Edition 02: SOFTEN MY HARDWARE: Agape and Eco-Futurities
Event held on June 13th, 2023 at VSRL featuring Elia-Rosa Guirous in dialogue with Carbon A., Installations from Fadl Fakhouri, Philip Errico, Ines Yahiaoui, and Mschyen / Thit Vienberg, and live performances from Cy X and :3lon. “Organize the apocalypse. Describe the life you want. Fight for this life.” - BDSM Apocalypse, Roman Noel
SOFTEN MY HARDWARE: Agape & Eco-Futurities explores questions of sustainability, cyber healing practices, decoloniality, and collective organization/resistance in relation to technology, raising central questions: How do we collectively organize to think about our future(s)? And, can the fight for a sustainable future ever be disconnected from a decolonial practice? Recent work on the history of capitalism and fossil production has highlighted the relationship between Western hegemony in the XIXth century and carbon emissions*. Imposing steam production and coal extraction on newly occupied territories, the United Kingdom, soon followed by the United States and the rest of Western and Northern European countries, accelerated the global energetic transition from local production to mass extinction.
Nowadays, the United States is still responsible for nearly thirty percent of carbon emissions, although its population only totals 4.5 % of the world. Indigenous and BIPOC activists in the United States and abroad have been leaders in organizing against global warming and raising awareness about the destruction of our ecosystems. Cop City is a project that plans the construction of a police training facility specially designed to break down climate and social protests. Built over the South River forest in Atlanta, Georgia, a former Muscogee territory, this complex would become the largest in the USA. In February 2023, a climate activist peacefully occupying the forest named Tortugitta was murdered by the police during a raid to claim back the space. Cop City embodies the Leviatan set up against the protection of ecosystems and living beings as well as the rigorous planning of repression.
Willing to take a position against inherited colonial idiosyncrasies, artists in this edition both analyzed the past to turn towards the future, engaging in practices of collective care and healing. By questioning our relationship to the land, production, and the environment, SOFTEN MY HARDWARE: Agape & Eco-Futurities explores care and benevolence as radical modes of action against neo-liberal individualism.
Each artist is invited to explore these themes, crafting their own way to cope with the dystopian reality we evolve in.
*Andras Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (2016).
ABOUT THE PERFORMANCES:
eros, thanatos, and the fish by Cy X
Participative performance, 90min
eros, thanatos, and the fish is a performance in process, choreographic essay, and attempt to find a tether to this world in the midst of ancestral grief and enforced disembodiment. drawing upon their eco-erotic connection to fish and research on their gullah geechee ancestry, cy demands access to their full aliveness and erotic possibilities as a method for more empathic, sustainable, collaborative world-building that necessarily involves water, land, humans, and other-than-human beings across multiple timelines.
Live Music by :3LON
:3LON (Elon Battle) is an autodidact singer/songwriter/producer based in Brooklyn, NYC, specializing in electronic soundscapes as well as multimedia. :3LON explores themes that examine the state of humanity from a futuristic lens with nods to classic anime and fantasy RPGs.
ABOUT THE MEDIA WORKS:
Let's hold hands forever in the virtual mountainside by Thit Vienberg & Mschyen
Single-channel video, 12min07
Premiered at connectedmatter, this audio-visual collaboration between animation and make-up artist Thit Vienberg and sound designer Mschyen creates a fabrication of a world inhabited by odd creatures, abandoned buildings, bodies, and twisted landscapes. This 3D-scanned mapping of the small town of Seydisfjordur, Iceland is contrary to the practice of mapping and measuring areas for orientation. Instead, the concept of world mapping and building becomes a way to showcase disorientation; to show what strange fictions the worlds we build and inhabit are. This project is queering the tools that have been used against the landscapes and against bodies. Turning the measuring tools on their head, making it into an emotional landscape full of glitches and morphed entities. It is a storytelling on the relation we have to our surroundings, where we don’t know what we know about ourselves. A story that holds multiple narratives, and characters and is inherently anti-protagonist.
Let's hold hands forever in the virtual mountainside depicts and disrupts ideas about which worlds we render possible, which bodies we accept, and which we do not. It is aware of its fakeness and reverses the term to reflect on what a so-called real depiction of the natural world is. In this way, the animator's ability to morph the surroundings makes room for new stories. In the virtual mountainside, everything is made up; buildings, bodies, and mountains. It is a fabrication of a town, a fiction over what could be, could have been, a worldbuilding of a world in which we can fabricate ourselves as we wish in the virtual mountainside, and hold hands forever.
Sur le lithium, les cyborgs, et ce pour quoi la vie vaut la peine d’être vécue (On lithium, cyborgs, and what life is worth living for) by Inès Yahiaoui
Single-channel video, 12min28
In this video piece, which is based on a text published in December 2022, Yahiaoui (she/her) decrypts the intricate connections between the tech industry, the pharmaceutical industry, and geopolitics. Drawing inspiration from their own medical journey and experiences with mental illness, Yahiaoui delves into the concepts of the cyborg and Otherness. She argues that the cyborg isn't solely a being augmented with hardware and machinery; its emergence is intertwined with the developments in pharmacology that began in the 1970s.
During this era, elements that had previously existed deep within the Earth started to be excavated under harsh conditions, serving the dual purpose of stabilizing the moods of patients and serving profit-driven extraction logic. The oil shocks of the post-WWII period accelerated the quest for alternatives to combustion engines, ultimately giving rise to the array of tech-savvy companies that we know today.
A Banned Surveillance by Fadl Fakhouri
Single-channel video, 3min
Displaying footage of participants’ eyes from Trump’s Banned Countries, this work (2018) by Fadk Fakhouri brings unwelcome and surveilled communities to the US. Different formats include a human-sized projection or large monitor to interrogate scale as a determinant for the difference between intimacy and surveillance. This work was exhibited in Times Square,NYC, UC Berkeley, and The Jewish Museum, NYC in response to the exhibition ‘Jonas Mekas: The Camera Was Always Running’.
ABOUT THE INSTALLATION:
Philip Errico & Avatar Lilith
The installation by Philip Errico and Avatar Lilith, composed of trinkets, branches, and stones collected from Brooklyn's city parks, serves as a woven space for speakers, artists, and guests to engage with. This creation emerges from the local accumulation of materials and objects left behind by humanity. However, it also embodies the potential for envisioning future aesthetics rooted in sustainability. It demonstrates that we can derive beauty from locally sourced "natural" elements, incorporate digital arts, and repurpose items often dismissed as waste, thus promoting a more environmentally conscious and creative approach to art and design.
PARTICIPATIVE TALK & WORKSHOPS:
The dialogue between Carbon A., an artist, community organizer, and activist, and curator Elia-Rosa Guirous-Amasse revolved around strategies for uniting and organizing eco-activism efforts in response to rising police brutality and the project of Cop City in Atlanta. This conversation explored the challenges and opportunities presented by these issues and aimed to inspire collective action and social change within the community. It reflects the intersectionality of art, activism, and environmental concerns in the face of complex societal challenges.
Our curatorial practice places a strong emphasis on participation and engagement. As part of this approach, we invite our guests to participate in a collaborative drawing activity and to experience the innovative prototype of sensory-relieving goggles developed by Brooklyn-based composer and artist Jacob Rudin. This interactive experience encourages a shared sense of creativity and exploration within our artistic community.
