Minor movements are not ours to make so much as ours to attune to:
read more on Minor Movements
Current Events:
Past Events
Brazil: Casa Liquida – Propositions for Social Dreaming – minor movement April 26-28, 2019
Encounter through introduction, Davi Kopenawa Falling Sky
Encounter through Ursula LeGuin Social Dreaming of the Frin
Encounter through Achille Mbembe, conversation
Zurich: Instituent Noise and the Sensibility Soup for Collective Care
July 5 – 7, 2019
The omnipresent and quotidian presence of noise permeates and constitutes our life. From the noise of affects and relations, of breathing, highways and construction sites, of organs, bacterial cells and digestion, to the noise of the digital, infinite communication, of emails and Whats-App streams. Different noises can act as enabling constraints, affections and subversive flows, as much as stress factors, redundancies and the inhibition of concretization. By attending to these noises and letting them in – against retreat, individualism and nihiliberal ideas of inwardness – we focus on ways of distancing from but also resonating with such forces.
Against the backdrop of institutional pulsation and exploitation our desires for instituent practices of care amplify, proliferating humming and queerly to these resounding assemblages. Care is not only conceived as a turning towards oneself and/or others but as care for the situation of gathering of bodies, spaces and temporalities.
Tuning up and slowing down, we will tend to collective practices of care and will activate sensibilities for the common through body techniques, readings, artistic works and cooking. In the collective sharing of time and space we seek movements and ways of living underneath the capitalist reality and resist the universal neoliberal logic of value extraction at the same time. What is at stake is nothing short of the question of how to live together and in the commons, and thus supporting resistant modes of subjectivation.
Edinburgh: Minor Movements Celebration
July 1 -2, 2019
Authentic Movement workshop and presentation
(dated tba)
Communicating research through creative methods – a narrative approach
(dated tba)
‘Collage your Brexit story’ workshop and art exhibition
Roving the Beast: A Hospital Dérive
Authentic Movement – Presentation and Films
No scripts attached: embodying improvisation theatre in the counselling room
Bodies and movement in the city: how to read the space in between
Montreal: Minor Gestures – Darling Fondry, August 15, 2019
Minor Gestures
Propositions pour le rêve social – un mouvement mineur
Le SenseLab vous invite à une soirée d’alimentation collective de nos rêves, une soirée de partage de ce qui mijote en deçà du savoir conscient, une soirée pour goûter à ce qui nous traverse, une soirée pour rêver autrement.
SenseLab invites you to an evening of collective eating of our dreams, an evening of sharing what lies just outside of our conscious knowing, an evening of tasting what else moves (through us), an evening of dreaming otherwise.
Amsterdam: August 24 2019
Locations: s-Gravesandestraat 29 & in the evening Warmoesstraat 139 (W139, the gallery)
preparatory material: ‘Dimensionalizing Landing Sites’ (p.21-22), ‘Procedural Architecture’ (p-48-50) and ‘Notes for an Architectural Body’ (p.63-4).
Day pragmatics:
We will begin the event at a participant’s house (s-Gravesandestraat 29) at 11:11 AM, for breakfast. We will be providing food for it, though feel free to bring something of your choice. Also, bring in your pockets a ‘schizzed’ and ‘schizzing’ technique that may (or may not) be used to activate and register a smooth textural space in the city. This smooth textural space (or spaZze?) is like potential ecology fermenting through the background of what is usually foregrounded as a seamlessly continuous habitual movement. This is a technique that cleaves and releases other alternative modes to register life (bio). If you know of a part of Amsterdam city that you would like to activate the technique, also bring that apportioned zone of the city in your pockets. It may (or may not) be visited.
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We will finish the day at Jacuzzi (An artist-run space). The door beside Warmoesstraat 139 (W139, the gallery). And we will compose (or decompose) some of the qualities schizzed and relayed during the day.
Copenhagen: Infrastructures for un/recommoning, September 2nd and 3rd from 10-18
Location: Centre of Psychiatry Amager + AIR (Affective Interactions & Relations) Lab/IT University of Copenhagen
How can we explore infrastructures for un/recommoning that engage us affectively, prompt us to reassess value systems and allow us to come together differently (on the level of divergent collective bodies (ourselves, communities, environments)) through processes of attunement facilitated by a number of techniques and technologies?
We will take as our point of departure two diverging institutional and physical settings – a user driven space in a psychiatric hospital (the Centre of Psychiatry Amager) and the AIR (Affective Interactions & Relations) Lab at the IT University Copenhagen – and explore the points of resonance in-between them through different experiential practices and modalities (listening, writing, walking, interacting, and more). Across these settings, we will conceptually explore concepts and practices related to the process of creating and inventing ‘common senses’ in both its problematic and productive aspects.
At the psychiatric center the event will mark the opening of an Association for Art and Mental Health that works to promote art-based practices and interventions within the psychiatric system, and we will, in this context, propose artful explorations of the collective processes and techniques of un/recommoning in relation to the mental, social and environmental ecologies.
At the AIR Lab, we will expand on, challenge and re-define some of the infrastructures that have both been used and created through the Immediations project (e.g. FeltRadio, Sonic Contours, different Affect-o-metric experiments with machine learning for detecting affective ambiances and values, the on/offline capture- and expression of affective data). We will make some of these infrastructures open for remote participation prior to and during the event.
Helsinki: Minor Movement in Helsinki – Neuroqueerness and repairing, August 28-31 2019 (read below for time& details)
*The minor movement hovers across the horizon, to be caught sometime between August 28-31 2019.
Please join us for the Minor Movement Helsinki. The minor movements are a series of events organised by the Senselab (Canada) – a laboratory for research-creation, towards the development of alter-pedagogies, culminating in an exhibition in Australia, November 2019 – and the Three Ecologies Institute.
What we understand as neurodiversity is not only the movement created by autistic activists in the nineties, but it is also a conceptual tool that posits the necessity of decentring onto-epistemological ableism as the primary mode of understanding, organising and distributing the bodies in the neoliberal society. Neurodiversity, in its broadest understanding, encompasses any individual who does not fit into the neurotypical patterns of the society, including autistics, Asperger’s and borderline subjects, respecting their singularities.
Location 1: In this minor movement, that will follow the presentation of Erin Manning at CARPA 6, at Kiasma Museum of Helsinki, How do we repair? (check https://sites.uniarts.fi/web/carpa/carpa6), we will read passages of Melanie Yergeau’s book Authoring Autism – On Rhetorical and Neurological Queerness. We will focus on chapter Intervention (pp. 89-139). Melanie’s book is an extraordinary approach to how neurodiversity and gender non-conformism do not need to be ontologically separated. Neuroqueerness resists a rigid idea of a fixed identity.
Please also bring food and drinks to share. The conversation will be informal and not necessarily focused on the linguistic conversation. It will move according to the differential appetites of the group. If you do not feel comfortable sitting in circles and looking to other people’s faces, this is the right gathering for you. Nobody needs to talk or perform in any way that distresses the bodies. Basically, we will sit in a park in the afternoon. Please also bring a piece of textile (larger than 50 cm).
Location 2: At the Sinebrychoffin puisto (Sinebrychoffin Park). Saturday, August 31st, 2019. We will meet at 1 PM in front of Fanny Café at the park and move to a spot on the grass. If you cannot find the place, please give me a call. The park can be easily reached by several tram lines: 6T (stop Alexandersteatern); 3 (stop Robertsgatan) or 9 (Ruoholaden Villat) – +358 0402513849. Please send me an email if you need the PDF file: francisco.trento@uniarts.fi
What if it rains? 🌧️ 🌧️ 🌧️ 🌧️ 🌧️
If it rains, we will still meet at Fanny Café, but move to a covered area near or in the park.
Manchester: Suspensions (Hanging Out and Hanging In)
Locations:
Suspension 1: Sept 5th, 9:43 – 10:36, public park near Euston (Invisibility)
Suspension 2: Sept. 5th, 10:46 – 11:28, Euston station terminal (Complicity)
Suspension 3: Sept. 5th, 11:40 – 13:46, train from London to Manchester (Passage) includes a radio broadcast In collaboration with curator/artist duo Irruptive Chora (Agata Kik & Ania Mokrzycka), our train journey on September 5th will be accompanied by a professional radio engineer and broadcast equipment, allowing FM, DAB, and online listeners to call in with questions, messages, and propositions for the suspension from afar.
Suspension 4: Sept. 5th, 14:49 – 15:37, Hulme community gardens (Cultivation)
Suspension 5: Sept. 5th, 16:05 – 17:03, gymnasium, MMU (Metabolism)
Suspension 6: Sept. 5th, 19:03 – 20:19, Apartment/Mayfield depot (Capture)
Suspensions Collaboratory: Sept. 6th, 11:00-16:00, Biosocial Lab, Hulme, and surrounds
Our offering to the Minor Movements is Suspensions (Hanging Out and Hanging In). Suspensions will collectively explore the possibilities of “suspension” through theoretical and artistic improvisation, in public spaces, in a private apartment, in a university laboratory and on a train ride that includes a live radio broadcast on Resonance 104.4 FM. Before getting on the train, and after getting off, we will meet at strategic GPS points to hang. (in or out).
Suspensions might be characterized as passages, cracks, intervals, and interstices within the institutionally gridded space-times of neoliberal capitalism. Suspensions can be both physical and conceptual, extensive and intensive, embodied and incorporeal, infrastructural and atmospheric. They invite us to attend to passages of experience that are complicit with social ordering, and yet resistant to regimes of compliance and control. “The causal independence of contemporary occasions is the ground for freedom within the Universe” (Whitehead, 1933/1967, p. 198).
The train journey will be one of six short Suspensions events in London and Manchester, culminating in a Collaboratory on September 6th at the Biosocial Lab, Manchester Metropolitan University.
Each suspension event is also gently shaped by the movement of a particular concept.
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We are not yet sure what a suspension is, or how we know when a suspension has been achieved. We might think of intimate, everyday suspensions like riding a train, walking to work, waiting for water to boil, or for a child to fall asleep. We can also consider more widely distributed suspensions such as block parties, picnics, community gardens, mobile sound systems, street performances, ruins, free spaces, autonomous zones, meet-ups, hangouts, jams, squats, celebrations of all kinds. Our sense is that suspensions may temporarily prise open some physical and conceptual elbow-room for cultivating techniques that let us hang out and hang in with events.
We are thinking of techniques of hanging out as practices that orientate toward the keen enjoyment of an event experiencing its own passage. These techniques could link to everyday practices of waiting, gathering, playing, loitering, squatting, chilling, hanging, jamming, daydreaming, wandering. Techniques of hanging in may tend more to toward practices of staying with – a readiness to give, endure, or coalesce. Hanging in asks us to stay with the world, to stay with what happens to us, to cultivate responsibility, generosity, and a therapeutics of care for how events co-compose.
In General:
Bring what we collectively need to hang out and hang in with the suspension events. Food, drink, readings, techniques, materials, sound and vision. Portable chairs, blankets, hammocks. Things that suspend, envelop, float, or disperse. All to share.
Readings will be distributed prior to the Suspensions, and we will form an ad hoc reading group that will be in part broadcast from the train.
We don’t know in advance what practices will be articulated through the suspensions. We will improvise practices together based on what people bring, and through attunement to events along the way.
GPS map links will be distributed, participants are invited to share their GPS locations for the day so the collective can register each other’s movement to and from the suspensions. Perhaps on the MinorMOVEMENTZ google map.
The Collaboratory on the 6th is an invitation to share the concepts and techniques cultivated during the suspensions event with the wider Manchester community.
Berlin (August 26-29)
What are the conditions for the event to shift from competition to alliance? If we do not wish to compete, we desire to share research processes in a mode of togetherness that offers a gift of potentiality for better living and knowing beyond their capture for capitalist value extraction. What if your work could relay and resonate with the affects at play, contributing by leaving traces that activate the ecologies of the event across times and spaces?
FEELING THE URGENCIES
The seventh edition of Digital Anthropologies constructs a sociality in its own right. We believe that the experience of an artistic or research process can especially be felt in the collective making of the event and in the doing of a series of minor gestures, within, between and beyond the sum of the individual research processes.
Digital Anthropologies #7 is a space of experimentation, where propositions from students, artists and researchers resonate and relay with the caring gesture. The caring gesture is what we will explore, not only in each proposition but also as a minor process with the event. How to care and to be taken care of? Both gestures are yet to experience, collectively, but one condition for them to emerge is to feel the urgency that makes us gather during five days.
What is urgent to transmit, share, listen, resonate and relay? The urgencies are not so much to be produced or formalised than listened to and composed with. The urgencies are not necessarily an emotion or a thought to be identified but rather an immanent process to experience. And more generally, the urgencies don’t usually emerge as known objects but often as a multiplicity of more-than corporeal perceptions, beyond the human mind and body as we know it.
To develop a collective feeling for the urgency of the event, protocols take place daily to keep pre-accelerating, as it already happened before the event. Because feeling the urgency doesn’t lie in the organisational aspects of the event, daily protocols are here to help us feel the limits of structuring the event and rather express the urgency in its spontaneous, free and radical share.
