Poetics of Relation is a collaboration between Uriel Orlow and Bettina Malcomess, who have been working together with sixteen artists and postgraduate students from Work.Master at Geneva University of Art and Design (HEAD - Genève), and the Division of Visual Arts (DIVA) at the Wits School of Arts (WSOA) at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, with the support of Pro Helvetia.
The project takes Edouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation as a starting point to think through and work with the aesthetics and politics of movement, exploring relational and errant forms of identity, language and image. It addresses transformative modes of history, creolisation, translation and nomadic thought.
The project began with a week of events in Johannesburg earlier this year, including a workshop on phonetics, a jamming session of censored records, lectures on mapping and communal walks, experiments and presentations. The exchange continued over email, Facebook, Dropbox and Skype over the last few months, producing several collaborative projects and intersections between projects, as well as sometimes delays and gaps in communication.
The exhibition and programme of events, Poetics of Relation / Slippery Sessions, at LiveInYourHead is a culmination of this exchange, manifested in space, and opened up to further dialogue with invited artists Érik Bullot and Nicoline van Harskamp. Several collaborative pieces will unfold in the space, intermedial and performative. The gallery will be punctuated by spaces within the space which open up potential points of connection between works, as well allowing for ruptures and disconnection. The exhibition programme is not an end point: the exploration of relationality will continue in the form of a publication to be produced over the following months. Slipperiness suggests the elusiveness of closure but also the continual evocation of potentials and possibilities for identity, becoming, connection and language.
Slippery Session #3 at LiveInYourHead
performance, talks, film, sound
Saturday 16 May at 4pm
Competitors Leave at Dawn (The Race from Johannesburg)
Part 2: Air,
a performance lecture by Bettina Malcomess
Abri de Swardt: Valley Else/Gotta Valley,
a performance
Léonard de Muralt presents
Simon Acevedo: Reggae, symptôme de la créolité et exemple d'ouverture au Tout-Monde
Érik Bullot: The Alphabet Revolution,
film screening
LiveInYourHead
Institut curatorial de la HEAD – Genève
Rue du Beulet 4 | 1203 Genève
Me-Sa de 14h à 19h