I’m pleased to announce an upcoming solo exhibition and performance at Kunstraum der Leuphana Universität Lüneburg, W’etter, accompanying the seminar Embodied Correspondences: A Practice-Based Seminar on Improvisation, which I will be leading as a Guest Lecturer.
W’etter,
In her inaugural performance as guest lecturer this May at Kunstraum, Bitsy Knox will enter into a correspondence with the rain. Unfolding along an indeterminate dramaturgy, Knox investigates the porosity of the authorial ‘I’ as it finds itself in a heightened state of attention, conditioned by its constructed environment. As Knox´s prerecorded voice mixes with the amplified sound of rainwater being pumped into the Kunstraum, a subjectivity emerges that is indivisible from the ontogenesis of bodies and materials in the space. A large lump of locally-sourced clay becomes the medium through which a shared language of call and response emerges. Its changing shape over the next four weeks attests to a collective exchange between Knox, the students and the weather.
Embodied Correspondences. A Practice-Based Seminar on Improvisation
How do we process an unfolding event somatically, as well as linguistically? This seminar roots itself in a study of improvisation as inherently responsive to the unstable—and often indeterminate—climatic, cultural, social, and political conditions of its practice. Drawing on the work and writing of activists, artists, dancers, thinkers, filmmakers, musicians, and musicologists such as Leanne Betasamosake Simpson & Robyn Maynard, John Cage, Ornette Coleman, Ellie Epp, Simone Forti, Milford Graves, George E. Lewis, Pauline Oliveros, and Christina Sharpe, we will critically explore core concepts of improvisation through modes of perceiving and cultivating attention, and of noticing attractions and patterns. Through exercises, readings, and discussions, we will seek to revise a working definition of correspondence (literally: answering together, from the Latin spondere: to pledge, to promise) beyond the epistolary, to consider a shared responsibility to co-responsiveness as inherently improvisational, and existing between the body-minds and the systems they exist with and within.
Interpolating these investigations, the Düsseldorf/Vienna-based multi-disciplinary artist and Dhrupad singer Harkeerat Mangat will deliver a guest lecture and discussion on April 24th; Christopher Weickenmeier will introduce a selection of films by the filmmaker Ellie Epp; and Bitsy Knox will lead a field trip on foraging clay, investigating the formation of a (sculptural) body in relation to its environmental and extractive conditions.