10:00–18:30
Moving (in) Constellations: Artistic Interventions as Institutional Transitions
Conference, Lectures, Performances

Free entry, in English

With Silvy Chakkalakal, Nadine George-Graves, ​​Satch Hoyt, Jason Wee and others

‘[Stars] are the reminder that thought (the sound of the rattle) has to be combined with heart and motion (the sound of the drum) in order to have energy and influence’

–Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done

To intervene into society in and through constellations offers the possibility to move towards sustainable, inclusive, and equitable futures, while unsettling hegemonic institutional structures and practices. Moving (in) Constellations, curated by HKW and the Collaborative Research Center ‘Intervening Arts’ at Freie Universität Berlin, offers a two-day conference to engage critically with the oscillating dynamics taking place between art and scholarship. 

Hosted on the first day at HKW and ending with a public evening programme, the conference gathers at the crossroads between academic discourses, artistic practices, and activist engagement, and between local groundings and global networks. Through lectures, performances, and talks, contributors exchange with one another, expanding an understanding of the relational and multidirectional qualities at stake, and engaging in questions such as: Is it possible to generate structures without reproducing oppressive power regimes, and what can be learned from historical experiences? What are the potentialities of decolonial discourses and approaches in the transformation of existing spaces, temporalities, and relations? How do artistic interventions shape anew the content and forms of looking, listening, moving, feeling, and thinking? 

June Jordan wrote in the 1960s about ‘constellations tuning among waves’ in a poem rich in sonic metaphors, and in the 1930s Walter Benjamin compared the movement of ideas to star constellations. Following the latin term constellatio for the planetary arrangement of the stars in outer space, he developed the idea of constellations as moments struck by the colliding and colluding of past and present. Further cross mappings include Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation, inspired by the arrangements and social realities of Caribbean archipelagos. Notions of constellations are grounded in multilayered and relational processes of meaning-making. By asking how to unfold and reflect upon constellations of living, thinking, moving, caring, and being, the conference also follows the contemporary Indigenous thinking of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. Grounded in Nishnaabeg epistemologies, Simpson suggests creating ‘constellations of co-resistance’ in order to work ‘together toward a radical alternative present based on deep reciprocity and the gorgeous generative refusal of colonial recognition.’

The event’s first day welcomes audiences at HKW to join the conference participants and facilitators in reflecting on and working through performative dynamics, investigating how infrastructures address (or not) in/visible and in/audible dimensions, agonistic and antagonistic environments and ecologies. The classic conference format of the lecture is re-evaluated through constellations of contributions generating different practices of knowledge production and transmission. Ethnologist and cultural scientist Silvy Chakkalakal and visual artist Jason Wee, for example, jointly design the opening of the conference with the presentation Unsettling Relations. Intervening Temporalities at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, and an artistic response, Notes on Speculating Biography, Lost and Broken homes, and Relations-Antirelations. Performance scholar and theatre-maker Nadine George-Graves meets with visual artist and musician Satch Hoyt to reflect on and practise ancestral and future-orientated Black diasporic constellations.

The second day of Moving (in) Constellations takes place in Dahlem at the Freie Universität’s Institute for Theatre Studies. Carving intellectual and physical spacetimes for convivial exchanges, the programme unfolds with a tour addressing the shared architectural history and sites of HKW and FU Berlin. Through the lens of specific performative practices, invited artists carve out the echoes of buildings associated with the US that once stood as symbols of westernized freedom and democracy. 

18:30–22:45
Collaborative Gestures in Constellations

Public Programme, free entry, in English and Spanish

With Don Alirio, Angela Alves, Marcela A. Fuentes, Zoncy Heavenly, and Moe Satt

18:30 Performance by Moe Satt, followed by a Response in conversation with Zoncy Heavenly
19:45 Lecture by Marcela A. Fuentes, followed by a Conversation with Angela Alves
21:30 Conversation between Don Alirio and Maëlle Karl, followed by Vinyl set by Don Alirio

Collaborative Gestures in Constellations presents a series of contributions belonging to Moving (in) Constellations,  a conference co-curated between HKW and the Collaborative Research Center ‘Intervening Arts’ (CRC, FU Berlin), investigating the dynamics taking place between art, activism, and scholarship. The public programme presents diverse approaches to intervention through the lens of the collaborative, focusing on confrontations addressing the appearance, reception, reinterpretation, and re-imagining of gestures within the performative practices. 

The evening starts with an artistic gesture by Moe Satt, whose performative and visual work entangles the two venues of the conference. In 2024 Satt was in residence at HKW and joined the CRC as a Mercator fellow with his hand-gestural project Pinky Say Something. His practice confronts and resists the oppressive operations of Myanmar’s government. Responding from a similar artistic perspective on the political context in which Satt’s work is placed, feminist visual artist, activist, and current DAAD resident  Zoncy Heavenly comments on the performance and the abolitionist practices within and outside Myanmar. 

A performance theorist and practitioner associated with Northwestern University, Marcela A. Fuentes continues the programme, with a lecture elaborating on her research and latest book Performance Constellations: Networks of Protest and Activism in Latin America. Dancer, choreographer, scholar, disability activist Angela Alves, associated with HZT, part of UdK Berlin, responds to Fuentes with a hosted discussion on the human body and its perception ability and limits. To conclude the convening, music researcher and current CRC Mercator fellow Carlos Mario Mojica aka Don Alirio, introduced by CRC scholar Maëlle Karl, offers a Picotero Set, a convivial acoustic constellation of stories and selected songs from Colombian Caribbean music cultures and its Afro-Colombian informed-ness.

 

Moving (in) Constellations is an event of the CRC 1512 Intervening Arts in collaboration with HKW