Sept 3, 2020

»Nepantlas #02«

Online Event with Teresa Dillon within the series »Nepantlas: Infrastructures for World-building«

Date: Sept 3, 2020, 14:00 Uhr

Info:

Nepantlas #02. »Cleansing Rituals for the Internet«

Nepantlas #02. »Cleansing Rituals for the Internet«
Teresa Dillon

Moderated by Daphne Dragona
03.09.20, 14:00–15:30 CEST 

Tubes, lines, pipes, fiber connectors, submarine communication chains, and colonial plumbing circumnavigate the globe. Copper wires are wrapped in the latex juices of the gutta-percha tree. Scouring barnacles from its back, a whale gets entangled in the line. The Amber Witch, a cable repair ship, is deployed to the Persian Gulf to investigate. There are dual landing points, forked ocean paths arranged in self-healing rings, backups for increasing network redundancy. What stories do infrastructures hold; those that support our exchange and communication? What is the price for maintaining this interconnected global network?

Casting telecommunications spells, we activate our collective imaginaries, traveling through the superhighways of the digital. We trace our physical forms though screen portals and routers, to the underground and watery infrastructures, the landscapes and niches, that connect us.

Your host on this journey, Teresa Dillon, guides this mediation and visioning, which is followed by a group conversation on the histories of the Internet, its environmental and colonial footprint, and the effort it takes to maintain such global connections.

Registration

We invite you to join us on Thursday, September 3, 2020, 2 pm, to be part of the online performance and guided medi(t)ation by Teresa Dillon.
Prior registration is required to participate in this event. More detailed instructions for the performance will be provided after the registration process.

Please, register in advance: signup@akademie-solitude.de

Teresa Dillon is an artist and researcher. Her performance and storytelling practice focuses on the situated, lived entanglements of interspecies relations and techno-civic systems within urban spaces. Recent works include UNDER NEW MOONS, WE STAND STRONG (2016–ongoing), a series of interconnected sculptures, performance lectures, and urban walks relating to surveillance histories, biometric data, and avian wildlife; In Your Aerial (2019) a project in which the inheritance and heritage of a community Internet network is established; and Liquid Loss: Learning to Mourn Our Companion Species and Landscapes (2019), an essay that examines the role of ritual in grieving environmental loss. Since 2013, Dillon has organized and hosted Urban Knights, a talks and workshops program that promotes and provokes alternatives to city living and in 2018, established the Repair Acts network, which focuses on practice and scholarship relating to repair, care and maintenance cultures. She is Professor of City Futures at the School of Art and Design, UWE Bristol, where she leads projects relating to lived urban experiments, restorative and healing futures, sonic, tech and data folklores, and urban commoning.

Daphne Dragona is a curator and writer based in Berlin. Through her work, she engages with artistic practices and methodologies that challenge contemporary forms of power. Among her topics of interest have been: the controversies of connectivity, the promises of the commons, the challenges of artistic subversion, the instrumentalization of play, the problematics of care and empathy, and most recently the potential of kin-making technologies in the time of climate crisis. Her exhibitions have been hosted at Onassis Stegi, Laboral, Aksioma, EMST, and Le Lieu Unique. Dragona was the conference curator of transmediale from 2015 until 2019. Articles of hers have been published in various books, journals, magazines, and exhibition catalogs by the likes of Springer, Sternberg Press, and Leonardo Electronic Almanac. She holds a PhD from the Faculty of Communication & Media Studies of the University of Athens/Greece.

https://daphnedragona.net