Klosterruine, Klosterstraße 73a, 10179 Berlin

Curated by Siegmar Zacharias & Christopher Weickenmeier

Grief follows loss. Of someone else, of something and sometimes of ourselves. But grief is not an absence. It's relational and it is moving and it resonates with affective dissonances. As such, it is a mode of inhabiting our shared vulnerabilities and inherently social and political. Practices of grieving may engender a shared sense of sociality and communality, an experience that may even bring joy and pleasure. With the program at Klosterruine, we - the curators Siegmar Zacharias and Christopher Weickenmeier - aim to de-privatize an experience that is universal but not nearly as monolithic as Western societies may have us believe. In a space of a 13th century ruin, artists, grief workers and activists are invited to complicate the idea of grieving and to articulate the collective dimensions of a feeling most of us are all too often left alone with.

With the kind support of Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Europa, Fonds für Ausstellungsvergütungen and the Bezirkskulturfonds and in cooperation with visitBerlin.

Program
August 26, 2022, 6 - 10pm

6pm - 8pm: to know the vultures so well (Performance)
- Carolina Mendonca, Catalina Insignares

A story that has as much to do with the dead, as with opening the registers of what is audible a story of training as channellers a story of conversations that take place in the midst of very loud frequencies a story about (missed) encounters with the dead in which we sometimes failed to understand one another.

Catalina Insignares and Carolina Mendonça, sound collaboration: Edy Girald.

9pm: Surrounded by sunsets (Performance, Screening)
- Theo Ilichenko, Ilias Gkionis aka GingerΈλα

In a performative offering preceding the screening of ‘Surrounded by sunsets’, Ilias Gkionis aka GingerΈλα and Theo invite to step into their kinship network extending beyond death. Through intertwined narrative threads reflecting our lives’ trajectories and encounters called into being by grief, loss, and the making of this film itself, we celebrate the ongoingness of love, memory and legacy, unfolding through time, off-screen and on-stage.

Theo Ilichenko – concept, performance; film direction; Ilias Gkionis aka GingerΈλα – concept, performance; film protagonist; Nuno Cassola – film direction.

6 - 9pm: Körper spüren durch Klang (Individual Listening Experience)
- Lydia Röder (15 Minute Slots)

Sounds for body and soul. When the strings are being played, persistent vibrations are created that seem like a fine shell of sound or a spherical carpet of sound. The open sound consists of two tones with an abundance of overtones and from these our whole musical cosmos opens up. The sound is self-contained, grounding and supportive. In their consistent structure, monochrome sounds are very suitable for "outwitting" the mind and thus opening access to deeper layers of consciousness. During treatment with the body tambura, sound is not only heard but also felt. The vibrations can be experienced in the whole body. The person themselves become a part of the sound body. Such a sound massage gently fulfils the basic human need for empathetic touch. It improves the perception of the body.

6 - 10pm: The Graveyard of Extension (Installation)
- Uma Breakdown

Program
August 27, 2022, 6 - 10pm
(partial repetition of the friday program)

6pm - 8pm: TRIBUTARY (Performative Workshop)
- Alice Heyward, Oisín Monaghan, Maciej Sado 

Drawing on diverse embodied knowledge– anatomy, dancing, discourse–this is a performative workshop for anybody interested in physical practice as an approach to the world and a mode of transformation. Bodily and vocal resonances open pathways to organic movement possibilities and move us in touch with our fluid bodies and energetic structures. In each other’s company, we will engage in guided movement research for individual body-felt exploration, collective sensory analysis, group discussion and open practice. Our collective ‘choreography’ is responding to deep layers of movement and rhythm in our bodies: we bones, cartilage, organs, blood and tissues move in harmony to process material, ideas and experiences through the processes that our bodies are themselves: growing, decaying, (d)evolving, crying, renewing, learning, breaking, recovering, liquifying, dying, aging, meeting, restoring, falling, connecting, birthing, separating, remembering, fantasizing, fictionalizing... Please wear comfortable clothes. 

Alice Heyward, Oisín Monaghan and Maciek Sado, Fabrics and costumes: Isabelle Lange, Promotional material: Milan Daemgen.

9pm: Surrounded by sunsets (Performance, Screening)
- Theo Ilichenko, Ilias Gkionis aka GingerΈλα

6 - 9pm: Körper spüren durch Klang (Individual Listening Experience)
- Lydia Röder (15 Minute Slots)

6 - 10pm: The Graveyard of Extension (Installation)
- Uma Breakdown

CVS

Alice Heyward is a dancer, choreographer and teacher from Naarm (Melbourne, Australia) living in Berlin. She is invested in thinking together with others through different forms, curious about the transformation of material and relations through embodiment and performance. Her practice develops through diverse collaborations internationally, as author, co-author and interpreter, constructing different situations for exchange and connection.

Carolina Mendonca and Catalina Insignares met in 2014 at the MA Choreography and Performance in Giessen. Since then they have been collaborating and maintaining a very close complicity in different manners of working together. The soil of their work is in workshops and seminars, moments where they can feel and think together with others. Reading groups, telepathic dances, psychic vision sessions, caresses and massages populate these encounters. The body and the extrasensorial have become central tools for asking questions of the world from the corner where their window is

Ilias Gkionis aka GingerΈλα is a 24-years-old drag queen and an activist for human rights involved with political and social issues (LGBTQIA+ rights/ homelessness/ abused women*/ children’s rights). He/she is one of the Greek drag queens carrying the legacy of her drag mother Zackie Oh (queer HIV+ activist and drag artist Zak Kostopoulos) murdered in Athens in 2018. In 2022, Ilias became a political refugee after having received death threats as a consequence of publically standing up for a sexual assault victim.

Lydia Röder  -  Ever since her initial training, Lydia Röder has worked with people during the last phase of life. For over two decades, she was director of a hospice. She is an expert on issues of life, death and grief. Lydia is supervisor in her field, certified trainer of the German Association for Palliative Medicine, and works as a grief counsellor. www.lydia-roeder.de

Maciej Sado - choreographer, performer, and dancer. Graduated from choreography in SNDO (School for New Dance Development) in Amsterdam 2016 and from medicine at the Medical University in Wrocław in 2012. In his work he investigates the concept of the obliqueness to challenge the contract between viewer-performer and question the usual perspective to enter in between spaces, the uncanny with- in normativities. He bodily devises technologies for manually augmented reali- ties. His involves himself in creative processes of other artists in a (as he calls it) dynamic dramaturgy, this forms crucial part of his extended choreo- graphic practice. He performs and performed for artists like: Ola Maciejewska, Florentina Holzinger & Vincent Riebeek, Tino Sehgal, Peaches, Keith Hennessy, Fernando Belfiore, Laima Jaunzema, Reza Mirabi. His latest works were presented during the festivals in Spain, Belgium, Poland, Austria, Germany and The Nether- lands. In 2016 he was a recipient of the DanceWeb scholarship during the Impulz- Tanz Festival in Vienna. He is a member of KuLe collective Berlin.

Oisín Monaghan (IE, UK, USA) is a dance artist and visual performer/creator currently residing in Wien. He began studying movement at the Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance in NYC. He has worked with Tere O'Connor, Xavier Le Roy, Maria Hassabi, Dora Garcia, Ryan McNamara, Christopher Williams, Brendan Fernandes and John-Mark Owen. Oisín has also worked with distinguished photographers including Peter Lindbergh, Mario Testino, Terry Tsiolis, Ryan McGinley, Kenneth Willardt, Josh Olins and John Rusnak. He has also collaborated with various visual artists and presented work at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, Deitch Projects and The Chelsea Hotel.

Theo Ilichenko is a multidisciplinary artist, performer and filmmaker. Influenced by the local AIDS crisis in their native Russia, their hybrid performance, film and writing practice often explores the intersection of grief and gender-based violence, and film and photo portraiture, polyphonic storytelling and the erotic moving body as affective mediums of care, appreciation, delegated mourning, engaged witnessing and cultural memory from a position of being a lover, caregiver and survivor. They hold a degree in Art in Context at the Berlin University of the Arts and have additional background in social work with migrants, refugees and violence survivors.