TALK SERIES 2021
curated by Maria Luigia Gioffrè
The series introduces artists and researchers who reframe archaeology with their work, unveiling new perspectives to look at the term and its meanings.
TALK 1: Thursday, 25 February, 6 pm (CET)
RADICAL IMAGE MAKING IN THE DIGITAL AGE
Julia Wolf in conversation with Célia Hay
Julia Wolf and Célia Hay introduce their separate yet entangled practices exploring how magic and dark matter can expand the archive of both the ritual and artificial within the context of their works. They will discuss the notion of "radical image-making" (from film-making to drone-vision) that emerges in the field of pluralised, sensuous poetics to explore new ways of embodiment in our contemporary technological setting.
Julia Wolf is a performance artist and current PhD candidate at the Royal College of Art in London under the supervision of Prof. Johnny Golding.
Her research engages computing technologies, AI poetry and sensuousness that goes beyond the human. Her performances are operating on energetic co-alliances with the digital, the embodied and the eerie platform of the artificial. They co-write choreographies with remote sensing technologies to establish a more holistic and sensuous set of ethics for artificial intelligence. Ultimately, they discover potentially poetic processes inherent to the latest techno-evolution of sense-making.
Célia Hay lives and works in London. She graduated in 2016 from the MA in Contemporary Photography at Central Saint Martins. She creates performative stories through which her characters accomplish mysterious existential quests in which they seem to free themselves from societal constraints. Her films deal with mourning, wandering, and how people who run out of words can bond at a given time. Her work has been presented in various institutions including the ICA, London, the Collection Yvon Lambert in Avignon, Friche la Belle de Mai in Marseille, PACT Zollverein in Essen, the Kyoto Art Center. She will take part to the yearly exhibition ‘Jeune Creation 71’ at the Fondation Fiminco in Paris in June 2021.
TALK 2: Thursday, 4 March, 6 pm (CET)
QUEER PROPOSITIONS AND THE PHOTOGRAPHIC ARCHIVE
Davide Meneghello
Davide Meneghello will look at how contemporary art can be used as a platform for ‘archaeological’ intervention. Making use of the archive as an historical site, the artist can ‘look backwards’, in order to identify, re-address and potentially re-think past historical narratives. Discussing his body of work as a starting point, the presentation will broaden to art historical references and a multiplicity of artists who employ archival sources in their practices.
Davide Meneghello is an Italian artist based in London. His work uses photography, slides, text and installation as a space to research historical representations of homosexuality. He graduated from a MA Photography at LCC, University of the Arts London in 2016. Selected exhibitions and presentations include Again He Holds My By The Hand at Jest, Turin, 2019; Paris Ass Book Fair at Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2019; Writing Photographs at Tate Modern, London, 2018; Burning with Pleasure at Photofusion, London, 2017. His work has been published by Photoworks, Der Grief, Cactus Digitale and Eyesore Magazine. He has been nominated for the Magnum graduate award 2017 and from February 2018 to February 2019 he has attended the residency programme LifeBoat, awarded through Artquest, London.
TALK 3: Wednesday, 10 March, 6 pm (CET)
MARKS, SOUND, GESTURE AND TECHNICAL INSCRIPTION
Andrea Giomi
Nowadays, a growing number of human social behaviours are encoded into information patterns enabling the prediction and determination of our ecological interactions. Human expression can be theoretically dematerialised into numerical sequences, collected and then stored into digital archives for diverse purposes, from health to marketing, surveillance and AI development... Bodily movement is at the core of this growing process of digitalisation and marketisation of human data. Resorting to mixed techniques including motion analysis, machine learning and interactive sonification, Andrea Giomi explores how digital “marks” or “footprints” of a gesture can be re-materialised as auditive representation. By presenting recent works and performances, Giomi will discuss how embodied gestural know-how can be externalized through technical inscription and then re-embodied in a new material form such as sound.
Andrea Giomi is currently adjunct professor in Digital Arts at Université Gustave-Eiffel (Paris Est/Marne-la-Vallée). His scientific interests involve embodied music cognition, human-computer interaction, digital arts, aesthetics, phenomenology and philosophy of Technology. As artist and performer, his research focuses on emergent relations between bodies, sound and technological environments. He collaborated with several French and Italian choreographers among which Eric Oberdoff, Raphael Bianco and Ariella Vidach. His music, ranging from techno to experimental music, has been released on different independent labels such as RXSTNZ and Obs/Audior. He presented his works at different international festivals and venues, among which: Säule/Berghain (Berlin), MiRA Festival (Barcelona), Teatro dell’Arte – Triennale and Auditorium San Fedele (Milan), Festival Manca (Nice), Plateforme Intermedia (Nantes), Live Performers Meeting (Rome), Santarcangelo Festival (Santarcangelo di Romagna).
TALK 4: Monday, 15 March, 6 pm (CET)
AT A LOSS FOR WORDS
Filippo Lorenzin and Guildor
Technological progress made it easier and easier to communicate with machines. So much that AIs are perfectly capable of understanding us and are now learning how to speak back. It seems then the right time to start asking ourselves: did they even care to hear from us in the first place? Artist Guildor and critic Filippo Lorenzin invite you to join them in a conversation that will explore our relationship with language and technology through the lens of art.
Filippo Lorenzin is an independent art writer, teacher, and curator. Originally from Italy, he worked for the Victoria and Albert Museum, Goethe Institut and Paris College of Art. He writes about media art, digital culture and art history.
Guildor is an artist whose practice investigates intersubjectivity in the context of contemporary communication. His interest for the influence that language and technology have in shaping cultural phenomenons has brought him to work also as a personality writer for artificial intelligence, such as the Google Assistant.