R.E.D. Residency Artists
2023
Virginnia Krämer aka Ogechi
Virginnia Krämer aka Ogechi (she/her) is a performer, dance facilitator, interdisciplinary artist, and mama. Significant aspects of her work include embodied research, healing practices, and an attempt to use words (spoken and written) as containers for inventories and nuances of these processes. 2022 year Virginnia Krämer was featured in her first solo “auf den weg zu mir/auf den weg zu dir” at the Sophiensälen. She collaborated with Nima Sené on this multimedia, installation-based performance referencing the poem of the same name by Afro-German poet May Ayim. As a co-founding member of the FemBlack Performance Collective, Virginnia was part of Afropolitan's performance residency. She has collaborated as a performer at Kampagel, GropiusBau, Uferstudios, as well as Ballhaus Naunynstraße and Etage, and has directed various projects at the intersection of artistic research and dance education. She is currently curating a decolonial movement laboratory by and for Black adopted people with the support of Dis-Tanz-Solo as well as the #takeheart research funding.
Nora Amin
Nora Amin (she/her) is a choreographer, dancer, theatre director, author and scholar. She is an expert/consultant at LAFT/PAP, advisor to Kuyum Dance Platform and board member of the German Center of the International Theater Institute. Nora Amin holds a PhD in performing arts and cultural policy. Her publications include: “Migrating the Feminine / Weiblichkeit im Aufbruch” (2018), and “Dance of the Persecuted / Tanz der Verfolgten” (2021). She is a co-curator/creator of the MA program “Participation, communities, Activism” at London Contemporary Dance School, The Place. During her residency, Nora Amin will research the following questions: Can community dance transform the gaze towards the female migrant body and its trauma? Can dance offer an opportunity for decolonising a discriminatory gaze towards Women of Colour? Can a marginalised dance form become a healing strategy and a way towards transformance and togetherness? Nora Amin wants to follow a path that blurs the boundaries between community dance and staged dance by allowing non-dancers to contribute to reinventing established forms.
Olivia Hyunsin Kim & Jones Seitz
Olivia Hyunsin Kim (she/her) works as a choreographer and curator. In 2019, she won first place in the Amadeu Antonio Art Prize and completed her MA in Choreography and Performance at the Institute of Applied Theater Studies in Giessen, Germany, with honors. Prior to that, she completed her BA in German Studies at Seoul National University, also with honors, and studied dance at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa and Falmouth University. She was a resident artist at Impulstanz 2017, at the Goethe-Institut Montréal & Circuit-Est centre choréographique 2022, at the Tarabya Cultural Academy in Istanbul 2021-2023, and at the Goethe-Institut Salvador 2023. In the 2022/23 season she is composer-in-residence at the Staatsoper Hannover. Her work has been shown at Sophiensælen Berlin, tanzhaus nrw Düsseldorf, Rote Fabrik Zurich, Art Sonje Center Seoul, and Museo Universitario del Chopo Mexico City, among others. Under the ddanddarakim, she works in recurring constellations with artists from different disciplines on choreographic works with a queer-feminist and postcolonial focus.
www.ddanddarakim.net
Jones Seitz (none or they/them) is a media technician for image and sound (SWR Baden-Baden) and studied Applied Theatre Studies at the Justus Liebig University in Gießen and the Universidade do Porto. In 2018, Jones founded the FLINTA network “Gefährliche Arbeit” together with Rosa Wernecke. In addition to their own artistic research on resistance, in-between spaces and materiality, Jones takes on the lighting and video design of free projects. They have been working on various artistic projects and installations together with Susana Alonso since 2021. Selection of collaborations: Light and video design for ddanddarakim on “History has failed us, but…” (2022), “Like daughter, like mother” (2021) and “Say my name, Say my name” (2019); video design for Simone Dede Ayivi on “Let's just be friends” (2022), “esmalbesserhabenin.de” (online installation, 2022), “Homecooking” (2021), “The kids are alright” (2020), “Solidaritätsstück” (2019) and “QUEENS” (2017); light design for Anne Welenc “Queens” (2023).
Jones Seitz (none or they/them) is a media technician for image and sound (SWR Baden-Baden) and studied Applied Theatre Studies at the Justus Liebig University in Gießen and the Universidade do Porto. In 2018, Jones founded the FLINTA network “Gefährliche Arbeit” together with Rosa Wernecke. In addition to their own artistic research on resistance, in-between spaces and materiality, Jones takes on the lighting and video design of free projects. They have been working on various artistic projects and installations together with Susana Alonso since 2021. Selection of collaborations: Light and video design for ddanddarakim on “History has failed us, but…” (2022), “Like daughter, like mother” (2021) and “Say my name, Say my name” (2019); video design for Simone Dede Ayivi on “Let's just be friends” (2022), “esmalbesserhabenin.de” (online installation, 2022), “Homecooking” (2021), “The kids are alright” (2020), “Solidaritätsstück” (2019) and “QUEENS” (2017); light design for Anne Welenc “Queens” (2023).
Thiago Rosa & Johanna Ryynänen
Thiago Rosa (he/him), born in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), is a Berlin based actor, dancer, performer and art educator. He has a Bachelor degree (BA) in Fine Arts (Brazil), Theater (Brazil) and in Dance, Context and Choreography at HZT Berlin (2022). Thiago Rosa´s works are based in dialog with theater, performance and improvisation.
Johanna Ryynänen (she/they) is a Berlin based dancer, performer and choreographer from Finland, who graduated from the BA program “Tanz, Kontext, Choreographie” at HZT Berlin in 2022 and with a “Diploma in Bühnentanz” from Tanzakademie Balance1 in 2018. Her works investigate questions of belonging and intimacy and shapeshifting bodies in relation to Otherness. They are curious about challenging western ideas of individuality without erasing personal histories and perspectives on societal matters. To investigate politics of belonging through the creation of temporary utopian and dystopian worlds where bodies and matters coexist and hierarchies and dynamics are questioned. She welcomes softness as radicality while attempting to give space for unsettlement, friction and atemporality. Much of their artistic work is in a constant flux, situated in liminality, in negotiation of constant becoming and resistance to the definite arrival.
Johanna Ryynänen (she/they) is a Berlin based dancer, performer and choreographer from Finland, who graduated from the BA program “Tanz, Kontext, Choreographie” at HZT Berlin in 2022 and with a “Diploma in Bühnentanz” from Tanzakademie Balance1 in 2018. Her works investigate questions of belonging and intimacy and shapeshifting bodies in relation to Otherness. They are curious about challenging western ideas of individuality without erasing personal histories and perspectives on societal matters. To investigate politics of belonging through the creation of temporary utopian and dystopian worlds where bodies and matters coexist and hierarchies and dynamics are questioned. She welcomes softness as radicality while attempting to give space for unsettlement, friction and atemporality. Much of their artistic work is in a constant flux, situated in liminality, in negotiation of constant becoming and resistance to the definite arrival.
2022
Makisig Akin
Makisig Akin (They/Them) is a choreographer, dancer, artist, activist, transgender Filipino born and raised in the Philippines. Akin is currently living and working in Berlin, Germany. Akin’s artistic work focuses on strengthening the recognition of intersectional identities, reconnecting with their ancestry, and decentralizing Western ideologies in dance making. They are interested in reimagining the process of making-dances, how can the process serve the dancers as they continue to have agency in directing the trajectory of the work? How can they create a community that functions beyond identity while honoring identity? Akin holds a Bachelor’s Degree in both Cognitive Science w/ Specialization in Neuroscience and Dance at University of California San Diego, California, USA and recently finished their Master’s of Fine Art in Dance Choreography in the program World Arts and Cultures/Dance at University of California Los Angeles, USA in June 2019. Akin’s physical dance background includes but is not limited to: Filipino Traditional Dance, Contact Improvisation, Kung Fu, Improvisation, walking meditation, Authentic Movement, Bouldering/Climbing and Contemporary Dance.
Performance ↪ Emerging Change: Give me your heart. No, the real one.
Performance ↪ Emerging Change: Give me your heart. No, the real one.
Adrian Marie Blount aka GodXXX Noirphiles
GodXXX Noirphiles (Adrian Marie Blount)- Parent to Chance Aijuka/ Non Binary Femme Boi/Founder/Organizer/ Curator/DJ- Is based in Berlin by way of San Diego, CA. After attending San Francisco State to obtain their BA in theatre, they performed in New York, traveled across the country with a touring theatre troupe, then moved to Rhode Island to perform with various Brown University programs including the Center for Slavery and Justice, Brown/ Trinity and Trinity Repertory theatre. Since being in Berlin, Adrian has taught anti-racist and collective healing workshops with various organizations such as Dice Festival and Conference and AfriVenir, dj’d internationally, performed at München Kammerspiele, Volksbühne, Gorki, Sophiensaele, Ballhaus Naunynstrasse and English Theatre Berlin (and others) and is the founder and lead organizer of the drag collective House of Living Colors for exclusively queer and trans BIPoC.
Performance ↪ Emerging Change: Power Tower Pishiboro
Performance ↪ Emerging Change: Power Tower Pishiboro
Frida Laux
Frida Laux (she/her) engages in art as (con)textual and social practice and works as artist and mediator in the expanded field of the performing arts. Coming from a background in dance and choreography, she follows an ongoing curiousity about bodies and other entities as places of knowledge production that can shift the perception of what is and what could be. She studies Accessibility and Accountability as relational and generative practices and is involved in the organization of the Performing Arts Forum in St. Erme (France). Recent works include the dance performance “Still To Come – A Feminist Pornscape”; “Paradance”, a book and installation on dance as practice of resistance; “Ki(n)”, a collective research with kids on forest as drag. Collaborative works have been invited and shown at venues such as Künstler*innenhaus Mousonturm Frankfurt, Teatro Il Lavatoio Santarcangelo, Queer Zagreb Festival, MOT Festival Skopje, Act Festival Bulgaria, Hessische Theatertage, Festival Implantieren Frankfurt. Forthcoming is the publication “Access and Exhaustion”, a collection of practices and perspectives that seek to expand the notion of accessibility in the arts and beyond.
Lau Perez* Transperreo Collective
Lau Perez (none or they/them) is a performer and producer as well as a Makeup and Hair Artist. They are also a member of the Transperreo collective. Lau Perez dedicates part of their time organizing events and bringing together groups to activate solidarity from the migrant Queer community in and beyond Berlin. Their motivation is to mobilize resources through activities that combine movement and pleasure in soli events which also includes selling food, in order to send donations where it’s needed. They met the members of Transperreo through these activities, which involve different forms of activism, for instance the Perreo Marik, a political block that shows up for pride, the 8th of march (International Women’s Day) and other political meetings. They aim to make use of the public space and encourage queers to resist together. Through dancing they reclaim the enjoyment of their bodies and identities, that have been neglected by imposed religions, patriarchy and heteronormative society.
Lau Perez is affiliated with Transperreo, a collective predominantly composed of individuals from Abya Yala*, but also from other non-hegemonic territories. Transperreo uses various artistic and performative practices around the perreo music, dance and ways of partying, as well as the associated aesthetics and statements, to criticize the ways in which colonial legacy has affected our bodies and imposed patriarchal, binary, racist and capitalist relationships based on exploitation and discrimination. Instead, the collective reclaims movement, collective care, desire, and hip-shaking euphoria as powerful means to transgress imposed orders. Through these practices, they aim to mobilize reflection and action in the historically powerful locations in which they currently reside. The conviction to live as drag performers, dancers, visual artists, artisans, DJs, and more is regularly challenged by the marketing industry subjecting their creativity and political positions to the commodification of the idea of "Latinidad". The members of the Transperreo collective counter this struggle through collaboration and self-management which finally reinforces their bonds.
* Abya Yala is a pre-colonial name, originating from the Kuna language of Panamá and northwestern Colombia, for the Americas before the arrival of Christopher Columbus and the Europeans.
** Latinidad is a Spanish-language term that refers to the various attributes shared by Latin American people and their descendants without reducing those similarities to any single essential trait.
Elvan Tekin
Elvan Tekin (she/her) is a dancer, choreographer and community organiser living in Berlin. Raised as a Kurdish woman in the geopolitics of West Asia, her artistic interest lies in the intricate and fluid notions of body, language and formation, mutation, transformation of identity. In 2022, Elvan's research "poetics of political resistance" was funded by the #TakeHeart residency in Kampnagel Hamburg. She recently presented her solo performance "to be a fish in a raki bottle" at Tanztage 2023 at Sophiensæle Berlin. Elvan is the founder, co-curator and organiser of the curatorial project emergent spaces that is centering queer and trans* feminist perspectives in diaspora. She is currently studying MA Choreography at the HZT Berlin.
Dafne Narvaez-Berlfein
Dafne Narvaez Berlfein (she/her) is a Berlin-based film and video artist; she also teaches and researches historical and contemporary media aesthetics. Prioritizing a collaborative approach and an intersectional perspective, her work encompasses multiple genres and media. Film, videotape field recordings, live video captures and modulated interventions are Narvaez Berlfein’s tools to create visual interpretations, in dialogue with the works of composers, sound artists, and performers, always with a DIY and DIWO (do it with others) approach. Her works have been shown at the Deutsche Oper Berlin, the Philharmonie Luxembourg, Documenta 14 and many other institutions and independent venues.
Dafne Narvaez Berlfein’s research focuses on female-identified artists who produce in underground contexts and deal with experiences of uprootedness. She has lectured at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig, Universidad de Buenos Aires, and Universität der Künste in Berlin.
All of her projects share the concern of decentralizing social-cultural structures through artistic discourse.
Dafne Narvaez Berlfein’s research focuses on female-identified artists who produce in underground contexts and deal with experiences of uprootedness. She has lectured at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig, Universidad de Buenos Aires, and Universität der Künste in Berlin.
All of her projects share the concern of decentralizing social-cultural structures through artistic discourse.
Ana Libório
Ana Libório (they/them) is a non-binary artist, dancer and performer that works along the intersection of performance, videogames and visual arts.
All of their performative work questions the hybrid body as a choreographic-digital representation in an intermodal performative research, thus expanding the scope of performative practice as a strategy of socio-political digital engagement. Their practice navigates questions surrounding decolonizing the digital interfaces and decentralizing western ideologies in performance making. In regarding choreography as expanded physical experiments that are improvisational, imagistic, they play with body transformations through embodiment.
All of their performative work questions the hybrid body as a choreographic-digital representation in an intermodal performative research, thus expanding the scope of performative practice as a strategy of socio-political digital engagement. Their practice navigates questions surrounding decolonizing the digital interfaces and decentralizing western ideologies in performance making. In regarding choreography as expanded physical experiments that are improvisational, imagistic, they play with body transformations through embodiment.
2021
Jee Chan
Since 2015, I have been developing a series of work based on my body’s relationship to various other bodies of water. The contexts within which this series is located and the compulsions behind it are diverse, yet collectively resonate from my maternal grandmother’s experience of undertaking a sea-crossing, fleeing from a Japanese invasion of her home in Guangzhou to Singapore. My current practice is concerned with re-imagining the world through ocean-based perspectives which detach from a static understanding of post-colonial identities and territories. During my residency at Tanzfabrik, I will extend my research into orality and embodied knowledge in Southeast Asian contexts through the development of two choreographic projects in parallel — bendungan and sea flights (every one of them landed on a beach like this). I will be doing so in relation with individuals who hold diasporic histories, as well as with specific sites in and around Berlin.
Biography Jee Chan
Interview Jee Chan
Biography Jee Chan
Interview Jee Chan
Carrie McILwain
The Pile and the Pyre.
The figure of the witch offers my practice crystal thinking, many faceted and slick for symbolic projection. In my research this year I have been busy with the historic victims and their trials (accusation, interrogation, execution) as recorded in: court documents, theological debates (Malleus Maleficarum) and in woodcuts (from 1300-1800). These documents are starting points for a practice of speculative feminism (Donna Haraway) of somatic fantasy that searches for the knowledge that was situated in the witch’s body and in the wood that was placed alongside her*.
I will be joined this August in the studio by Josephine Brinkmann, Suvi Kemppainen, Johanna Ackva, a pile of wood (Totholz) recovered from Tegeler Forest and together we will move - thinking through textual offerings from Silvia Federici, Jane Bennett and the others mentioned here throughout. We will invite wooden materiality and give attention to agencies, voices, bodies and the gravity of being together as we stack, carry, lean - piling up. The witch offers a character that can move between binaries or realms, situated in cyclical wisdom - phase existence, intersectional and inclusive. A figure that practices power-within rather than power-over (Starhawk) and was condemned because of wielding an illegitimate (access to) power. If this power was not achieved through the acceptable means of inherited privilege, accumulation in capitalist enterprise, or seized through violent force, it is a knowledge, an agency that our contemporary world urgently needs to imagine or re-discover.
The pile is an inclusive and chaotic mass. It is full of spiders, insects, rotting material, freshly cut wood, mold, bacteria, things fallen, things forgotten. The pyre a rearrangement, an ordering of these agents for the purpose of punishment within human culture. With the inclusion of the human subject, it makes for a penultimate collaboration of human and non-human elements. When the flames finish their performance, a pile appears once more this time containing ash, memories in the bones and branches that did not burn away, dust settles and new agents flourish. Through performance we will explore these forms searching for the choreography of the pile and an aesthetic action of reclaiming.
Biography Carrie McILwain
Interview Carrie McILwain
The figure of the witch offers my practice crystal thinking, many faceted and slick for symbolic projection. In my research this year I have been busy with the historic victims and their trials (accusation, interrogation, execution) as recorded in: court documents, theological debates (Malleus Maleficarum) and in woodcuts (from 1300-1800). These documents are starting points for a practice of speculative feminism (Donna Haraway) of somatic fantasy that searches for the knowledge that was situated in the witch’s body and in the wood that was placed alongside her*.
I will be joined this August in the studio by Josephine Brinkmann, Suvi Kemppainen, Johanna Ackva, a pile of wood (Totholz) recovered from Tegeler Forest and together we will move - thinking through textual offerings from Silvia Federici, Jane Bennett and the others mentioned here throughout. We will invite wooden materiality and give attention to agencies, voices, bodies and the gravity of being together as we stack, carry, lean - piling up. The witch offers a character that can move between binaries or realms, situated in cyclical wisdom - phase existence, intersectional and inclusive. A figure that practices power-within rather than power-over (Starhawk) and was condemned because of wielding an illegitimate (access to) power. If this power was not achieved through the acceptable means of inherited privilege, accumulation in capitalist enterprise, or seized through violent force, it is a knowledge, an agency that our contemporary world urgently needs to imagine or re-discover.
The pile is an inclusive and chaotic mass. It is full of spiders, insects, rotting material, freshly cut wood, mold, bacteria, things fallen, things forgotten. The pyre a rearrangement, an ordering of these agents for the purpose of punishment within human culture. With the inclusion of the human subject, it makes for a penultimate collaboration of human and non-human elements. When the flames finish their performance, a pile appears once more this time containing ash, memories in the bones and branches that did not burn away, dust settles and new agents flourish. Through performance we will explore these forms searching for the choreography of the pile and an aesthetic action of reclaiming.
Biography Carrie McILwain
Interview Carrie McILwain
Roger Sala Reyner
In the short essay “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” Ursula K. Le Guin beautifully writes about Elizabeth Fisher’s Carrier Bag Theory of human evolution. In her book “Woman’s Creation: Sexual Evolution and the Shaping of Society” Fisher tells: “The first cultural device was probably a recipient (…) a container to hold gathered products (…)”. And Le Guin elaborates: “A leaf a gourd a shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container. A holder. A recipient.”
I have invited 4 collaborators with whom I’ve engaged in the past and with whom I have an ongoing working-affective-collaborative relationship to fill up the bag with me. I’ve asked every one of them, all of us, to take on ourselves the task to respectively curate a week for each other, 5 times 5 days of exchange that others will join. And on the 6th week we’ll gather again to look together at what has been collected. Instead of being a sharp tool to carve a production, through our incongruent/quirky generosity toward one another, this residency should hopefully become a soft container, a caring and carrying bag wide enough to receive and make available anything that we are willing to share and find on the way. In it, we will joyfully confuse our roles and playfully mix the un-mixable to the point where, hopefully, something beautiful will spring out of the womb of our unexpected co-creation.
I have invited 4 collaborators with whom I’ve engaged in the past and with whom I have an ongoing working-affective-collaborative relationship to fill up the bag with me. I’ve asked every one of them, all of us, to take on ourselves the task to respectively curate a week for each other, 5 times 5 days of exchange that others will join. And on the 6th week we’ll gather again to look together at what has been collected. Instead of being a sharp tool to carve a production, through our incongruent/quirky generosity toward one another, this residency should hopefully become a soft container, a caring and carrying bag wide enough to receive and make available anything that we are willing to share and find on the way. In it, we will joyfully confuse our roles and playfully mix the un-mixable to the point where, hopefully, something beautiful will spring out of the womb of our unexpected co-creation.
Litó Walkey
Developing collaboratively through circuits of transversal interdisciplinary processes my work operates with language and writing as a mediating device that nourishes collective processes to compress, translate, disrupt and displace location, sense-making and intention. This residency will support the development of my long-term research project ‘Critical Ecologies in Choreographic Practices’, that addresses alternative modes of disseminating creative processes. The project aims to create public spaces for critical thinking and experimentation unbound by single authorship, discipline or terminus.
Discursive and practical exchange with Berlin-based colleagues will consider how publishing, curating and audio recording practices could enhance participatory engagement. This will be complimented by dialogue with writer/artist/ publisher Renee Gladman, musician/composer Boris Hauf and visual artist/set designer Nadia Lauro.
Biography Litó Walkey
Interview Litó Walkey
Discursive and practical exchange with Berlin-based colleagues will consider how publishing, curating and audio recording practices could enhance participatory engagement. This will be complimented by dialogue with writer/artist/ publisher Renee Gladman, musician/composer Boris Hauf and visual artist/set designer Nadia Lauro.
Biography Litó Walkey
Interview Litó Walkey