FOURTH EPISODE: «COLLABORATIONS, ETHICS AND SYSTEMIC VIOLENCE»
For the fourth episode of «Conversas Diversas» we invited two collectives Knowbotiq (Switzerland) and Mapa Teatro (Colombia) to discuss ethical collaborations, cosmologies and systemic violence based on a series of projects. The work “Many are holding: mercurybodies” by Knowbotiq was realized with the support by COINCIDENCIA at the Atrato River in Colombia and is a process of recognizing nature as subject. The work “The Moon is in the Amazon” was created by Mapa Teatro; the trans-disciplinary collective from Colombia deals with the construction of Ethnofiction and recently presented its work at the 11th Berlin Biennale.
KNOWBOTIQ
knowbotiq (Yvonne Wilhelm, Christian Huebler) has been experimenting with forms and medialities of knowledge, political representations and epistemic disobedience. In recent projects they are investigating and enacting political landscapes and inhuman geographies with the focus on algorithmic governmentalities, libidinous and affective economies and postcolonial violence. In various installations, interventions and performative settings knowbotiq are exploring molecular, psychotropic and derivative aesthetics. They have exhibited at the Biennials of Venice, Moscow, Seoul, Hong Kong, Shenzen and Rotterdam, as well as at the New Museum New York, Witte de With Rotterdam, MOCA Taipei, Kunsthalle St. Gallen, Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum Duisburg, Skuc Gallery Ljubljana, NAMOC Beijing, Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Museum of
Contemporary Art Helsinki, Hamburger Kunstverein, Henie Onstad Kunstsenter Oslo and Museum Ludwig in Cologne. Yvonne Wilhelm and Christian Hübler hold professorships in the Master of Fine Arts program of the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK).
MAPA TEATRO
Mapa Teatro is an Artists laboratory dedicated to trans-disciplinary creation. Based in Bogota since 1986, Mapa Teatro was founded in Paris in 1984 by Heidi, Elizabeth and Rolf Abderhalden, theatre and visual artists from Colombia. Since its inception, Mapa Teatro has built a cartography within the milieu of the Live Arts, a propitious space for transgressing – geographic, linguistic, artistic – boundaries, and for staging local and global issues through various “thought-montage” operations. A space of migration, were myth, history and topicality exist continuously; intimate and public spheres; artistic languages (theatre, opera, cabaret, radio, sound and video installations, urban interventions, actions and performatic conferences); authors and epochs (Aeschylus, Müller, Shakespeare, Sarah Kane, Antonio Rodriguez, Händl Klaus); geographies and languages (La Noche/Nuit in French and Spanish; West Dock in Russian, A Very Old Man with enormous wings in Tamil; De Mortibus in English, Spanish and French; voice, image and movement (4:48 Psychosis, simply complicated); memory and city (Project Prometheus, The Cleaning of Augias Stables, Witness to the Ruins, Cartographies in Motion); voice, music and live electronics (Simply Complicated, Love Story, The Magic Flute, Orpheus) simulation and reality (Exxxtrañas Amazonas, Trans/positions); document and fiction, poetics and politics (Horatio, The Holy Innocents, Discourse of a decent man and The Unaccounted: a triptych). Hence Mapa Teatro’s interest in the creative processes and events “in vivo”; in the translation and transposition of writings and scenic scores; and in the operation of putting together documentation, archives and fictions. In recent years, Mapa Teatro has focussed particularly on the production of poetic-political events through the construction of ethno-fictions and the ephemeral creation of experimental communities, Mapa Teatro generates processes of artistic investigation and research, which are developed in diverse spheres and scenarios of a Colombian reality. They are laboratories of social imagination.
