Kunstraum der Leuphana Universität, Lüneburg, 2024, w’etter (seminar), by Bitsy Knox, Kunstraum Leuphana Universität Lüneburg, Copyright photo: Bitsy Knox
Score: The artist enters into correspondence with the rain. The artist’s pre-recorded voice mixes with the amplified sound of rainwater being pumped into the Kunstraum, and the rumble of a work table’s thuds and squishing. Unfolding along an indeterminate dramaturgy, a large lump of locally-sourced clay is sculpted and unsculpted in collaboration with rainwater. the clay becomes the medium through which a shared language of call and response emerges. Its changing shape over the proeeding four weeks attests to a collective exchange between the artist, the students and the weather. At its culmination (part of “Embodied Correspondences: A Practice-Based Introduction to Improvisation as Social Practice”), the artist and students return the unfired clay to its source of extraction, a local park that was once a commercial clay pit. Students must decide how they will reintroduce the unfired clay to its original site, but never again its original state, and in doing so recognize the way their touch (and the touch of thousands of human and non-human organisms before and after them) inexorably, inevitably, changes makeup of the eco-system while altering their own exposome.
In her inaugural performance and exhibition as guest lecturer this May at Kunstraum, Bitsy Knox will enter into a correspondence with the rain. 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. 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. 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 (Christopher Weickenmeier)
Curated by Christopher Weickenmeier
This installation and performance was accompanied by the Spring/Summer 2024 semester seminar, Embodied Correspondences. A Practice-Based Seminar on Improvisation, in which students participated in the making and unmaking of the exhibition through an introduction to critical improvisation studies. It was also accompanied by a public programme that included a lecture by artist Harkeerat Mangat, and a film screening by filmmaker Ellie Epp.