‘Art Object as Counter-fetish in Otobong Nkanga’s Carved To Flow, Documenta 14,’ Runway

Otobong Nkanga, ‘Carved to Flow’, Documenta 14, Athens, 2017. Photo: Sumugan Sivanesan

Carved to Flow
Otobong Nkanga’s Carved to Flow (2017) is a process-based research project and enterprise encompassing performance, installation and socially engaged methodologies. Its focus is the production, distribution and sale of a natural soap bar, o 8, made up of seven oils that ‘nourish the skin’ sourced from regions that encompass the Mediterranean, North and West Africa and the Middle East. The oils are combined with water, lye and charcoal which according to Nkanga prompts us to ‘think about spaces that are actually charred’; places that are depleted of resources, riven by war, impacted by ecological shifts, toxicity and other such traumas that force people to move. The histories, knowledges and stories that are associated with these places travel with the ‘nourishing oils’ that are combined into o 8 and are according to the artist, ‘part and parcel’ of a ‘taste palate’ that connects us.

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‘Ritual As Resistance, Transmediale 2017,’ Runway

‘Ritual Casualty 003.’ Black Quantum Futurism, Langenbeck-Virchow-Haus, Humbolt University, Transmediale, 2017.

This year marked thirty years of Transmediale, the premier festival of (post)digital culture and aesthetics held annually in Berlin at Haus der Kulturen der Welt and other venues. Founded as VideoFilmFest in 1988 to showcase a media format that had been phased out of the Berlin International Film Festival and poised at the cusp of the ‘digital revolution,’ the festival embraced developments and experiments in computer animation, multimedia, games and net-art to become a truly ‘transmedia’ event by the late 1990s. My introduction to Transmediale came via my involvement in Electrofringe, an annual festival of emerging media arts which I co-directed in 2005 and 2006. Over these years both festivals exchanged screening programs and I attended Transmediale in 2006 to present on a panel and participate in an artist-run satellite project, Transit Lounge, a Berlin–Australia exchange. Which is to say, in the first decade of the World Wide Web, Transmediale was supportive of the kinds of independent experimental practices and networks proliferating with the onset of web-based culture. By then, Transmediale had expanded to include a music program, Club Transmediale, which is now run as a distinct yet interconnected festival, CTM, showcasing contemporary electronic and digital music alongside experimental sound and club cultures. As such, the first weekend in February has become a red letter date for media artists, technologists, theorists and enthusiasts from the world over to gather in Berlin.

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‘Ella Barclay: A feeling of lost connections,’ Artlink: Parallel Universe, December 2016.

‘The nerds have got to stop working for the thugs.’ Ella Barclay 2016, Photograph.

Ella Barclay’s first institutional solo exhibition, I Had To Do It at UTS Gallery, is entered down a long darkened corridor. Blinds pulled down over the gallery’s floor‐to‐ceiling windows, obstruct the light and sway to the air-conditioning. Turning the corner one encounters a cluster of five scrunched‐up paper objects accompanied by a series of pale blue sculptural squiggles, Greetings Program (best left unsaid)(2016). The large sheets, washed with violet, pale blue and yellow watercolour, are overlaid with erratic note‐taking. The barely legible handwriting leads the eye across the folds and contours of the paper. Hand‐cut and coloured letterforms are pasted onto the sheets, peeling away at the edges. I can make out a single phrase: “Make them suffer”.

Read in Artlink: Parallel Universe, iss. 36, no. 4, December 2016.

un Magazine: ‘Mass Aktion Media’

‘Video still: Ende Gelände wrap-up video.’ 350.org, 2016.

‘I got two versions.’ 

My text ‘Mass Action Media:Ende Gelände, Break Free 2016’ has been published in un Magazine 10.2, an issue that concerns ‘the throng.’

For the second Ende Gelände, this year more than four thousand people converged in the Lausitz in the east of Germany for a weekend of actions (13–15 May) in the coal pits operated by Swedish state-owned energy company Vattenfall. In an effort to shift towards renewables, Vattenfall announced it would sell its lignite business to a Czech consortium of energy companies, EPH (Energetický a Průmyslový Holding), who would continue to operate the mines until 2045. In response, Ende Gelände declared itself to be ‘the investment risk’, telling potential investors that coal assets come bundled with a ‘wildly determined resistance movement’. Reflecting on my experiences with Ende Gelände, this text reviews its strategic use of media, and the aesthetics and innovations arising within climate justice movements following COP21.

Also, a slightly different version is available as a print yourself A3 ’zine here. Instructions on how to cut and fold are below c/o Dear Colleen.

Overland: ‘Power of Assembly: On the New World Summit’

‘Richard Bell, Callum Clayton-Dixon and Ilena Saturay, New World Summit Utrecht, 31 January 2016.’ Photo: Ernie Buts.

My short overview of the last New World Summit in Utrecht, January 2016 is now online at Overland.

‘Drawing on Rojava’s political experiment, the sixth NWS convened in Utrecht over the last weekend in January this year to consider the prospect of ‘Stateless Democracy’. It marked the culmination of a year-long collaboration between NWS, BAK and the University of Utrecht’s Centre for Conflict Studies. The Summit convened within a temporary architecture built inside the main hall of the university – where the Treaty of Utrecht was signed in 1579, the document by which the ‘free’ Dutch provinces claimed independence from the Spanish monarchy. In this latest iteration, NWS performed a historical intervention as a critique of the Dutch nation state, using the site of its foundation to stage an assembly of stateless organisations.’

Runway: ‘Institutional Reform’

‘Big Oil Out of Culture,’ Paris, December 2015. Credit: Sumugan Sivanesan

A new article, ‘Institutional Reform: Art as Anti-Statecraft’ for Runway #30, Ecologies is now online. 

Institutions that facilitate the coming together of cultural objects, historical narratives, philosophical concepts, the wealthy elite and their political interests can be understood as instruments of statecraft—the skill of governing, effecting and maintaining power. The formulation of counterpower through these same institutions is its antithesis.

RealTime: ‘Art versus the war against Nature’

Photo: Artúr van Balen / Tools for Action

My report from Paris COP21 for RealTime, re-titled as ‘Art versus the war against Nature’ is now online.

The second week of COP21 was notable for the influx of activists from around the world, arriving in anticipation of the December 12, ‘D12’ day of action . Daily activist training and ‘speed-dating’ sessions organised by Coalition Climat 21 helped strangers ‘buddy-up’ and ultimately took thousands of potential demonstrators through exercises concerned with spatial awareness and quick consensus decision-making, advised them on what to do if sprayed with tear gas and about what to say—or rather not say—if arrested. Despite the real consequences of defying the state-of-emergency laws, it was difficult not to become swept up in this sociable choreography of disobedience.