21 – 25 August 2023 @ Osmo/za & Cukrarna, Ljubljana
ARIA (Algo-Rhythmic Ideation Assembly) is a summer school designed as a role-playing game. It takes place through the lens of a fiction-theory narrative. Bringing together artists, critical thinkers, and experts from diverse fields ARIA explores theoretical, artistic, and curatorial approaches to imagining, crafting, and inhabiting alternative futures in the context of a changing planetary ecology.
During five-days of the 2023 edition of the intensive, ARIA combined closed-door workshops for selected participants and a public programme of lectures, discussions and a film screening.
Curated by Tjaša Pogačar and Brandon Rosenbluth.
RGP design and facilitation by OMSK Social Club.
Workshop mentors: OMSK Social Club, Protektorama toxica, JP Raether, Simon Speiser, Subash Thebe Limbu, Gediminas Žygus.
ARIA residents: Subash Thebe Limbu and Ondřej Trhon.
Production: Projekt Atol, Šum
Coproduction: Cukrarna, osmo/za
ARIA SYMPOSIUM
22 & 23 August, Cukrarna, Ljubljana
Speakers:
Florin Flueras, Michael Marder, Špela Petrič, Protektorama toxica, JP Raether, Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás, Simon Speiser, Subash Thebe Limbu, Lea Vene & Lovro Japundžić.
SCHEDULE
Tuesday, 22 August 2023
17:00 ➤ Lecture / Florin Flueras: Unsorcery, practiced concepts
Unsorcery composes and explores ways of sorcery that can eventually surpass or undo some of the contemporary realities and subjectivities. It is an Artworld involved in a productive alienation from concepts through experience and from experience through thought. It is the embrace of an impossible cognition and a horrific affect, it is a “via negativa” that starts where the hopes end and the remaining options are rather negative, dark, and dead. Unsorcery was an environment in which Alina Popa and Florin Flueras were working together, each following their own path, doing their own practices, texts, and performances around the concepts: Life Programing, Artworlds, Second Body, Dead Thinking, Eternal Feeding, Black Hyperbox, End Dream.
18:00 ➤ Discussion / Curating and Worldbuilding Practice
Speakers: Florin Flueras, Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás, JP Raether and Protektorama, Lea Vene & Lovro Japundžić. Moderated by Tjaša Pogačar.
A renewed interest in contemporary art in ways of imagining, modeling, and constructing potential worlds other than the ones we inhabit has been resonating particularly strongly at a time when we are faced with the challenges of two interlocking “crises” that come to define our “world”: an ecological crisis and a crisis of imagination, or the foreclosure of horizons in the face of looming environmental collapse. If worldbuilding involves setting the ground—constructing the foundations and principles that define and organize an emerging world—the round table asks what “worldbuilding” means, or could mean, in a curatorial and artistic sense. How do the invited guests approach the building of potential worlds in their practices? What does worldbuilding mean for their work, and how does it relate to the world currently in existence? Finally, what shifts in reality-settings should be laid as foundations for future art practices, institutions, and their rituals, beyond the hegemonic form of worlding that Campagna refers to as Westernized Modernity?
19:00 ➤ Film screening and Q&A / Subash Thebe Limbu: Ningwasum
Set in the Indigenous Yakthung nation in Nepal, Ningwasum follows two time travellers, Miksam and Mingsoma, who return to the present from a future where interplanetary civilisations are thriving and living sustainably by adopting Indigenous knowledge and technology. The fragility of our current ecosystem is portrayed in aerial shots and documentary footage of Himalayan glaciers, imbued with an ethereal blue filter. These are woven with digital cosmic landscapes and an immersive soundtrack, which includes electronic sound, spoken word, and folksongs. Inspired by ancient oral traditions, the film is narrated entirely in the Indigenous Yakthungpan, which the artist imagines as a vital language for the future. Ningwasum – which loosely translates as “memory” in Yakthungpan – explores notions of time, memory and space, and the way in which these shape reality. Limbu has theorised his approach to science fiction as “Adivasi Futurism”: a space where Nepalese Indigenous people and artists can imagine themselves in a future of their own making, driven by their culture and traditions.
- Wednesday, 23 August
17:00 ➤ Talk / Špela Petrič: “The Auf Wieder Schnitzel Tasted Like Infrastructures of Care” – Field Notes from Performative Ethnographies
The talk will address various current (horti/agri)cultural technologies to critically analyse the tropes of food scarcity, peak soil, colonisation of Mars, and other ideological shorthands that are shaping imaginations about futures.
18:00 ➤ Lecture / Michael Marder: Disentangling the Phoenix Complex
The talk will travel through the mechanisms of natural and social reproduction and replication, especially those ingrained in our individual and collective lives. Along the way, we will survey and explore the limits, both internal and external, to the seamless phoenix-like reconstitution of the same (organism, psyche, society, environment) across the gap of death, total destruction and devastation.
19:00 ➤ Discussion / Anthropoforming For a Weird Planet
Speakers: Michael Marder, Špela Petrič, Protektorama toxica, Simon Speiser. Moderated by Brandon Rosenbluth.