2019

at BRUNAKRA

Brunakra offers residency for artists, writers, journalists, or anybody that carries ideas that requires time and space to realize. The period is supposed to end with an exhibit or presentation of the completed work to the public or specially invited guests. This is our log of previous visiting residents.

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Tori Lawrence | re-residency

Secret moves in abandoned spaces. Choreographer and filmmaker Tori Lawrence is back summer 2019 to further develop JUNKSPACE, a project that she initiated while in residence at BRUNAKRA last year. She is here together with dancer Ellie Goudie-Averill and musicians Cole Highnam (hammered dulcimer, piano) and Seth Wenger (vocals) to explore spaces and shoot video. They ”[…] appear and depart like specters, weaving through doorways and manifesting unobtrusively across the room. They guide us through the dimly lit bowels of the building into a cavernous warehouse three floors above. A wooden bench with asymmetrical legs hangs from a rafter; rotating fans high up on the walls exhale through tattered pieces of fabric.” It’s a haunting escape into the unknown, movement and sounds recognisable but alien. It’s a hidden eye that follows and pauses together with the dancers, capturing every move, part member, part alienated.

What if the performance site is kept secret, revealed at the last minute? What if there is no premiere. A dance that deconstructs and reconstructs the space that it is within.

Welcome to the late night show,
Wednesday June 19th. 10PM.
Insight into the current working scores of JUNKSPACE.
Live music by Cole Highnam (hammered dulcimer, piano) and Seth Wenger (vocals).

A place-less-ness dance –
Spending two years without a site to make a site-specific performance
Performing the work in its in-progress stage, but never complete
Modularity, deconstruction, and replace-ability
Movement scores are the tethering/plan – what keeps the work together
A home-less work. Constantly in transition. You could be anywhere. You could perform it anywhere. Updating itself dependent on the site that it’s in, it will never be the same.

Chain stores, hotels, malls, restaurants, duplexes, cineplexes, complexes, multiplexes
It’s happening across America, I can’t tell where I am –
Cabinetry and technology match the decade
Maybe this throwaway culture is desirable for some. Or maybe the capitalist freedom is more important than the construction/sustainability and architecture of a space.
Or maybe architecture has ceased to exist
Living in the fallout of modernization*

The body, able to be anywhere
Transitional disposable spaces, I can’t focus
Adaptable disembodiment within chaos
Self-organization and wandering in a wall-less-ness
To shed and to keep going – leaving pieces of the body the junk leaving pieces of itself myself everywhere Jointed together by our plastic shards

Eva Vēvere

The material text

The word context has become a signifier for critical theory and contemporary cultural discussions. The use of the word, according to Google statistics, has increased in popular use throughout the last hundred years. While being used modestly during the 19th century, it took off during early modernism to really explode from the sixties and onwards as post-modernism and critical theory became the main academic and artistic norm, to finally establish itself on a stable though slightly declining line during the last decade.

The relevance of the word context is that it points to and enlightens the importance of where something is said, and by whom it’s said. It enlightens the structures behind the words and it opens up for scrutinising the subject positions behind the voices. If you like, it explores the surroundings of the language. So what does it mean, where does it come from, what does it bear within it self?

The word derives from Latin.

  1. To weave (Latin: Textere), as in textile. The poet is a weaver who’s words bears meaning
  2. To connect (Latin: Con), as in together. The meaning makes sense to us only when placed together with its setting.


We’re happy to welcome Eva Vēvere during this spring´s second resident period at BRUNAKRA. In recent years she has put her interest into paper and books as mediums and information bearers as well as objects. During her residency she will focus on two opposing ideas – the manifestation of text as a material object; in other words, how text is transformed into an object and how paper represents ideas such as movement, time, and the clash between various aspects of reality and eras. And in the second direction – how various aspects of reality disappear, when paper and its value are transformed.

Visual artist Eva Vēvere (Latvia) is working in various media, including installation, process-based events, still and moving image. Since 2009 active with Poetic Robotism projects – a series of interactive installations and performances focusing on architecture of time and deconstruction of different aspects of life, connected both to the mundane reality and philosophic issues. In recent years, her exhibition activity has also included group shows at the Latvian National Museum of Art, annual Survival Kit festivals organised by the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art and experimental collaborations with professionals from the fields of contemporary dance and music. www.evavevere.com

Eva Vēvere will stay at BRUNAKRA during April 8th until May 5th. The residency is held through a collaboration with Konstitutet – the agency for artistic facilitation and exchange.

Image: Lyrical Stuff, collection of paper objects and ideas made for The Rainis and Aspazija Museum, Riga, Latvia, 2018/2019

 

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In collaboration with:

 

 

 

Eva Vēvere´s residency at BRUNAKRA is financed by Latvian State Culture Capital Foundation:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Institut für Alles Mögliche

As our first collaboration with Institut für Alles Mögliche two residencies are held in connection to each other from March 15th – ending April 15th.

Karl Heinz Jeron. March 15th – March 25th.
Brunakra Field Trip

Enactments of a human-animal-plant-things symbiosis

In Swedish we use the word rymdvarelser which in German would be weltraumkreaturen for what in english would be aliens. But aliens means literally främling in Swedish or fremder in German. While rymdvarelser or weltraumkreaturen simply implies that the descripted creature belongs to space it doesn’t say if it’s known to us or not. If you want to meet real life rymdvarelser or weltraumkreaturen you don’t have to search for long. They are already all around you, living on this lonely outpost in space called earth. David Bowie knew this, that we’re all strangers living in space. Alien for one another. Främling or fremder, extra terrestrial or not.

Karl Heinz Jeron was born in Memmingen, Germany in 1962. He lives and works in Athens since 2018. His art deals with every day culture, media perception and information processing. He rather creates experiences than objects. Jeron’s works span from the singing and dancing robot Sim Gishel, to compositions for electrified rotten vegetables and audio tour guides in onshore wind farms. Recent exhibitions, events and collaborations include Athens Digital Arts Festival, ZKM Karlsruhe, Ars Electronica Linz, Documenta X, ICA London, Walker Art Museum Minneapolis, Berlinischen Galerie Berlin and the Museum of Modern Art San Francisco.


Dr. Veronika Reichl. April 1st – April 15th.
Phantasms of Art Works

What are artists’ phantasms of perfect works? What are we desperate for? What do we dream of, when we think of making a huge work (a dream almost every artist entertains)? How we imagine tiny works? What precise concepts – known and preconscious – do we entertain when we speak of poetic, daring, or consequent works? What ideals do we have in mind? What are the impulses, the perceptions, the hunches that get us going? What ideas about working processes and states of being passive and active are connected to these ideas on works?

During her stay in Brunakra Veronika will work on these questions, maybe conduct some interviews and try to develop a form of how to map them.

This is part of an ongoing project on phantasms of artistic production. Its first part was shown at the exhibition “The Production of Nothing” curated by Ulrike Riebel and Stefan Riebel from the Institut für alles Mögliche, Berlin, Kunstpunkt, 2018:

I have to lie down – pretty much about hardly anything

“During the exhibition I am as hyperactive as possible. I collect and develop figures of thought, descriptions, instructions about all kinds of minor and hardly-any-productions, about slow, discrete and hidden production, about latency phases and the phantasm of non-production. I collect these ideas with help of the visitors: Please give me an interview (5-15 min) on your delicate, narrow or reduced production, but also on your everyday production or your fantasies of non-production or large-scale production.”

Veronika Reichl works and lives as a writer, artist and lecturer in Berlin. Her preferred formats are performative talks, sound installations, and animated films. Many of her projects are located on the threshold between art and philosophy. All her works are concerned with the stuff we think, feel, imagine and perceive without being fully aware of it.

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In collaboration with Institut für Alles Mögliche:

 

 

 

 

This residency at BRUNAKRA is financed by Goethe Institut Schweden:

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