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Project Overview
Practices of Attunement
PoA are a collective of artists and researchers, distributed across different geographic locations, who meet bi-weekly to practice attunement and study, across physical and digital space. Formed initially in response to Haus der Kulturen der Welt’s call for #Instituting in the context of The New Alphabet School, we explore and experiment with techniques of being in and of the world differently. In doing so, we take ‘instituting’ as a nonfinite verb, a call to collective action: a never-ending form of speculation, adopting attentiveness, receptivity and movement as its constituent elements. In order to institute otherwise, we seek to extend Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s notion of study: an encounter “where you allow yourself to be possessed by others,” instituting a mode of counter-maintenance, generating and maintaining the felicitous conditions for always more-than-human encounters.
Weaving together theory-and-practice, we undertake Field-Studies, a series of informal gatherings (online readings/sharing of practices/collective exercises, such as walking, knotting, and crystal making), with more formal gatherings with invited guests, to develop collective acts of speculation, imagination and encounters with material environments and their ever-changing fields of relation.
Who is PoA?
Aslı Uludağ explores the implications of architectural, techno-scientific and legal structures that organize the relationship between existents. Through her practice, she develops performative tools that can intervene into their material and spatiotemporal operations. Her current research focuses on geothermal energy development and its redefinition of the relationship between the surface and the deep subsurface. Uludag received her BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her MA in Research Architecture from Goldsmiths University. Her work has been exhibited at the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art, Pera Museum, and 5th Istanbul Design Biennial among others.
Chara Stergiou’s research is focused on the exploration of hidden spatial ontologies in theoretical disciplines and their cognitive affordances. Her artistic practice deals with the transmission of theoretical concerns through sonic narratives called the ‘DJ Lectures’. Chara is a selected artist for the ‘Mediterranea 19 Young Artists Biennale’ and a fellow of ‘Artworks’ SNF Artist Fellowship Program for 2020-2021.
Gala Rexer is a sociologist and writer, pursuing a PhD at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Situated in the fields of STS, medical anthropology, sociology of the body, queer theory, and post/settler colonial studies, her work explores how bodies serve as interfaces to negotiate larger cultural and political processes. Gala is a member of diffrakt | centre for theoretical periphery and a fellow of Heinrich Böll Foundation.
Moritz Gansen is an historian of philosophy, an editor and translator, an organiser and a dramaturg. He is a member of diffrakt | centre for theoretical periphery, a doctoral student at TU Darmstadt, and an associated researcher at Centre Marc Bloch, Berlin.
Sam Nightingale is an artist and researcher working in environmental media. He uses experimental forms of photography and speculative fieldwork to explore spectral landscapes and the geopolitical interface between history, ecology and the image. Nightingale is undertaking a PhD at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is co-editor of A Guide to Experimental Fieldwork for Future Ecologies (Onomatopee, due 2021).
Simon Fleury’s practice-led research fabricates museum-objects to explore and test the intimate entangling relations between the museum and the photograph (foldingMUSEUMCAMERA): Accessing this saturated field of material relations (photosphere), via conservation based modes of photo-documentation and material analysis. This practice is underpinned by many years as a senior conservator at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, where Simon was responsible for the care of the Museum’s extensive photographic holdings.