Projects:

dis- order presents the exhibition project Intimate Estrangement and the Estrangement Sessions, a set of performances, talks, workshops and a role play – rethinking alienation.

Intimate Estrangement
Format: Exhibiton (static)
Opening: 27.08.2020
Duration: 27.08. – 27.09.2020
Location: Off-Space Mikro, Zürich

Estrangement Sessions
Format: Events (inter-active)
Duration: 11.-27.09.2020
Locations: Mikro
and schwarzescafé | Löwenbräukunst, Zürich

Intimate Estrangement is an exhibition project investigating how disorder, disruption or a non-normalized perspective can foster new knowledge, insights and behaviour. It takes the format of an exhibition and a set of events called Estrangement Sessions.

The project Intimate Estrangement is inspired 1) by the text Where is the concept? (localisation, ramification, navigation) by iranian Philosopher Reza Negarestani, thinking through how ruptures in given systems evolve into re-evaluation and re-reading of the given and the possible within that system, eventually visualising new possible paths. And 2) by the Quote “Alienation is the labour of freedom’s construction.” from the Manifesto Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation by Laboria Cuboniks. The urgency to re-evaluate alienation as an emancipatory strategy in the year 2020 is linked to current events such as the feminist movement, the LGBTQI+ movement, the climate movement, and more recently the Covid-19 pandemic and the BIPOC movement, and the visualisazion they foster of structural imbalances, leading us to the conviction that socially constructed norms should be examined, dis- ordered and not accepted as given.
Intimate Estrangement presents 11 different positions investigating the topic of alienation, each work representing either a singular artistic perspective or a distinct philosophical hypothesis.

The exhibition Intimate Estrangement, curated by the Swedish curator Sofia Wickman at Mikro, Zürich, is a love declaration to the alien, to the extraterrestrial, may it be within this society or in our Self’s. Perhaps something the outside world has told us to cast away… As the title suggests, Intimate Estrangement invites you to an innermost journey, introducing three perspectives through three oeuvres. One of compositions with sonic tracings of discretized memories, so called musical meta-narratives by Katrina Burch. One of playful material compositions translated into anthropomorphic shapes by Christopher Füllemann. And a tingling installation that asks you to abandon the expected, the known, to look for a different approach of being, thinking and navigating by Yael Wicki.


ESTRANGEMENT SESSIONS
curated by Giulia Busetti and Yael Wicki

For the Estrangement Sessions, a variety of performances, talks, a role play and 3 workshops, further perspectives were invited by curators Giulia Busetti and Yael Wicki to playfully contextualise and deepen our horizon about what alienation can be.
Rafał Pierzyński researches the human body-mind-space connection through the expanded idea of touching and being in touch. And in a humorous poetic reading Martina Mächler will investigate the black box space that is the schwarzescafé | Löwenbräukunst, the relationship between furniture, visitor and room.

Reza Negarestani will be presenting a lecture entitled Human Re-Cognized, Lifeform Re-Made. Whereas Nagi Gianni investigates Vertigo and human locomotion, adding modern stilts to the human body, inflicting a ‘designated alienation’, followed by Patricia Reed’s lecture about the importance of the unknown and perspectival reformatting. Closing off the part at schwarzescafé | Löwenbräukunst we’ll watch together Johanna Bruckner’s oeuvre Molecular Sex: Following the writings of Karen Barad, the project asks how the molecularization and indeterminacy of being, today, might inform queer and hybrid futures better tooled to deal with current technological, political and ecological changes.
As a digital native born in a female body, Giulia Essyad’s practice engages with the varied forms of alienation that come with the consumption and production of body images, for us through a reading of her beautiful poetry. Yael Wicki will be performing How to dis- order one’s Self analysing the system of her perception through her alienating mental illness. And Valentina Demicheli reflects about the current political climate through her sonic performance.

The Somatics Sessions of the project Xenosomatics by Susan Ploetz, are three workshops meant to build a vocabulary of skills (hyperobservation, ideokinesis, hyperempathy, interfacing) that can be implement and instrumentalise as somatic simulations in the day-long LARP (live action role play) called The Guild. The Guild is a larp set in a speculative scenario inspired by the Xenogenesis trilogy by Octavia Butler: a world where alien and human life forms are inextricably linked and the characters must grapple with what it is to be “human” or “alien” in a world where the distinction between the two is disappearing. With this immersive, participative work we will end the exhibition project Intimate Estrangement on September 27th, 2020.

To further contextualise and deepen the different presented perspectives we published the answers by most invited participants to the questions: What work are you presenting? What is your personal approach to your research? What is alien to you? How do you change perspective?, as well as some of their research material for the exhibition project Intimate Estrangement on our website.

PERSPECTIVES