SONIC ACTS FESTIVAL 2019 – HEREAFTER Rosi Braidotti – Necropolitics and Ways of Dying – Introduction by Rick Dolphijn 22 February 2019 – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. What does it mean to die within the posthuman convergence, which positions us – humans and non-humans – between the Fourth Industrial Age and the Sixth Extinction? This contemporary convergence results in the shifting of boundaries between bio-power and necro-politics, life and death, the government of the living and...
May 27, 2019•27 min
SONIC ACTS FESTIVAL 2019 – HEREAFTER Post-Screening Discussion: Maeve Brennan in conversation with Mirna Belina 22 February – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Following the screening of Listening in the Dark (44 min, 2018), Maeve Brennan discusses the film with Mirna Belina and takes questions from the audience. Maeve Brennan’s film Listening in the Dark (44 min, 2018) takes a documentary approach, gathering a series of subtle yet penetrating soundings of human beings’ impact on the n...
May 27, 2019•13 min
SONIC ACTS FESTIVAL 2019 – HEREAFTER Post-Screening Discussion: Tony Cokes in conversation with Mirna Belina. 23 February – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Following the screening of Black Celebration (1988, 17 min) Tony Cokes discusses the film with Mirna Belina and takes questions from the audience. In Black Celebration (1988, 17 min), Tony Cokes merges newsreel footage of riots in urban black neighbourhoods in the 1960s with popular music and text commentary to create an incisive ...
May 27, 2019•22 min
SONIC ACTS FESTIVAL 2019 – HEREAFTER Post-Screening Discussion: Ephraim Asili in conversation with Mirna Belina. 23 February – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Following the screening of American Hunger (2013, 19 min) and Fluid Frontiers (2017, 23 min) Ephraim Asili discusses the films with Mirna Belina and takes questions from the audience. In seven years, from 2011 to 2017, Ephraim Asili has completed a remarkable cycle of films called The Diaspora Suite about his relationship with ...
May 27, 2019•38 min
SONIC ACTS FESTIVAL 2019 – HEREAFTER Post-Screening Discussion: Louis Henderson 23 February – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Following the screening of Bring breath to the death of rocks (2018, 34 min)(work in progress) Louis Henderson discusses the films with Mirna Belina. ‘I feel this force that draws me towards the invisible doorway, and it is like a fire burning in my stiffened limbs. So I must walk through the fields of snow… there, to where my resting place is already prepared...
May 27, 2019•16 min
SONIC ACTS FESTIVAL 2019 – HEREAFTER Rick Dolphijn – (The Earth Demands) The Necropolitics of Art – Introduction by Lucas van der Velden 22 February – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands 'The present… is what we are, and thereby, what already we are ceasing to be.' (Deleuze and Guattari) In the first part of this talk, Rick Dolphijn will discuss the necropolitics of art. He will talk of the difficult relation that art has with the present and why the power of art is not ‘finite’ (not lim...
May 15, 2019•35 min
SONIC ACTS FESTIVAL 2019 – HEREAFTER Susanne M. Winterling – Gravitational Currents and The Life Magic – Introduction by Rick Dolphijn 22 February – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands In her conference talk, Susanne M. Winterling will show some of her recent works including Planetary Opera In Three Acts, Divided By The Currents (2018), a composition of sounds, natural and synthetic, documentary and imaginary. The composition includes hydrophone recordings of dinoflagellates, the sound o...
May 15, 2019•31 min
SONIC ACTS FESTIVAL 2019 – HEREAFTER Didier Debaise – Out of Nature. How a Concept Became a Political Power? – Introduction by Rick Dolphijn 22 February – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands The moderns have invented ‘nature’ and have made it one of their most important political institutions. Didier Debaise will revisit this very singular adventure through which a number of local inventions, gestures, and operations, namely within experimental systems, have given birth to a new politica...
May 15, 2019•39 min
SONIC ACTS FESTIVAL 2019 – HEREAFTER Irit Rogoff – Becoming Research – Introduction by Lucas van der Velden. 22 February – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands 'Research' as we experience it now in both institutional and culturally active contexts has moved away from stable bodies of knowledge to be excavated as well as away from recognised subjects whose validity is universally recognised. ‘Research’ models emanating from practice have ceased to be the context or the preparation for work...
May 15, 2019•32 min
SONIC ACTS FESTIVAL 2019 – HEREAFTER Sasha Litvintseva, Beny Wagner – Universal Syntax – Introduction by Victoria Douka-Doukopoulou. 22 February – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands This talk will introduce a long-term collaborative project, Universal Syntax, by Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner which seeks to untangle the human tendency to read the natural world as a text. The long and remarkably consistent history of the use of text as a metaphor for the interpretation of the natural ...
May 15, 2019•34 min
SONIC ACTS FESTIVAL 2019 – HEREAFTER Jodi Dean – Communism or Feudalism? – Introduction by Ash Sarkar 23 February – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands In the twentieth century, much of the Left understood society as facing a choice between socialism and barbarism (to use the phrase made famous by Rosa Luxemburg). By the century’s end, some argued that the experiments of state socialism were themselves barbaric. Others pointed out that the reality that unfolded after 1989 proved the trut...
May 15, 2019•38 min
SONIC ACTS FESTIVAL 2019 – HEREAFTER Gregory Sholette – Can an Anti-Capitalist Avant-Garde Art Survive in a World of Lolcats, Doomsday Preppers and Xenophobic Frog Memes? Do We Have a Choice? – Introduction by Ash Sarkar 23 February – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands As artistic activism becomes a signature attribute of contemporary high culture, a wave of museum boycotts, protests, occupations and labour unrest marks our current decade. Meanwhile, much of the post-2008, post-Occupy a...
May 15, 2019•47 min
SONIC ACTS FESTIVAL 2019 – HEREAFTER Flavia Dzodan – The Coloniality of the Algorithm – Introduction by Juha van 't Zelfde 23 February – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands The topic of Flavia Dzodan’s talk is the coloniality of the algorithm or how contemporary technologies became a tool of racial, gender and class exclusions that can be traced back to the foundational moment of modern capitalism in the eighteenth century. The databases that feed algorithms of both corporations and the ...
May 15, 2019•47 min
SONIC ACTS FESTIVAL 2019 – HEREAFTER Ramon Amaro – AI as an Act of Thought – Introduction by Juha van 't Zelfde 23 February – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Artificial intelligence (AI) research has risen exponentially in the last decade. One of the stated goals of AI is a better understanding of the world around us. As such, an increasingly large proportion of human reality is now lived through algorithms. While our relationship with AI is undoubtedly important as a mode of knowled...
May 15, 2019•38 min
SONIC ACTS FESTIVAL 2019 – HEREAFTER Tony Cokes – the next ‘revolution’? 07.2001 (revised 02.2019) – or progress does not exist – Introduction by Ash Sarkar 23 February – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands In his talk, Tony Cokes will revisit some of his ideas he deployed in a talk presented in July 2001. He will begin with Black Celebration (1988), his first work to examine the legacy of the late 60s and early 70s. That video appropriated newsreel images of urban uprisings in Watts, Bo...
May 15, 2019•16 min
SONIC ACTS FESTIVAL 2019 – HEREAFTER Ephraim Asili – Mindfulness Cinema – Introduction by Juha van 't Zelfde 23 February – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Artist and filmmaker Ephraim Asili presents a talk about his cinematic practice to date as well as some ideas that he hopes to resolve in future projects. Themes of his presentation include: jazz methodologies, meditation, African-American literary traditions, Sigmund Freud, Sun Ra and concepts of landscape/locational cinema. Ephra...
May 15, 2019•53 min
SONIC ACTS FESTIVAL 2019 – HEREAFTER – Introduction by Emily Pethick The Otolith Group and Annie Fletcher – Eastman is the Matter at Hand24 February – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands From the late 1960s until his death in 1990 at the age of 49, Julius Eastman, the queer African-American avant-garde composer, pianist, vocalist and conductor, wrote and performed compositions whose ecstatic militant minimalism initiated a black radical aesthetic that revolutionised the East Coast’s new ...
May 15, 2019•44 min
SONIC ACTS FESTIVAL 2019 – HEREAFTER Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa – Carrying Yours and Standing Between You – Introduction by Emily Pethick 24 February – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands During her talk, Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa will be reflecting on the similarities and differences between the contexts and research processes that led her to produce the 2015 video Promised Lands and Carrying Yours and Standing Between You, a research/installation recently created for the exhibition Women on Aer...
May 15, 2019•32 min
SONIC ACTS FESTIVAL 2019 – HEREAFTER Elizabeth A. Povinelli – After the End, Stubborn Affects and Collective Practices – Introduction by Mirna Belina 24 February – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands As many in the West look forward to a climate-induced end of times, huge areas of the human and nonhuman world have been struggling to exist in the toxic excrement of late liberal capitalism. For them, the end of the world has already happened – and it has happened multiple times: the catast...
May 15, 2019•37 min
SONIC ACTS FESTIVAL 2019 – HEREAFTER Louis Henderson – Dialect of hurricanes. Patois of rains. Language of storms. Unfolding of life in a spiral. – Introduction by Mirna Belina 24 February – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Unfurling like a fiddlehead fern fond in a forest, the word ‘creole’ comes from the Greek root *ḱer- meaning to grow, to nourish. Celebrating the vast possibilities of translating both into and from Haitian Creole, this talk will describe how the artist group The L...
May 15, 2019•29 min
SONIC ACTS FESTIVAL 2019 – HEREAFTER Stoffel Debuysere – Fictions of the Real – Introduction by Mirna Belina 24 February – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands With an introduction by Mirna Belina. What has happened to the cinematic fictions that set out to make sense of our times? That is to say: what has happened to fiction as the construction of both an arrangement of events and a relation of a referential world to alternative worlds? In accordance with the laws of verisimilitude and r...
May 15, 2019•35 min
SONIC ACTS FESTIVAL 2019 – HEREAFTER Filipa César, Jin Mustafa – Meteorisations: Reading Amílcar Cabral's Agro-Poetics of Liberation – Introduction by Mirna Belina 24 February – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands A reading of Amílcar Cabral’s agronomic writings exposes substrata of a syntax for liberation later performed in guerrilla language and the struggle against Portuguese colonialism in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde. This visual and sonic reading explores the definitions of soil an...
May 15, 2019•1 hr 3 min
