Project Support

Astrological guidance by Luz Peuscovich

Project support by Staci Bu Shea




Luz Peuscovich




Luz Peuscovich is an Artist and Astrologer from Argentina who accompanies Falke Pisano from the astrological cosmovision, focusing on providing an integrative and bonding perspective.
Luz's work focuses on the integration of humans with nature (of the sky) and the development of sustainable human relationships.
The panoramic vision of the sky is used as a tool in the investigation of the internal states of the project participants, seeking to understand the relationships between humans in the current contexts. The metaphors provided by the symbols are poetic doors for the creation of narratives and interpretations that enrich and enhance sensitivity, and the search for shared patterns can help people to feel contained in situations that involve a lot of commitment and exposure. Seeking emotional contact, empathy and dialogue is fundamental to investigate in depth how we function in the social contexts we create and share.

To learn more about Luz’s work, visit luzpeuscovich.com



Staci Bu Shea




Credit: Staci Bu Shea, 2021 [Image description: fresh from being washed, a black t-shirt of a hospice guest, with the printed text "Trust the timing of your life" on the front, hangs on a dollie from a hanger. The shirt is drying faster in the warm space of the boiler room of the hospice, near the laundry machines, storage goods, and tools.]

Staci Bu Shea is a project companion to Where Should We Begin?. Staci supports the main organizers (Falke Pisano, Joanna Zielińska and Anne-Claire Schmitz) in their collaborative process of organizing and hosting the project and gives attention to the interpersonal experiences of their collective work. Meeting at the beginning, middle, and end of the project's span, we discuss roles, expectations, and values for common understanding, as well as topics of preventive care like communication styles, approaches to conflict, and accountability. These discussions are approached with the attitude that care is something incomplete, accessibility and safety imperfect. Instead, it is the intention and willingness to strive toward these “horizons” where deeper connection and transformation can take place in our relationships.

To learn more about Staci's work, visit stacibushea.info.



December

3 December: Stories that are not so easy to tell

with Karen Vantvelt, Luz Peuscovich, MC Julie Yu, Table Dance, Zeynep Kubat, Falke Pisano and new work by Gizem Üstüner

Karen Vantvelt ︎︎︎
Luz Peuscovich ︎︎︎
MC Julie Yu ︎︎︎
Table Dance ︎︎︎
Zeynep Kubat ︎︎︎
Gizem Üstüner ︎︎︎




Stories that are not so easy to tell

with Karen Vantvelt, Luz Peuscovich, MC Julie Yu, Table Dance, Zeynep Kubat, Falke Pisano and new work by Gizem Üstüner



3 December 2022, 15:00-18:00 (including drinks, programme approx 2hrs)
M HKA 6th floor

On the 3rd of December, we invite you to join the last public event of Where Should We Begin?, Superhost 2022.

Superhost 2022: Where should we begin? has been a vehicle to investigate the working conditions in the field of art, with a specific focus on the work involved in public programming in art institutions. We were curious about the questions that would arise when paying extra close attention to the material and systemic conditions in which we work. How do they shape the way we work and the decisions we make? How do we feel when working? What information can we draw from it? How do the material and systemic conditions influence our relations? And how can we develop strategies to intervene in our own conditioning and that of the institutional context around us?

Throughout the year, many processes have taken place. Some have been (partly) public, others happened behind the scenes. During this event we will reflect on some of the more hidden processes of a year of Superhost, through dance and sound, conversation, astrology and a game.

The artist Karen Vantvelt is developing an affective response (non-verbal expression) to the experience of having been invited as a guest in the Superhost project. In a video made for the occasion artist and astrologer Luz Peuscovich will share some astrological insights on collaborative work, based on the guidance she has given throughout the year. Artist MC Julie Yu and Falke Pisano will present a prototype of a game that allows for the unpacking of recurring situations and experiences of work in the cultural field. Curator and writer Zeynep Kubat has been invited to engage in a conversation with Falke Pisano – as a critical friend – to look back at the year, the project’s intention, its life and possible afterlife.

Also newly added to the Superhost space is a series of ‘shadow clouds’ by artist Gizem Üstüner, in which she reflects on questions we might ask ourselves when working with others, in larger groups, in public, or in institutional context. It can be read from the perspective of an art worker who is shuttling between different needs and demands at the same time, often working for changing their conditions, while also needing to find a balance within conditions that change constantly in unforeseen ways.

We invite you to join us in tension, discomfort, curiosity, desire and imagination.

There’s time for hanging out and conversations in between and after the programme, with snacks and drinks provided by the collective Table Dance, currently in residency at the M HKA café.

More information on participants and programme follows soon.







September

10 September: Love Doesn’t Pay the Bill. A conversation about values and economies in publishing as artistic practice

with Yin Yin Wong, Riet Wijnen and Falke Pisano

Yin Yin Wong ︎︎︎
Riet Wijnen ︎︎︎



Love Doesn’t Pay the Bill.
A conversation about values and economies in publishing as artistic practice


with Yin Yin Wong, Riet Wijnen and Falke Pisano



10 September 2022, 15:00-17:00
M HKA 6th floor

As we move from summer to autumn, the yearlong programme Where Should We Begin? does so as well. On the 10th of September, we invite you to join a series of short presentations, followed by a discussion, about the values and productive frictions in publishing as (part of) artistic practice.

During this event Yin Yin Wong, Riet Wijnen and Falke Pisano will share their experiences with publishing and introduce current intersections through two collaborative projects: Wong and Pisano are developing a publishing methodology as a part of Where should we begin? and Wijnen and Pisano are working on the children’s book Love Doesn’t Pay the Bill, based on the International Wages for Housework Campaign (a historical grassroots women's network campaigning for recognition and payment for all caring work founded in 1972). This book is made in collaboration with Simnikiwe Buhlungu and David Bennewith amongst others.

Wong, Wijnen and Pisano will speak about their different roles in the projects and about how they themselves view issues such as complexity and accessibility, editing and multiplicity and the different economies from production to distribution. They will also share how these considerations are reflected in the use of visual and spatial methods of editing, structuring and working with material.


Riet Wijnen, Yin Yin Wong, Falke Pisano, all photos this page: ChunYao Lin

Yin Yin Wong is an artist, designer and researcher. They deal with questions surrounding ownership, agency, circulation and dissemination of visual culture in relation to the public space and public sphere. Interested in graphic design’s potential to be distributed widely; beyond museum walls, into public space, or even into homes, Wong challenges specific models or paradigms that operate on modes of exclusion within the arts and the distribution of (visual) culture and practices this through site specific installation, (social) sculpture, public intervention and publishing.

Wong was the director of Publication  Studio Rotterdam from 2015 to 2021 and is currently a participant at the Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht.



Riet Wijnen is an artist whose practice involves sculpture, photograms, working through texts, woodcuts and more recently, type design. She is interested in incomplete histories of abstraction, and what and who are already there in ways we might not yet know. Wijnen looks to elders, hosts practitioners from the past and present within her work who have been active in the field of art during early modernism, or in science, philosophy, education and activism. Bringing them together through fictional conversations and sculptures to reconsider histories and better understand what comes next, Wijnen centers perception, language and organizational structures.

This research comes together in the cycle Sixteen Conversations on Abstraction (2015) and publications related to language and biographies of female modernists that provide sources for her practice while functioning independently, such as Saloua Raouda Choucair (2022), Homophone Dictionary (2019), Grace Crowley (2019), Abstraction Création: Art non-figuratif (reprint and translation) (2014) and Marlow Moss (2013).














August

Start August: Launch of audio piece by RA Walden, ɦej jala uθɪjeɽadjaθa / if the body is willing, 2022

RA Walden has made a new audio piece for Where should we begin? which is now available for listening.


ɦej jala uθɪjeɽadjaθa / if the body is willing

a fragmented audio offering featuring entangled moments from RA Walden’s project ẍây ithřa, a guided meditation by Clay “onion” AD, and voiceover by Harley Aussoleil.

︎ AUDIO HERE (anchor) and HERE (spotify)

︎ TRANSCRIPT HERE (pdf)

p1 of transcript



July

6-7 June: work meeting with Yin Yin Wong and installation prints RA Walden

9 July: Installation intervention Karen Vantvelt



Yin Yin Wong & Falke Pisano, publishing structure



Artist, designer and publisher Yin Yin Wong and I have begun collaborating on a publishing methodology, which after summer will gain some form in the space, to open up the research, the different processes and conversations that currently take place in an accessible way. This will lead to a production process or structure for the publishing of different voices and kinds of texts, throughout the second part of the year. We will share some insights into the complexities of publishing during a public event in September, together with the artist Riet Wijnen (with whom I am currently developing a children’s book based on the International Wages for Housework Campain, a grassroots women's network campaigning for recognition and payment for all caring work).

As an artist, designer and researcher Yin Yin Wong deals with questions surrounding ownership, agency, circulation and dissemination of visual culture in relation to the public space and public sphere.  Interested in graphic design’s potential to be distributed widely; beyond museum walls, into public space, or even into homes, Wong challenges specific models or paradigms that operate on modes of exclusion within the arts and the distribution of (visual) culture and practices this through site specific installation, (social) sculpture, public intervention and publishing.


RA Walden, ẍây ithřa, 2021



The artist RA Walden presents a new language: ẍây ithřa. The project was initiated in response to the restrictive nature of the English language. Formulated over a period of months in close collaboration with the linguist Margaret Ransdell Green, ẍây ithřa consists of a 300+ word lexicon, complete with morphosyntax, phonology, and an ever-growing set of idioms. Drawing on the rich histories of queering lexicon, from argots and cants, to anti-languages and the use of constructed language within Sci-Fi and speculative fiction, Walden seeks to bring fluidity, ease and ‘access intimacy’ to those in sick, disabled and trans bodies. The artist uses world-building, not as a visionary tool for an imagined future, but as an embodied methodology for the ‘now’. As part of Superhost, we present prints and a workshop in the form of a podcast explaining the principles of the language ẍây ithřa.

I encountered this work at Kunstinstituut Melly in Rotterdam in summer 2021. It was commissioned as part of 84 Steps. The work and events within 84 STEPS give special attention to the relation between physical and mental architectures, as much as with interpretations of personal and social health. I felt it was crucial to include this work in a project that aims at investigating the consequences of the current organization of labour and value production within the art institutional field.

RA Walden’s techniques span text, sculpture, printed matter, performance and video, all of which is undertaken with a socially engaged and research-led working methodology. Walden’s works question contemporary Western society’s relationship with care, tenderness and fragility in relation to our bodies, our communities and our failing ecosystems. They explore these issues through the lenses of crip theory, queer theory, sci-fi, speculative fiction and disobedient archives. Recent work has sought to disturb overly simplistic understandings of the disabled body, looking to bring an ethic of care, a connection between the land and the body, and a cripped concept of performance into conversation with the work.



One of RA Walden’s prints with a caption that refers back to Katja Mater’s Time is an Arrow, Error series. Three small series of clockalikes selected by association and affection where present in the spaces from February to May. 


Karen Vantvelt – (s)he –, wat dragen we hier binnen? (what are we carrying/wearing in here?), 2022



Karen Vantvelt – (s)he – has added an intervention in response to the blue modular gate that I installed between the two spaces on the 6th floor. wat dragen we hier binnen? (What are we carrying/wearing in here?) consists of the artist’s clothes and other silkscreened textiles squeezed between the wall and the entrance-gate. In her work with clothes, textiles and performance Vantvelt searches for ways to communicate about complex and difficult experiences and feelings within shame and shyness. The collaboration stems from our conversations about the interaction between trauma and institutions and the experience of working and studying at the threshold of art (educational) institutions, in continuous negotiation with the existing institutional practices.

(s)he

(s)he lives inside
(s)he lives
(s)he lives a life
alive
her head is gone
her words are found
(s)he becomes

(s)he extended her legs towards the walls , and her fingers into an emotional layer of a hidden body . the body is stuck . you can call her he , but (s)he has breasts , doesn’t like bread and grew up in the West . Belgium rooted , but (s)he is not rooted , could not escape , but tries to . needs some help but isn’t helpless . (s)he cares without knowing , (s)he lives without growing . (s)he is made from clay . not found at an archeological sound , but sounds like the digital world behind . ( words . )

cries ( sometimes ) hides ( sometimes ) but mostly hangs around smiling .

(s)he is . (s)he is alive . but does (s)he know where (s)he is right now ?