links
Unfamiliarities is a space for artists of various disciplines to present their work in progress and to create a conversation subsequently. The project finds its genesis in the desire to design a space, where fragile, unfinished, and perhaps unfunded works can be witnessed and nourished. The aim is to create a momentum for artists, that stimulates their artistic processes by means of exchange. The event can be a potential meeting space, supporting the artists’ work process in addition to the institutional, educational or academic contexts. Each session hosts a maximum of 4 artists + an audience that can stimulate the creation process of the presented works by engaging into conversation. After each artists’ shared proposal, there is the possibility of feedback, in a manner chosen by the artists.The first editions followed a "pay-what-you-want/can" policy, with the sales going to the artist. There were small contribution of warm soup and drinks, that the audience could purchase during breaks, which supported the space/host. Unfamiliarities happened first in late 2019 at QRU Amsterdam, organised completely on volunteering basis. Its second edition was prepared together with Subbacultcha but had to be postponed because of Covid-19. The third edition is in its development.
Credits:
Unfamiliarities #1, collaboration in between Toni Steffens and QRU Amsterdam, October 2019
Participating Artists:
Annelieke Holland
Stefa Govaart
Eva Pel
Wietske Joan
Ellen Ogawa
When a tadpole is growing into a frog, its electromagnetic field already holds the information of its legs and body shape. In the essay ‘TransMaterialities’ , Karen Barad refers to a (cruel) experiment,where the electromagnetic field of tadpoles were changed by scientists, which resulted in them growing additional limbs, eyes in different places and other bodily mutations. Following this experiment, scientists concluded that tadpole bodies do not have fixed or defined borders. They carry their suggested futures, just as our DNA, bones and cells carry our inherited pasts, eventually manifesting anew in future times to come. The space in the air, for tadpoles at least, is sensible, intelligent, loaded with information and very much subject to intervention, interaction, and, as the experiment shows, open, porous, vulnerable and corruptible. Space is a part of the process of being, likewise it is part or the extension of beings. Space is oftentimes thought as filled with unlimited potential and possibilities. Yet the tadpoles are connected to space, as space is connected to them, from material (the body of the tadpole) to immaterial (the electromagnetic field of the tadpole) and across timelines. Space is specific enough to carry planted seeds for futures, while those are not necessarily fixed. For it to become a frog in the future, space needs be strong enough to carry information and at the same time remember how a frog is created. What is a future vision is also a memory. Such operation of space could be seen as a form of a creative, spatial training. When training starts in the brain, and something new (or old) is learned, neurones craft new pathways. The brain changes. Being enters the space, and the space enters being.
.png)
.png)
.png)
