(M)OTHERSHIP

We are artists, researchers, and cultural practitioners living across Europe. Our practice engages with a politics of care, re/production, and identity, exploring a new relationship to “mother” and “other(s)” in the resistance of the new forms of essentialist identitarianism, heterosexist male dominance, racial violence, and misogyny. With different cultural, geographical, racial, and ethnic backgrounds, we have so far experimented with various methods of care and solidarity in the forms of a study group, collaborative researches, and roaming assemblies in the past few years under the framework of Dutch Art Institute, Roaming Assembly, e.g. islandthinking, Eurasia Underground Library, Parasite Library, The Entangled Readers, We Eat Circles and Drink Squares, The Cage Bed of Dreams among others. With the art initiative “(M)othership,” we aim to create new modes of solidarity and multiplicities in the form of a digital assembly and online publication where the boundaries of a discipline collapse, a collective study is revalued, and the ethics of cultural work is discussed in ecological terms.  

Lucie Draai

Lucie Draai (Bogotá/Rotterdam) is an artist based in Rotterdam and currently finishing a Master of Fine Art Praxis at the Dutch Art Institute. Her practice proposes to rethink and rupture the social and political terms of order that surround us. Working within the perception of our living world as viscous and porous than solid and universal, she takes a more-than-human understanding of the present as a necessary practice to shift the existing conception of being, temporality, and life/death. 

Exhibitions, performances, readings, and workshops have been hosted by and in collaboration with Zoe Scoglio; Tim Mastik; Hordaland Kunstsenter; Shimmer; Volteface; Hot Wheels Projects; Billytown; PA-AP; A Tale of a Tub; Cafe Bel; GROOS. Artist-in-Residencies at Artist Proof Studio and AGALAB. Her works can be found at Billytown Bookshop and Walter Bookstore.

https://www.luciedraai.nl 

Irati Irulegi

Irati Irulegi (San Sebastián/Barcelona) works as a curator and cultural practitioner in Barcelona. Her curatorial work and practice evolves around different collaborative works. She is currently part of Idensitat, a Barcelona based art project focusing on the public sphere and socially engaged projects by collaborating with the inhabitants of the areas. Lrulegi holds a degree in Art History from the University of Barcelona (BA), a postgraduate degree in Exterior Design, and Dutch Art Institute, Roaming Academy (MA). She has established her career in the field of curatorship and artistic mediation. Since 2012, she has participated in various projects such as Sala d’Art Jove (2017), Komisario Berriak (2016), and “Out of the loop,” the curatorial proposal with Iker Fidalgo and Laura Diez for Montehermoso.

https://iratiirulegi.wordpress.com

Ellen Nunes

Ellen Nunes (São Paulo/London) is a Brazilian artist, researcher and educator based in London. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art in London. She is interested in the intersection of scholarly research with artistic practices which explore participatory and dialogical approaches, assessing artistic practice as a methodological research tool. She has currently researched Brazilian artist Helio Oiticica. Experimenting with the possibilities of a methodological and pedagogical tool with his concepts and theories, her work and practice is composed of long-term collaborations, study groups, and workshops, based upon which she coordinates and organises exhibitions. Most recent experiences took place in Chelsea, Camberwell and Wimbledon Colleges of Art.

Her works have been hosted by: Chelsea Triangle Space Gallery; State of Concept; A-Dash Space; Laboratorio Arte Alameda; Sesc Sorocaba; Paço das Artes; Praca Victor Civita; Mediterraneo Centro Artistico; Palazzo Barone; Lisbon Arquiteturas Film Festival; Tokonoma Kassel; Instituto Itau Cultural; Museu da Imagem e do Som; Museu Murillo La Greca; Casa M.

http://cargocollective.com/ellennunes

Yen Noh

Yen Noh (Seoul/Utrecht) is an artist and researcher, currently living in Utrecht. Noh engages with a politics of the unspeakable by way of anti-colonial  “paralanguage” that performs the language’s materiality to precede and exceed representation and meaning. She uses performance, speech, and writing act to exercise paralinguistic elements, i.e. sound, tone, rhythm, gesture, non-sensical expression, that are always parts of language yet fall away from linguistic analyses. Her performance is an attempt to escape the linguistic violence of signification and instead affirm the new intensity of paralanguage as possibility of language by reenacting and recreating radical practices by those whose history is ignored and unthought by the official history but deserve to be told. Her research so far has been the Korean-American performance writer, filmmaker, and artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, the 1920s Japanese art group MAVO, the Korean poet and architect Yi Sang and his partner Geumhong who was a sex worker, through whom she seeks to rethink signification as its bodily practice.

Her work and practice has been shown in various exhibition and performance venues, e.g. Bulegoa z/b; Künstlerhaus Wien; Silent Green; Bauhaus Dessau; BRUX/Freies Theatre Innsbruck; A-Dash; Seoul Art Space Mullae; das weisse haus; Salon für Kunstbuch, 21er Haus; IG Bildende Kunst. 

by Areumnari Ee, Ellen Nunes, Eric Peter, Irati Irulegi, Karina Sarkissova, Leon Filter, Polly Wright, Yen Noh

Through practicing organisation, a group of eight curators, artists, and researchers has worked towards a commonality of interests and intentions. But how to find unity when members stem from various educational and cultural backgrounds? And how to practice this unified organization in a roaming context—in places yet unknown? Via diverse practices arisen from a year of get-togethers, they’ve come to the structure of ‘islandthinking’ as a means to collaborate through collective knowledge.

by Irati Irulegi, Polly Wright, Ellen Nunes, Yen Noh in collaboration with Walter Books

The Parasite Library by Irati Irulegi, Polly Wright, Ellen Nunes, Yen Noh in collaboration with Walter Books - Athens, June 2018

15 book titles were selected concerning the concept of islandthinking to start exchange processes. Working closely with WALTER Books (Arnheim, NL), we curated together texts to act as a starting point to invite to further conversation, exchange, and collaboration across independent organisations, initiatives, and individuals. 

by Lucie Draai and Zoe Scoglio, ongoing program

Entangled Readers is an ongoing study group organised, where we practice ways in which text and language might  resonate with, and be digested by, the bodies present in the room. We  approach reading as a collective, dialogical, and full body activity. By engaging sensorial methodologies with critical thinking we attempt to  become receptive to the knowledge present on the page, under our skin  and within the spaces between. We explore what tools and conditions  might assist us to think through current political climates and open up  space for alternative socialities and imaginaries to emerge.

The Entangled Readers is initiated by artists Zoë Scoglio and Lucie  Draai, acting as a point of connection and opening up of their practices  and research. Previous sessions have been held at Shimmer (Rotterdam), and Hot Wheels Projects (Athens) as part of the Dutch Art Institute and Van Abbemuseum COOP Academy. During this time a slow collective reading of Oswald de Andrade’s ‘The Manifesto Antropofago’ (The Cannibalist Manifesto) was undertaken, along with Denise Ferreira Da Silva’s text  ‘On Difference Without Separability.’

The Entangled Readers 

by Lucie Draai and Zoe Scoglio, ongoing program 

Entangled Readers is an ongoing study group organised, where we practice ways in which text and language might  resonate with, and be digested by, the bodies present in the room. We  approach reading as a collective, dialogical, and full body activity. By engaging sensorial methodologies with critical thinking we attempt to  become receptive to the knowledge present on the page, under our skin  and within the spaces between. We explore what tools and conditions  might assist us to think through current political climates and open up  space for alternative socialities and imaginaries to emerge. 

The Entangled Readers is initiated by artists Zoë Scoglio and Lucie  Draai, acting as a point of connection and opening up of their practices  and research. Previous sessions have been held at Shimmer (Rotterdam), and Hot Wheels Projects (Athens) as part of the Dutch Art Institute and Van Abbemuseum COOP Academy. During this time a slow collective reading of Oswald de Andrade’s ‘The Manifesto Antropofago’ (The Cannibalist Manifesto) was undertaken, along with Denise Ferreira Da Silva’s text  ‘On Difference Without Separability.’

by Anastasia McCammon, Irati Irulegi, Yen Noh, Lucie Draai, Zoi Moutsokou, Raphael Daibert, Teresa Lanceta, Pedro G Romero, Leire Vergara

“We Eat Circles And Drink Squares” is a textile piece crafted collectively under a pedagogic framework in which knowledge was shared through a constructive process. A degradation of formal language, utilising instead crafted endeavours, where impulses from all its makers (most of them ignorant in the language of stitching) emerged. An unconscious strategy to escape from the pressure of functionality, embracing a more moveable fictionality. In the context of School Fundamentals, this precariousness denotes the spirit emanating from the pedagogical model of DAI Roaming Academy.

“We Eat Circles And Drink Squares” has grown through the itinerary of 2018-2019 of DAI Roaming Academy that included places like Arnhem, PAF-Performing Arts Forum in Saint-Erme, Cagliari and Epen. Carried out by a multitude of bodies and minds through geographical borders--traversing rooms, outside landscapes and different countries of Europe--it discloses now again in Dessau its singular constructive process as a means of “trespassing” entrenched modes of pedagogy.

by Ellen Nunes, Ana Tam, Andrea Rocha, Marcia Thompson and Patricia Tavares at the Triangle Space Gallery in Chelsea, London, 2019

https://workflow.arts.ac.uk/group/mercator/mercator

Ellen Nunes investigates in her PhD how the installation series Cosmococa by Helio Oiticica and Neville D’Almeida can be understood in the context of current contemporary processes and strategies. Her practice explores collaboration with temporary communities as a way to uncondition from the institutionalised artistic practice with works that explore support structures for collaboration and participation.

The Cage Bed of Dreams by Ellen Nunes, Ana Tam, Andrea Rocha, Marcia Thompson and Patricia Tavares at the Triangle Space Gallery in Chelsea, London, 2019

https://workflow.arts.ac.uk/group/mercator/mercator

Ellen Nunes investigates in her PhD how the installation series Cosmococa by Helio Oiticica and Neville D’Almeida can be understood in the context of current contemporary processes and strategies. Her practice explores collaboration with temporary communities as a way to uncondition from the institutionalised artistic practice with works that explore support structures for collaboration and participation.