What Stays – Archiving Care is a year-long residency project exploring digital counter-archives and the role of technology in opening up alternative histories and memories. The project launched with an open call for three digital residencies for international artists of any discipline. The residents were selected by jury members Helen Pritchard, Oulimata Gueye, Clara Herrmann, Markus Huber, and Nora O Murchú.

The selected artists are

Aditya Surya Taruna aka Kasimyn

Romi Ron Morrison

Lo-Def Film Factory


In their projects, the residents explore alternative histories, oral traditions, and how counter archives can be built from Black kinship and care. Challenging records, reclaiming narratives, or writing differences into public accounts requires defiance and imagination, and brings oppositional experiences and knowledge together. Incomplete and unstable, archives have become spaces where accounts of histories are contested and expanded through acts of resistance and refusal. Examining the gaps, omissions, and the politics of metadata, What Stays – Archiving Care explores how counter-archives can be built through gestures of care; opening up alternative histories, narratives, and stories.

Responding to changing political realities, the project explores how objects, landscapes, built environments, and bodies can be rethought. It asks:

  • How might counter archives be embodied differently and rethought through oral traditions, archival tools, and experimental digital practices?
  • What tools and technologies, such as gaming platforms or artificial intelligence, account for more-than-human or unaccounted memories?
  • What roles do care and imagination play in spaces of resistance, against official records and dominant narratives?
  • How do artistic practices activate silence or omission, or refuse the politics of metadata and indexing?
  • How do more-than-human agents shape new systems of knowledge and understandings of society, culture, and the environment?
  • How might DIY archives built on intimacy, instability, and failure make new responsibilities and accountabilities visible?
  • What are the values of the counter-archive and how do they transform or generate new political realities?
  • Can archival practices affect climate change?
  • Can counter-archives become living spaces of undoing, resignification, and repair?
  • What role can archival practices take in the construction of new territorial imaginaries and identities?

What Stays – Archiving Care is a project by Akademie der Künste, Goethe Institute Slovakia, and transmediale and highlights artistic, speculative, and uncooperative practices that change perceptions of pasts and futures. Over the year the project partners hosted various event formats exploring and documenting the development of the residency projects and their outcomes.

Through this open call, the three projects were selected. The digital residency took place from August to October 2021.

Team

The project was initiated by Nora O Murchú (Artistic Director transmediale festival), Clara Herrmann (Head of the JUNGE AKADEMIE, Akademie der Künste, Berlin), and Markus Huber (Director, Goethe-Institut Slovakia).

Project Management: Ricarda Bross (transmediale festival)
Communication: Antonia Deckert (Akademie der Künste), Linda Fintorová (Goethe-Institut), Anna-Lena Panter (transmediale festival)
Event Management Akademie der Künste: Franziska Benkel
Visual Identity: The Laboratory of Manuel Bürger (Manuel Bürger & Bárbara Acevedo Strange)
Website Development: Simon Knebl
Website Project Management: Anky Heidenreich (transmediale festival)

Please refer to these pages for our imprint and data privacy.

Resident

Aditya Surya Taruna aka Kasimyn:

JOGET-X

In JOGET-X (A Speculative Archive of Alternate Histories of Indonesian Dance Music), Aditya Surya Taruna explores the diversity of Gamelan music to construct a speculative archive of Indonesian dance music. The project asks; what if colonisation did not affect how music, technology and dance has developed?

Gamelan, made up predominantly of percussive instruments, is the traditional ensemble music of the Javanese, Sundanese, and Balinese peoples of Indonesia. Exploring the oral traditions and knowledge systems of indigenous culture, the work investigates how these knowledge systems can coexist with and contextualise global understandings of technology and music. The archive contains historical data from 1990 to 2030. Existing histories are hacked and deconstructed in collaborations with six musicians and dancers from Jakarta to Wamena (West Papua), through the process of Laras, an Indonesian tuning method. The artist is developing a set of open source digital instruments that are built with the methods and processes of Gamelan music. This method recreates traditional dance music free from the influences by chromatic/western scales. Kasymin speculates that this new method of music creation will affect the development of modern dance and club culture. Since beginning, the project has grown from six to over thirty musicians, intrigued by the idea of Decolonizing music using a primal Indonesian system with common contemporary tools. Joining forces with YES NO WAVE the results will be released in the compilation JOGET-X : The Anthology of Indonesian Dance Music That (Should/Never) Exist.

Aditya Surya Taruna aka Kasimyn is an electronic music producer, sound artist, DJ, amateur researcher, and graphic motion artist based in Bali. His work is inspired by points of crossover between tradition and technology, as well as dance music and the fascinating connection between the past and future of Indonesian culture. His experimental collaboration with fellow artist/MC Gabber Modus Operandi makes an imaginary Indonesian version of rave by using traditional scales with hardcore dance music. He has also worked solo as Hulubalang. He has appeared at festivals including Dark Mof, CTM Festival, Unsound, and NYEGE-NYEGE Festival Uganda, and has released on labels including YESNOWAVE Indonesia, Shanghai’s SVBKVLT, Ireland’s CANVAS INDEX, SFX Berlin, and the Swiss label DANSE NOIRE.

JOGET-X

Resident

Romi Ron Morrison:

Noticing The Preconditions For ___________.

Noticing The Preconditions For ___________. is an experiment in durational correspondence between artists Romi Ron Morrison and Mimi Ọnụọha. In this project, noticing takes an archival form, as an index of passing moments of care each artist notices in their daily lives.

As every moment is indexed, a short media artwork (sound, video, photography) is created to represent these moments of care. This artwork is indexed in the archive and shared between Morrison and Ọnụọha to interpret, iterate, and resend the modified artwork back to the sender. These moments are intended to act as instructions that reveal Black futures in quotidian practices of care and kinship. This first iteration of the work exhibits a small sampling of the artworks created, as the artists will further develop their database with plans for a future physical installation.

Romi Ron Morrison is an artist, researcher, and educator. They engage the personal, political, ideological, and spatial boundaries of race, ethics, and social infrastructure within digital technologies. Using maps, data, sound, performance, and video, their installations center Black Feminist technologies that challenge the demands of an increasingly quantified world - reducing land into property, people into digits, and knowledge into data. Romi has exhibited work at Transmediale (Berlin), ALT_CPH Biennial (Copenhagen), the American Institute of Architects (New York), Tribeca Film Festival, Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), Queens Museum (New York), and Walker Museum of Art, They have been in residence at Eyebeam, New York University (ITP), and The Joan Mitchell Foundation. Their writing has appeared in publications by MIT Press, University of California Press, and Logic Magazine.

Noticing The Preconditions For ___________.

Resident

Lo-Def Film Factory:

The Subterranean Imprint Archive

The Subterranean Imprint Archive is a project by Francois Knoetze and Amy Louise Wilson (Lo-Def Film Factory) in collaboration with Joe-Yves Salankang Sa-Ngo. It is an ongoing research project that traces the legacy of extractive technologies in Central and Southern Africa.

The starting point of this inquiry is in the underground of the Shinkolobwe mine in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where the uranium used in the Manhattan Project to create the atom bomb was extracted. This work seeks to layer narratives that are usually kept distinct and to visualize these historical and technological entanglements. During the residency, a series of diagrams were created to visualise key thematic elements from the project. These diagrams are housed in an online project archive also developed during the residency. The archive contains text, sound, video and collage. A pair of newly-created 360° maps seek to manipulate Google’s Streetview technology, asking if we can dislocate, re-map, complicate, and exploit existing models to deepen and disrupt the discourse on technopolitics in Africa and abroad.

Based in South Africa, Francois Knoetze and Amy Louise Wilson (Lo-Def Film Factory)'s work involves archival research, dramaturgy, and visual strategies associated with video art, collage, sculptural installation and Virtual Reality, to explore and create space for collaborative and experimental community storytelling. Francois is a sculptor, performance, and video artist, who creates narrative portraits of the uncertainty in the nervous system of a global digital machine at the brink of collapse. Amy is a writer and performer interested in traditional South African theatre practices as a methodology for research and experimentation. The duo work with digital technologies in a DIY practice which embraces mistake-making.

The Subterranean Imprint Archive

Archiving Care Event - Transforming Archives

Video Documentation of the event at Akademie der Künste

Tue, 13 July 2021, 19:00
What Stays – Archiving Care
Discussion
Akademie der Künste, Pariser Platz

How and what a society remembers has become a key question at a time when self-perceptions are being re-negotiated and mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion are being questioned. This shows in a new presence of the archive in contemporary art. The artistic memory work positions itself against current examples of historical oblivion and a disturbing surge of revisionism through the strengthening of nationalistic and racist historical narratives. At the same time, it argues in favour of long-overdue strategies for decolonising and diversifying bodies of knowledge and ranges of experience. The memory of humanity, analogous to the memory of nature itself, becomes a question that is crucial for survival. Cultural diversity as a resource of social and sustainable living has become a fundamental issue for shaping the future. This makes accumulated memory institutions and archives the focus of critical reflection as well. As a manifestation of power, they are called into question in their production of a canon.

The event was hosted by the JUNGE AKADEMIE as part of the year-long programme of What Stays – Archiving Care, a collaborative project between transmediale, the JUNGE AKADEMIE of Akademie der Künste, Berlin and the Goethe-Institut Slovakia. The discussion was part of an exhibition and weekly event series by the Akademie der Künste on the topic Memory Work – Transforming Archives .

Akademie der Künste

Unrendered facts event documentation

Thu, 19 Aug 2021, 20:30–23:00
Unrendered facts
Performance, Screenings
Haus der Kulturen der Welt

Counter narratives performed out loud in a hotel room, the rendering of psychogeographies that an algorithm cannot find and a celebration at the end of the world. Bringing together films and a performance, out of doors Thursday programme explored how alternative histories, narratives and stories open up possibilities for refusal.

In her film, Unrendered Road (2020, 23 mins.), Tali Liberman questions knowledge systems such as Google Maps and the political realities they create. In Cemile Sahin‘s new essay film Bad People, Bad News (2021, 40 mins.), three Kurdish women meet in a presidential suite to celebrate the death of Saddam Hussein and Sonja Khalecallon, Cibelle Cavalli Bastos’ Drag Queen and chaotic High Femme, sings and tells tales of the retro-future from her establishment: Las Venus Resort Palace Hotel.

out of doors’s Thursday event was part of the year-long programme of What Stays – Archiving Care, a collaborative project between transmediale, the JUNGE AKADEMIE of Akademie der Künste, Berlin and the Goethe-Institut Slovakia. Taking place across HKW’s Westgarten and the garden at silent green, transmediale’s out of doors brought together film, music, performance and talks that engaged with the aesthetics and politics of refusal. Featuring an international lineup of artists, writers, and filmmakers: Arjuna Neuman + Denise Ferreira da Silva, Bárbara Wagner + Benjamin de Burca, Bassam Al Sabah, Cemile Sahin, Cibelle Cavalli Bastos, Diane Edwards, Dylan Kerr, Frank Sweeney, Jennifer Mehigan, Nazanin Noori, p. staff, Salvatore Arancio, Tali Liberman and Haig Aivazian.

transmediale

Archiving Care Symposium

Video Documentation of the Archiving Care Symposium Part 1

Find the full documentation of the online symposium on the Goethe-Institut Slowakei YouTube channel.

Fri, 26 Nov 2021, 16:00 - 20:40
Archiving Care Symposium
Online Event

Speakers: Dušan Barok, Agata Cieślak & Asia Tsisar, Marcell Mars & Tomislav Medak (Pirate Care), Bojana Piškur, Jaro Varga, Arseny Zhilyaev

As Boris Groys says, history occurs in a space between the archive and life, between the past that is being collected and the reality, understood as everything that has not been collected. Together we will explore this space between. The symposium will take a look at different contexts, cracks, how our presence is formed and then as accumulation, the archiving of different types of knowledge shapes its current narratives. We will also examine what has not been collected and archived. How can we look for the missing pieces of history in the cracks that shape our reality and presence. History follows a formal logic where the past, present and future are not thought of psychologically, not historically in the classical sense of the word, not existentially, but in a purely formal way, from the point of view of archival inclusion and exclusion. We will explore the forms and tools of archiving, care, interventions, we can approach our local histories in various contexts and constantly re-evaluate what is excluded and what is not, and how we can create scenarios for possible more inclusive futures.

Programme (detailed programme description here):

Dušan Barok - Matryoshka Intelligence: Archive, Database, Blockchain
Bojana Piškur - Southern Constellations: Poetics of the Non-Aligned - ways of researching, curating, archiving and working together
Arseny Zhilyaev - Museum in Russian Cosmism
Agata Cieśliak & Asia Tsisar - Creating the alternative: Secondary Archive
Jaro Varga - Challenging the library
Marcell Mars & Tomislav Medak (Pirate Care) - The Disobedient Practices of Care and the Technopolitics of Digital Custodianship

Curated & moderated by Peter Sit

The event was hosted by the Goethe-Institut Slovakia as part of the year-long programme of What Stays – Archiving Care, a collaborative project between transmediale, the JUNGE AKADEMIE of Akademie der Künste, Berlin and the Goethe-Institut Slovakia.

Goethe-Institut Slovakia
JOGET-X
Noticing The Preconditions For ___.
The Subterranean Imprint Archive