Publishing Practices 3
Weaving the Inner Bark
August 23-25, 2023
(full program here)
Archive Berlin
Reinickendorfer Str. 17
13347 Berlin
Weaving the Inner Bark Festival is an invitation to unpack, share, and inquire more broadly on how library projects can reflect on experiences of resistance, create ground for transnational solidarity, and participate in the unwriting and unfixing of hegemonic knowledge systems. Weaving the Inner Bark inhabits the physical space of the exhibition In the Inner Bark of Trees and activates it. The exhibition, imagined as an ensemble of potential libraries, is made of many voices and mediums. Each object in the exhibition calls for a haptical and multisensorial reading breaking away from the hegemonic fixity of the printed matter.
Weaving the Inner Bark embarks on forms of archiving and editing that defy canonical and standardised notions of publishing and prompts ancestral techniques such as oral storytelling, embodied literacies, and texturalities, a compound term for textiles interwoven into/as texts. These modes of knowledge inscription and transmission trouble the dominance of the book and inform the idea that libraries can become spaces of affective reading and experimental laboratories for practising hapticality. The Greek root of “haptic” is “haptein,” meaning to touch or grasp an object. Weaving the Inner Bark thus explores haptic experiences and experimentation, connecting somatic knowledge to contemporary bodies, spaces, worlds, and imaginations.
Curatorial ensemble: Leila Bencharnia, Chiara Figone, Miriam Gatt, Samira Ghoualmia, Paz Guevara, Beya Othmani, Savanna Morgan
Curator in residency: Salma Kossemtini
Graphic design: Archive Appendix
Production: Miriam Gatt
Production assistance: Malab Alneel, Iman Salem
Tech: Rey Domurat, Benjamin Nash
Publishing Practices 3. Weaving the Inner Bark festival is supported by Spartenoffene Förderung für Festivals und Reihen.
Publishing Practices 2
In the Inner Bark of Trees
Archive Berlin
Reinickendorfer Str. 17, 13347 Berlin
Opening July 29,
From 14:00
Exhibition dates
July 30, until August 27
Opening hours Thursday – Sunday 14:00 to 19:00
A multivocal, translinguistic, and transnational project, In the Inner Bark of Trees, reflects the necessity of continuously challenging pathways to knowledge inheritance, production, and transmission. In presenting art libraries, texturalities, performances, and co-learning sessions that defy histories of oppression and colonialism,  the project reunites publishing practices that seek to simultaneously unsettle knowledge systems from dominant symbolic cultures and release themselves from the confines of the material medium of modern colonial libraries. Instead, it fosters the imagination not only of libraries that are no longer limited by the printing system or canonical classification but crafted and nurtured by the intergenerational techniques, modalities, and feelings needed to sustain the alternatives of insurgent practices.
Although the performative nature of alternative libraries and archives has been extensively discussed, the project aims to question and reclaim the tools that allow the realisation of spaces and modes of cultural production and their maintenance and circulation in a transnational context. By virtue of virtual communication that flows like the vital lymph that passes through the inner bark of trees, the program interconnects different art libraries across regions and practices to share books and non-book cultural materials and immaterial figurations with Berlin practitioners and communities. 
A broad spectrum of performative, aural, textile, and bodily artistic practices are addressed within In the Inner Bark of Trees in conjunction with the context of the extensive research stream of Publishing Practices, which analyses other meanings and outcomes of publishing, such as descent, belonging, and dissemination. By drawing inspiration from collective, anti-disciplinary, and reflexive perspectives—which emphasise how knowledge production is always becoming participatory and contradictory, as well as how the hierarchies of learning can be disrupted—this set of research embraces artistic, publishing and curatorial practices calling for awareness of often unquestioned aspects of publishing and seeking alternative pathways to inhabit and engage with forms of knowing and sensing. 
With contributions from 
Amina Agueznay, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Sara Bouzgarrou, El Warcha, Juan–Pedro Fabra Guemberena, Aziza Gorgi, Karina Griffith, Raisa Kabir, Gladys Kalichini, Gabriel Rossell Santillán and Keiko Kimoto, Teresa Lanceta, Machi Mashy, Mallory Lowe Mpoka, Rah Naqvi, Katy Lèna N’diaye, Merve Elveren and Çağla Özbek, İz Öztat, Zineb Achoubie and Lorenzo Sandoval, Farkhondeh Shahroudi, Shireen Taweel, Cecilia Vicuña.
Curatorial ensemble: Soukaina Aboulaoula, Mistura Allison, Chiara Figone, Paz Guevara, Beya Othmani
Curator in residency: Salma Kossemtini
Visual identity: Aziza Ahmad and Lilia Di Bella for Archive Appendix with Yvon Langué
Scenography and head of production: Nancy Naser Al Deen
Structures design: Ola Zielińska
Production assistance and hospitality: Malab Alneel, Miriam Gatt, Iman Salem
Forum of co-learning curator and coordinator: Samira Ghoualmia
Light design: Emilio Cordero
Carpentry: Santiago Doljanin
Exhibition mounting: Ayham Allouch, Fai Chung, Waylon D’Mello, Rafał Łazar, Jessie Omamogho
Tech: Bert Günther

Download the Exhibition Handout and Conceptual Framework below

The Twana Archive
Archive Berlin
Saturday
25.02.2023
7–9 pm  (CET)
With contributions by Rawsht Twana,
Caterina Erica Shanta, Heba Hage-Felder,
and Nazand Begikhani
The Twana Archive project consists of the study, indexing, digitization, and documentation of Twana Abdullah’s photographic archive. Twana Abdullah was a photographer active in Iraqi Kurdistan between 1974–1992, and was killed on June 22nd. The archive, contains around 20.000 images and is currently under the care of his son, Rawsht Twana.
The public program will provide an introduction to the research process, the content of the archive, and the recent archival residency at the Arab Image Foundation in Beirut. The participants will reflect about the importance of such a photographic archive in illustrating the history of a community and the photographer’s practice in his particular social and political context.

The Twana Archive project is initiated and led by the Kurdish photographer and archivist Rawsht Twana, the Italian artist and film director Caterina Erica Shanta, and is coordinated by Grazia Sechi.

Rawsht Twana is a photographer and archivist. He started taking photos in 2006 following in his father’s footsteps. In 2009, he started working as a photojournalist for Metrography – an independent photography agency based in Iraq – documenting social events through intimate and long-term projects in Iraqi Kurdistan. His images have been published in many international magazines and media outlets.
Heba Hage-Felder is the outgoing director of the Arab Image Foundation in Beirut. She joined the foundation in September 2020 and as of January 2023, she continues her engagement as a general assembly member. She has over twenty-five years of experience in institutional building and management of cultural and developmental initiatives, and holds a Master in International Relations. Born in Ghana, she grew up between West Africa and Lebanon. She currently oscillates between Bern and Beirut and is pursuing writing and visual storytelling.

The body archives stories­­: it saves them from oblivion and at the same time gives them new life. What languages of the body come into play to articulate the stories of those inter-generational chains of memory? How does the performance of embodied knowledge transform us and the space around us? What humble and active role can these gestures play in transforming infrastructures and reimagining social conditions? Confronting the violent material and psychic fragmentation inherited from colonial modernity, Crossings engages with the complex archival practices of remembering and grounding that happen in the body.

Aiming at inhabiting archives collectively, intersubjectively and in enlivening ways, Crossings is a series of encounters that opens up permeable formats to civic engagement and diasporic memory. Crossings # 2 is dedicated to feminist inter-generational traces, resistance and migrant knowledges and the politics of the body –in readings, performances, social displays and food-sharing.

Crossings #2

Archive Berlin

Friday, September 16, 2022
13.30–19.00

How do vital forms, such as plants and water worlds, archive stories? What role do they play in political struggles and in reimagining society? How can those stories defy oblivion, alienation and objectification? Confronting the violent material and psychic fragmentation inherited from colonial modernity and the damage of its ongoing extractivism, Crossings engages with multiple archival practices and acts of remembering.

Crossings establishes spaces to traverse knowledge divisions, rehearse forms of togetherness and engage with complex consciousness. Driven by a genealogy of feminist thinkers, these spaces recall M. Jacqui Alexander’s pedagogies of crossings that remembers the fragmented stories of the diasporic experience that still yearn to be told and pine for wholeness in the midst of dismembered life. They also invoke Gloría Anzaldúa’s strategy of crossings as the experiences of actively going beyond those (national) boundaries and the consequent diversification of consciousness and knowledge.

Crossings is part of Archive’s research stream (re)memberings and (re)groundings.

Sunday, June 12, 2022
3–10 pm
HKW riverbanks and roof terrace
Full program

Vulnerable Archives
On silenced archives
and dissenting views
Savvy Contemporary
Invocations
17–18.09.2021
Archives – the fragile, vulnerable ones we are addressing here – are not silent per se. They do have a voice, but one that can be silenced. They do have a voice, but one whose potent airing might not be listened to. In this project – initiated by Savvy Contemporary – we collaborate with archives and organizations that engage in strategies of alternative history writing, dissent, self-organization, and participation via practical solidarity. The project Vulnerable Archives understands vulnerability as a method, with the potential of continuous recreative sources of knowledge.
Since 2020, the work of Vulnerable Archives has been taking place in Germany with research partners and communities in Turkey, Italy, and France. The aims of the project is to build dialogues among the communities that have been silenced and denied from archival practices in order to make visible the overlooked efforts and unconventional ways of storing collective memories.
In the frame of the Invocations taking place on September 17th and 18th – whose aim is to enhance archival networks and infrastructures through workshops, readings, discussions, performances, screenings and more – Archive Berlin will introduce a body of materials tracing feminists publishing practices in Turkey and its diaspora as part of Archive Inventory and a performance by Muna Mussie staging the archaeology of one’s body, a corporeal archive, repository of historical practices, fragments, and traces.

Changes in Direction – A Journal
Digital book launch

10.04.2021

Changes in Direction – a Journal provides multivocal and transnational African-European statements to current decoloniality debates from different perspectives. The Finnish-German artist Laura Horelli engages with the traumatic and complex histories of colonialism and international solidarity between East Germany, Finland and Namibia, staging micro-historical interventions in public spaces. Her films transform the archive into a space – and publication – of reflective engagement. The artist’s compilation of research, interviews and discussions in this bilingual German-English volume are enriched by contributions by the Namibian performance artist Nashilongweshipwe Mushaandja, the German curator-theorist Doreen Mende and the Finnish writer Olli Löytty. Initially an exhibition project and film screenings shown in Berlin, Freiburg i. Br., Malmö, Helsinki and Windhoek, Horelli and the curator Heidi Brunnschweiler put together a volume that celebrates and critically reflects on art as a process.

 

Following the screening of Laura Horelli’s works Namibia Today, Interviews, and Newstime which offered an insight into Horelli’s practice an online gathering was held to discuss the publication. At the online gathering curator Heidi Brunnschweiler introduced the project, while Laura Horelli spoke about the structure of the publication and referred to the works featured. Nashilongweshipwe Mushaanja discussed his text “’Making Love’: Solidarity in Decolonial Times” and Doreen Mende talked about her contribution “The Image-Complex of Modernity’s Grandchildren”.

 

About the speakers

Heidi Brunnschweiler

HEIDI BRUNNSCHWEILER is a Swiss curator, art scholar and art critic. She has conducted scholarly and curatorial activities in Switzerland and the UK. Since 2014 she has been the Head of Visual Arts and a curator of Galerie für Gegenwartskunst, E-WERK, Freiburg i. Br. She has curated numerous exhibitions, among others by Jorinde Voigt, Jananne Al-Ani, Theo Eshetu, Natasha A. Kelly, Sven Johne, Laura Horelli and Jaki Irvine. In her dissertation, she examined the significance of the photographic in the work of Christian Boltanski. As an editor she published among others Futures of the Past, Annette Amberg, Asier Mendizábal, Yelena Popova in Dialogue (2013) and Perpetually Transient, Anahita Razmi, Basim Magdy, Florian Graf, Bernd Behr (2015).

Laura Horelli

LAURA HORELLI is a visual artist and filmmaker interested in representations and mediations of the past taking a micro-historical approach. Her work has been shown at numerous exhibitions and festivals internationally. Her films and video installations include Newstime (2019); Namibia Today (2018); Jokinen (2016); A Letter to Mother (2013); The Terrace (2011); Haukka-pala (2009); You Go Where You’re Sent (2003); Helsinki Shipyard / Port San Juan (2003). Her previous publications are Laura Horelli: interviews, Diaries,Reports (2006) and Laura Horelli: n.b.k. Ausstellungen Band 12 (2012). Horelli was born in Helsinki, grew up partly in Nairobi and London and lives in Berlin since 2001.

Doreen Mende

DOREEN MENDE, a curator, researcher, and theorist, is currently professor of Curatorial/Politics and director of the CCC Research Master and PhD Forum at the Geneva University of Art and Design (HEAD). In 2015, she founded the Harun Farocki Institute in Berlin with Tom Holert and Volker Pantenburg. Her projects include Hamhŭngs Zwei Waisen (Für Konrad Püschel) (2018–2019) in the context of bauhaus imaginista in Moscow, Berlin, Bern and Istanbul; Navigation Beyond Vision (2019– 2020) with the Harun Farocki Institute and e-flux Journal at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; The Undutiful Daughter’s Concept of Archival Metabolism (2018) for e-flux Journal. Her work has also been published, among others, by Sternberg Press and in the Oxford Handbook for Communist Visual Cultures (2020). Mende is the initiator of the research project Decolonizing Socialism, Entangled Internationalism, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (2019–2023). She lives in Berlin and works in Geneva.

Nashilongweshipwe Mushaandja

NASHILONGWESHIPWE MUSHAANDJA is a performer, educator and writer with practice and research interests embodied in spatial archives and in movement formation. Mushaandja is also a PhD artist at the Centre for Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies at the University of Cape Town studying Queer Praxis in Oudano Archives. His recent performance Dance of the Rubber Tree is a cross-disciplinary critical queer intervention in museums, theatre and archives in Germany, Switzerland, South Africa, Cameroon and Namibia. He is also involved in curative projects on public learning and culture, such as the John Muafangejo Season (2016– 2017); Operation Odalate Naiteke (2018–2020) and Owela Festival (2019).

Mes nouveaux plafonds
My new ceilings
A talk with Georges Senga

Join us for a talk introducing Georges Senga’s research in Rome, disclosing his researches and residences in Europe and Congo and his active involvement in the establishment of Picha / Lubumbashi Biennale. His activism as an artist and as a cultural producer will be highlighted in dialogue with the invited speakers, active supporters in his research at different stages, who will reflect upon the local/global dialectics of their institutions and their role in the trajectories of artists who articulates projects across different regions of the world. Continuing this conversation Archive will publish the artist’s book Comment un petit chasseur païen devient prêtre catholique in 2022.

Supported by the Embassy and Consulate General of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. In partnership with ArtHub.

Mes nouveau plafonds is the title of one of the first photographic series conceived by artist Georges Senga (Lubumbashi, RDC, 1983, based in the Netherlands). The series was focused on the ceilings of family houses that Senga photographed in his home city Lubumbashi, second city of the Democratic Republic of Congo and capital of the rich minerary Province of Katanga. The work is a survey on the way people inhabit and experience daily life in the city and a way to narrate the massive economical and social transformations of the last decades. The photographic work of Georges Senga is based on a close topographic research of Lubumbashi, where he started as a photographer after some photography workshops and after the participation in the first Lubumbashi Biennale (organized by artists organization Picha and curated by Simon Njami in 2008).
Georges Senga is 2020–21 fellow at Villa Medici, French Academy in Rome, to develop his last project, Comment un petit chasseur païen devient prêtre catholique (How a little pagan hunter becomes a Catholic priest), conceived as an experimental editorial object which mixes documentation, archival material, original pictures and literary fiction to narrate the story of Bonaventure Manono, a Catholic priest who left in the 50’s his village in the outskirts of Lubumbashi to become a Jesuit priest in Rome, and his travels between Africa and Europe in the moment of decolonization.

Where is Cinema?
November 15, 2019

Just before Wolf opened its doors for the first time, a curious cinema soulmate, artist Anouk de Clercq, stepped into our raw space and did an interview with us. Over the years, we had a great many conversations about cinema and cultural spaces and utopias and we can‘t wait to help celebrate the launch of this labour of love book, alongside some rare and beautiful 16mm films. Thank you Anouk for this exciting investigation into Kino in all its current and future forms from around the world.

– Where is Cinema? –
This book is compiled of portraits of film initiatives from around the world, interwoven with conversations with adventurers who have rebooted movie theatres or built them up from the ground, in the hope that it can be an inspiring compendium for future cinema builders, filmmakers, film curators and film lovers.

Anouk De Clercq in conversation with Verena von Stackelberg, Ana López Ortego and Daniel Bejarano, Ilona Jurkonytė and Ugnė Marija Andrijauskaitė, Adam Pugh, Thomas Liu and Silja Espolin Johnson, Erika Balsom, Beatrice Gibson, María Palacios Cruz and Ben Rivers, Heather Lane and Mia Ferm.

– Anouk De Clercq –
Anouk De Clercq explores the potential of audiovisual language to create possible worlds. She is interested in what lies behind ‘reality’ or in between the visible and the imaginary.

She has received several awards, including the Illy Prize at Art Brussels in 2005 and a Prix Ars Electronica Honorary Mention in 2014. Her work has been shown in Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, MAXXI, Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Berlinale, Ars Electronica, among others.

Anouk De Clercq is affiliated to the School of Arts University College Ghent as an artistic researcher. She is a founding member of Auguste Orts and is represented by Gallery Sofie Van de Velde.

A new banner for TIER & a new publication with Archive Books
A double event at TIER & Archive Books@Arkaoda

Thursday, October 31st, 2019

Part 1: 19.00 – 21.00
The Institute for Endotic Research (TIER)
Donaustr. 84
12043 Berlin

Part 2: 21.00 – 24.00
Archive Books@Arkaoda
Karl-Marx Platz 16
12043 Berlin/Germany

1. Editing Spaces – Discoteca Flaming Star
A Tier-Banner (or a new banner for TIER) and the screening of a collection of funny and glam and sexy and sad short films by Discoteca Flaming Star, made between 2002 and 2019.
The Institute for Endotic Research (TIER)
Donaustr. 84
12043 Berlin
Editing Spaces
One of the meanings of the word publication is to make something public. If the relations between local and global are regarded as a text that can be read through contemporary art practices, a pertinent tactic would be to substitute the idea of exhibition with publication. This means to understand exhibitions as narrative machines, as expanded books that can also unfold a set of other possibilities such as cross-temporal approaches, choreography of bodies moving through the extensive idea of text and support structures.
The work of the artists/curators invited to Editing Space develops from translations from texts to installations, from transitions between the written and the performative.
With: Discoteca Flaming Star, Alicia Kopf, Josep Maynou, Mattin and Laura Vallés
Supported by the program PICE of Acción Cultural Española
2. Sticky Stage – A Book as Evidence & Script for Future Performances
The book on the dance-floor of Arkaoda, surrounded by the films and the soundtrack from Sticky Stage. Starring – Discoteca Flaming Star, Archive Books, friends and guests.
Music by DJ Sara Pereira
Arkaoda
Karl-Marx Platz 16
12043 Berlin/Germany
Sticky Stage is an installation and a performance. It’s a rehearsal situation, carried by live music, including poems, songs, films and texts. Repetition of the songs. Repetition of the films. Reappearance of the very same and the familiar with difference, unfolding a space of strength and fragility. Sticky Stage is a temporary space within a dystopian landscape in which to take up our fatigue and our dreams in order to approach a tender imagination.
Sticky Stage is a lullabye and a dirge, a funeral and a birth.
Who will guard our dreams?
This book gives evidence to Sticky Stage, specified on the basis of the case study at DISTRICT in Berlin. It is a path for future performances.
This book is an archive of the performance and a documentation of what will be.