Curated program and workshop

As part of NOTYET Collective (Noëlle BuAbbud, Farzad Golghasemi, Abd Tammaa, Gabriela Valdespino and Lucas Kalmus) 

“Mine - a condition” frames a series of events conducted in and around a vacant pavillon on a central plaza in Bremen city center. The UMZU pavillon hosted the NOTYET Collective for a three week period to reside with 16 different events for free public access. Invited guests and the collective members offered workshops as well as days for screenings, readings, and listening sessions.

The program digs into the erosion of the city centers’ marketed function. Surrounded by vacant high rise buildings that used to host the desires of consumerism before being replaced by transshipment warehouses, the program’s critical engagement with extractive economies opens encounters with facetted signifiers of mining.

The collective curation has been informed by the individual notions of the members’ approaches to the topic. Lucas Kalmus’ workshop on Place-Weaving departs from an imaginary of vacant commercial zones becoming entangled in a process of commoning, which exposes them to ways of being mined for their parts and purposefulness. By shedding light on the fragmentary nature of permanent (anchored to the ground) buildings, even a screw of a gate and a grain in the mortar of a brick wall become focal points be questioned toward their next shape in the metabolism of matter.

Image translation (lifted from performative bitumen drawing on road to hand drawing on paper)

2x25m and variable dimensions

The ongoing collection and drawing series reverberates off the soft gaze on motion of manual labor employed in dienstleistung. Coreography cues in boiling tar tracing the waters seasonal change of state to ice through bursting asphalt. Leaving a thick seal to resist the pressure from below. The performative drawings in the collection are being done by anonymous road workers on construction sites spanning geographical contexts such as New York City, Washington DC, Catskills, Luxembourg, Strasbourg, Brussels, Antwerp, Berlin, Bremen among others.

Public program at 9th Sinop Biennale (Walk, reading)

‘Embracing shores of drifting’ emerged from and merged two strains of research: on the situationist movement with its inherent aim to examine and evade strong currents in the flows of urban maps of movement through practices of dérive (french for drift) and on the qualities of autopoietic, self-metabolizing and self-reproducing systems with its implications about adaptation and collaboration in the drift of biological evolution. 
 

The walk departed from Sinopale’s communal rotunda Hal to five different locations around the city of Sinop. Textfragments from Humberto Maturana and Guy Debord were provided and read together in English and Turkish.
 

The merge unravels in an exploration of the city as its own assemblage with organistic qualities while focusing on the negative space and cohesive spatial matrix all around the organs of the place. Participants found themselves stepping in the infamous minded gap usually reserved for sedimentation to settle in bare toleration corridors throughout the urban fabric of shared space and private property. 

Installation in public space (Steel scaffolding tubes, clutches, feet)

3x7x5m and variable dimensions

The five meter tall sculpture resembles the permeable, extracellular matrix of tissue. The structure acts as an amorphous body in its formation and decay at the same moment. It gathers material aesthetics from modular maintenance structures designed for temporary support in environments striving for permanence.
 

The installation consists of two sculptures: one located in the floodplains of the Weser and the other beside the Werdersee lake in an imaginary line bridging Theater Bremen with the former water tower ‘Umgedrehte Kommode’ to the Schwankhalle theatre providing a direct link between the city’s provision with water by the water tower for the needs of the collective body (formerly by gravity when the water tower was the highest building) and the city’s provision with art and culture for the needs of the collective mind. The work was installed for the Out Now! performing arts festival by Schwankhalle. In nearness to the river Weser with its tidal rise of up to 4 m on a regular basis, the sculpture is partly submerged in water whilst the river reaches its floodplain.