Ritual of the Hydra / Hydraritual
2023
Funded by the European Union, Goethe Institut and the Ministry for Culture and Media, Hamburg.
Developed during a residency at INSTITUTO (PT). Hamburg version at Kachelraum with Ina Römling.
In a speculative reading, Torben Körschkes explores questions of a possible post-apocalyptic community: How do people travel? What do rituals look like? How are non-identitarian identities formed? At Kachelraum in Hamburg designer Ina Römling joins the session and develops an installation that transforms the themes of the text into a mystic gathering space, including a fountain and gifts for the visitors: the many heads of the Hydra spread out in all directions of the night. The hydra is one motif of the work: it refers here to one of the two meanings of the term Hydrarchy, that Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker elaborate in their book The Many-Headed Hydra: the self-organization of seafarers from below, which the early capitalist states of the 17th century could not keep down.
Ritual of the Hydra, performed at Kachelraum in Hamburg. Together with Ina Römling. Photo: Alex Kla.
Ritual of the Hydra, Exhibition at INSTITUTO in Porto. Photo: Carlos Campos.
Zones of Entanglement (ZOE)
2022
UniArts, Helsinki.
With Anke Haarmann, Alice Lagaay, Petja Ivanova, Frieder Bohaumilitzky, Barbro Scholz, Tom Bieling.
Film: Camera: Tamara Hildebrand. Editing: Stephan Kraus. Sound: Hadi Abilmona.
As one of seven key groups (vs. keyspeakers), the members of the Speculative Space research project gave a performative lecture at the Performance Philosophy Problems 2022 conference at the University of the Arts Helsinki (Uniarts). In performance and screening, we as a group negotiate the entanglements of collaboration between seven individuals. The film shows a joint session with a professional mediator who wants to find out how we actually work together. The film repeatedly interrupts the live performance on stage, in which we try to present our individual working approaches. It is also an attempt to break up traditional forms of science and knowledge transfer and to take the question of collaboration seriously: to question the hierarchies of our group and to work out the different roles. Following the presentation in Helsinki, we were able to discuss these topics with the conference audience.
Performance of Zones of Entanglement, 2022. Photo: Kai Sinervo.
Still from the film accompanying our performance in Helsinki.
Performance of Zones of Entanglement, 2022. Photo: Kai Sinervo.
Design of Unrest
2021 / 2023
With Anke Haarmann, Frieder Bohaumilitzky, Tom Bieling.Film: Camera: Tamara Hildebrand. Sound and Editing: Stephan Kraus
“The question of navigating and being navigated helps decide how we want to deal with the complexity of the world 1) without getting lost in it; 2) without (re)producing social relations of oppression; 3) without breaking it down and provoking totalitarian encrustations.” We approach the topic of „unrest“ from four perspectives in an experimental chamber play and ask what it means to bring unrest into scientific practice and one‘s own thinking. We test both collaborative writing and the thinking of theory and text through and with filmic means. Looking back, we can formulate approaches that emerged from this collaboration.
The setting of the bouncy castle was developed by Frieder Bohaumilitzky for his project Metapolitisches Hüpfen (2022) and hijacked by us.
Still from the film Design of Unrest.
Still from the film Design of Unrest.
Oscillating Spaces:
Assembly Spaces
2019–ongoing
With Ina Römling.
Initiated during a residency at Bibliothek Andreas Züst, CH.
The Andreas Züst library is an oracle. Its mysticism reveals itself in the encounter of different complexes, between natural science, art, history and fields that defy bourgeois categorization. The oracle invites us to design speculative futures. Oscillating Spaces: Assembly Spaces gathers traces of past real and fictional places of assembly and negotiation to spin them into the future. It is a collection of metaphors, architectures, histories, images, practices, and manners from different eras, currents, and cultures. The currently approx. 150 annotated index cards allow for a wide variety of sortings and readings. They can be put into new relationships and spun into networks. Since 2019, they have repeatedly been the starting point and inspiration for new projects and part of different lecture performances.
Contribution to the Journal of Bibliothek Andreas Züst: oscillating-spaces-of-subversion
Reading at MATERIAL in Zürich.
Archive of Assembly Spaces.
Activation of HEFT-Archiv
2018
With Ina Römling. At Golden Pudel Club, Hamburg.
When running the project space HEFT we collected a number of magazines, zines, and pamphlets all dealing with the topic of the city. Many of these magazines ended up the HEFT-Archiv, an archive that we ship around to be set up in different locations as a reading corner, workshop material and so on. We ourselves also work from the content of the magazines from the archive and develop different interventions, readings and installations. The following images document one of these interventions at the Golden Pudel Club in Hamburg. Two Kodak Carousel projectors were loaded with images we scanned from the magazine. They would randomly project on top of each other while we were reading snippets from different magazines from the archive – a kind of live collaging, referencing the very idea of what a city is.