Sound Leaks

Since the pandemic where interactions with others have been limited to endless zoom meetings and virtual gatherings, I am thinking about ways to challenge the formality and expectation of artistic community and production. How can spoken words as a medium offer a message to decentralization of the structure of the art world? Is it possible to speak about the issues if I don’t know the vocabulary, how to speak it with a language that is not mine? Matthew Salesses reminds us that writing standards are not neutral, that expectations belong to an audience whose priorities we can choose to reject: Why, when the protagonist faces the world, does she need to win, lose, or draw? This is a Western idea of conflict. What if she understands herself as a part of that world, that world as a part of herself? What if she simply continues to live?

In Sound Leaks, I recreated and arranged elements from an elevator as a stage for my performance. The performance is part of my current on-going work that examines voices and transit(lat)ions in our ever-shifting world. Elevator as a transitional space reminds me of public transportation. People are neither at the destination nor the origin, nobody wants to be in an elevator forever. It is an extremely public space full of strangers but at the same time, we are squeezed tightly in the cube feeling the intimacy from eavesdropping and other’s odors. In the video, I perform notes meandering on this inherent tension between public and private and its extension, with spoken poetry and experimental uses of language.

Amiko Li is a visual artist who works across photography, text, film, and performance. His works take an aleatoric approach to the nuances in the cultural system, and the ethics of language and representation, through reenactment, exchange and mistranslation. 

Recent exhibitions and projects include UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, China; Abrons Arts Center, New York; LeRoy Neiman Gallery at Columbia University, New York; Anthology Film Archive, New York; Dodd Galleries at the University of Georgia; Ulster Museum, Ireland; Thorvald Meyers 51, Norway; and Flat Earth Film Festival, Iceland. Publications include Adbusters, American Chordata, Artforum, Esquire Russia, Juxtapoz, The New Yorker, T Magazine, and Zeit. Li has been awarded fellowships and residencies from Royal Ulster Academy, United Kingdom; Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, Germany; Triangle Arts Association, New York; and Philadelphia Photo Arts Center. 

VIDROS DE TEMPO part I. Is a play between words and worlds, times and mirrors. Those are the characters of this reflection on what does future and center mean – or don’t. Through the visuality and philosophy of the mirrors present inside of a laser machine, I start to trace ideas about infinity and optical illusions, which are also social illusions. An entity, a ghost, who once told me a story about time, appears in this world to bring it’s magical words. They echo through the space of sands, and seas.

biarritzzz is an interdisciplinary artist who moves between the music and party scene and contemporary art, using the internet language to disseminate her ideas. Through sophisticated irony, biarritzzz tackles serious issues around race, gender and identity by mixing video art, pop culture and aesthetics of the internet and its interfaces, platforms, mechanisms. By declaring herself not an Afrofuturist, she rejects the North American term to understand the complexities of her indigenous heritage, seeking new ways to attribute the reality in which her people actually find themselves: a complex that has never been binary, dualistic, linear or either straight. biarritzzz has been active in the Brazilian art scene since 2013. 

biarritzzz’s recent projects include The Scalability Project, A.I.R. Gallery, New York (2021); Convergências, Goethe Institute Porto Alegre (2020); 9:16, N menos 1, Estadio El Campin, Bogota (2020); Digital Legacies, Black Woman’s Museum, Baltimore (2020); Os dias antes da quebra, Pivô Satélte (2020);  Si Vienen Por la Mañana.., Interior 2.1, Guadalajara (2019); The Wrong Biennale: Epicentre, Centre del Carme Cultura Contemporània CCCC, Valência (2019). 

wī(ə)rləs 

Using the phonetic spelling of Wireless graphically, the project begins as a verbal disarticulation of the word to generate reflections on the processes of communication at a distance, in order to rethink the transmission of knowledge and information of the present from a decentralised perspective. 

The project consists of a CGI (computer generated image) video that composes a narrative based on the variations of the traditional design of the feather fan. In the video-rendering, different movements occur that alter the function in a parallel reality, focusing on the spiritual in the movements of each scene that resemble rituals with the wind. The sound was made specifically for the video, in an experimental way, using real feathers and a microphone. The result is a series of sounds of different intensities generated by movement and fanning, which alludes to the way birds communicate with each other through their wings. The objects are modulators of waves that generate a communication that transcends the human. 

I am interested in the appellations we give to some objects over time as part of a past history, and in this sense I conceive of the workings of wireless devices which store, share and link information. This project is thought as a kind of deprogramming, from the digital to the analogue, as a reflection on the speculative function of certain atavistic objects, such as the designs of feather fans from the Puriscal area in Costa Rica. 

These fans are loaded with stories which I relate to my family, which preserves traditions of indigenous heritage whose origins and meanings, however, are largely unknown. Thus, different narratives (re)constitute the objects and their functions. This allows me to reflect on a world where knowledge and information can be transferred from natural and spiritual links as a way of understanding the present. 

I make use of this design, which is made by peasant and indigenous communities to be used for cleaning grains and seeds but which enables other functions beyond the instrumental-presentist. I thus reimagine the object as a living archive that, in view of an open future, stores diverse knowledge forms and gives rise to a multiplicity of uses and symbolic orders. 

Christian Salablanca Diaz’s artistic research processes are influenced by myths and narratives that arise from family encounters with ancestral communities. He uses stories from oral tradition that explain different ancient and symbolic knowledge through narration to develop his installations, sculptures, drawings and performance.

Salablanca  Diaz received a degree in Arts and Visual Communication from Universidad Nacional de Costa Rica, with a Cum Laude in Sculpture. He has had recent solo shows at Sagrada Mercancía (Santiago, Chile), and Kiosko Galería, both in 2019, and at Valenzuela Klenner Galería (Bogotá, Colombia) in 2018. He has participated in numerous groups shows at institutions such as  Museum Mestni Muzej Ljubljana (Eslovenia), Museo Nacional Thyssen Bornemisza TBA21 (Madrid), Museo de Arte Contemporanéo de Panamá (Panama), Kunsthalle am Hamburger Platz (Berlin, Germany), Gasworks (London, UK), and Museo de arte Moderno de Medellín (Medellín, Colombia), among others. 

I Used To Play In Bands Now I Do This Solo (I Don’t Need Bands I Just Need You Baby) -Teaser #1

Decentralization of information

The seemingly free access to apparent decentralized information therefore ‘decentralized’ access to the truth through the internet has resulted in a tendency to represent whatever agenda one represents as a human being living in the 21st Century in places of the world such as Mexico and United States of America through a very extremist manner. In this way the apparent decentralization of information which the the internet promised to anyone with access to the tool has naturally shifted into what almost appears to be a lack of what in the beginning we thought we had finally had gained access to: the actual truth.

With so much truth how could truth actually unveil itself in front of us? Has abundance of information become the blinding spot that humans before the internet era also had to deal with through a lack of information access? What is the future of information? What is the future of truth(s)? Is more information the access to the truth? Is the truth real? Is the truth useful? Is the truth true? What is left after this? Is faith the blockchain that has sustained the truth throughout all human history? Will faith continue to be the support of the truth no matter how much decentralized access to information one could possibly get? Faith in what? Is faith useful?Is faith learned? Is any new discovery a materialization of human faith? Faith in what?

Edgar Allan Rodriguez Castillo, also known as Edgar Alan GoPro, is a video artist from Mexico City. For the last year and a half, GoPro has been working on his feature film, “I Used To Play In Bands Now I Do This Solo (I Don’t Need Bands I Just Need You Baby),” which follows a group of characters on a psychedelic video game quest and encounters a number of futurist characters on the way. The inevitable fictional characteristic product of documenting immoderate and unrestricted human beings together fabricates what they call “Sci-Fi/Documentary” and magic realism. 

Rodriguez Castillo has a BFA in Philosophy from Universidad lberoamericana and a BFA from the School of Visual Arts of New York with a Suzanne Anker BFA Grant for Exceptional Achievement. Recent solo exhibitions include Spring Break Art Show (2020). Notable groups shows include Colegio de Desextincion, Mexico City, Mexico (2020); The Wrong New Digital Art Biennale, Mexico City, Mexico (2019); De:Formal Gallery, on line (2020); The Living Gallery, New York, NY (2019); The Spectacle Theatre, New York, NY (2018); Can’t Complain Gallery, Ontario, Canada (2018); and Augurio Mezcal, Mexico City, Mexico (2017).

Gabriella Torres-Ferrer, Insufficient Browsing, 2021. Moving mural with sound, 6:26″

As part of the ongoing series Isn’t the World Just a Great Big Pyramid Scheme, Insufficient Browsing dwells on our degrees of embeddedness on earth’s digital double, and its continuous tension with our efforts to achieve equality. It addresses decentralised and unregulated ecologies of value creation surrounding data in the digital space. It ponders on the complexity of the personal data economy, the feedback loops involved in this economy; how our data reshapes the internet. Our increasingly networked world brings both harsher forms of domination, and possibilities for new struggles for liberation.

Soundscape made in collaboration with Enityaset Rodríguez Santos

Gabriella Torres-Ferrer is an artist whose work considers futurability, new digital epistemologies and subverting hegemonic narratives; power dynamics and means of exchange and production in a globalized networked society. Their interdisciplinary practice integrates new media, installation, video, web-based interventions, among other experimentations.
Torres-Ferrer has exhibited at The Wrong New Digital Art Biennale online and offline in São Paulo, Mexico City, San Juan and Santo Domingo; A.I.R. feminist collective, New York; Phillip Martin, Los Angeles; Curro, Guadalajara; Gianni Manhattan, Vienna; Embajada, San Juan; Priska Pasquer, Cologne, Germany. They are a 2020-2021 recipient of the Akademie Schloss Solitude Artist-in-Residence fellowship and received a guest artist, honorary mention at CERN Collide, Geneve, Switzerland.

(Zero, Zero)

(0,0) is the origin on a graph with Intimacy and Transparency as the X and Y-axes respectively. This point describes a relationship with neutral attachment and median knowledge, the place at which the majority of human relationships begin. At the center of the graph lies the controlling body, the sole gravitational force keeping its surrounding bodies tethered.  

(Zero, Zero) makes visual the centralized organization of human relationships by algorithm. In the Digital Age, what it means to be friends,  family, and lovers has been completely re-defined. In handing over our data to a select few—a technological oligarchy—we have forfeited our control over these definitions, and as a result our control over the experience itself. The line between in-person and online interface blurs, and chance encounters all but cease to exist. 

Georgica Pettus makes time-based media. She is interested in the sacred and the ceremonial as a means by which she can preserve the temporal. Her work is essentially formless, with story-telling at its core. Stories endure; what is not material can not decompose. Neither additive nor subtractive, her process is adaptive. Her aim is to make nothing about something. 

Pettus has a BA in Visual Arts and Art History from Barnard College of Columbia University. Recent solo exhibitions include A.I.R Gallery New York, NY (2020). Notable group exhibitions include Hesse Flatow, New York, NY (2021); Spring Break Art Show, New York, NY (2020); New Art City, New York, NY (2020); De:Formal Gallery, Online (2019) ; Mary Gates Gallery, New York, NY (2019); Louise McCagg Gallery, New York, NY (2019); and forthcoming participation at Love Club, New York, NY (2021). She is currently pursuing an MFA from Oxford University. 

Haley Elizabeth Anderson is a filmmaker, writer, and visual artist from Houston, Texas. She currently attends New York University’s Graduate Film Program as a Dean’s Fellow.  With roots across the Gulf and a background in playwriting and poetry, her work explores coming-of-age experiences and the class divide in the American South. Before moving to New York, Haley worked in casting where she street cast several feature length projects.

Toil 

Toil tells a story of a woman, a woman who has dedicated her life to activism and the liberation of people and of her own people. Some might even call her a feminist. The story looks at how the world and its systems have always deterred women, often to the point of surrender. 

As women, we frequently get to a point that we think that the work is done, but it infact, it has just begun. This story takes inspiration from activists such as Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, Josina Machel, women of the 32 Battalion and Angolan women during the civil war and post-war in Angola. These women sowed the seeds but never ate the fruits of their labour, for example, Josina Machel died before she saw a liberated Mozambique. In the same vein, women of the 32  Battalion faced many hardships historically which continue to creep into the present. In another instance, women of post war angola face disproportionate economic inequality, misogyny and inequality at large. Winnie Madikizela-Mandela saw a ‘free’ South Africa but her name was tarnished. 

In moving towards a decentralised world, we must be conscious of historical injustices towards women who fought for the freedoms that we have today and not perpetuate a culture of disempowerment. Women who fight, who stand up to injustices and inequalities should be able to reap the victories of the seeds that they sowed.

Helena Uambembe was born in Pomfret, South Africa to Angolan parents who fled the civil war. Her father was a soldier in the 32 Battalion, a military unit within the South African Defence Force made up primarily of black Angolan men. The 32 Battalion, Pomfret, and the artist’s Angolan heritage are dominant themes in Uambembe’s work, in which she explores narratives surrounding history and place, interweaving connected symbols and archival material. Uambembe currently lives and works between Johannesburg and Pretoria. 

Uambembe was one of Bag Factory’s three 2019 David Koloane Award winners. In addition to her own practice, Uambembe is a member of the collective Kutala Chopeto, alongside partner Teresa Kutala Firmino. Uambembe has recently presented PIM PAM PUM, a new body of installation work looking at childhood and memory in the landscape of Pomfret, at the NWU Gallery (North West University) on the Potchefstroom Campus. 

Untitled 

This video, concretely and metaphorically, illustrates how Stories from the Room, a long-term participatory project of mine, builds a text-based archive that travels to different localities in a time of global isolation. Since 2020, the growing archive collects personal writings responding to lived experiences of the “new normal” from across continents. I was eager to learn whether the sense of collectiveness we shared was an illusion?

Stories from the Room rethinks the gap between on and offline worlds as a new territory that defines questions and challenges the distance between sociality and solidarity. Responding to a new world where the notion of universality can not only be impossible but also dangerous, I embraced an open structure in this work, a project dedicated to connecting and gathering individuals from different corners of the world, to welcome flexibility and diversity. Even though this openness may also imply greater possibilities for inconsistency, accidents, or failure, I still believe this is one way to acknowledge distance and differences among us, which is a prerequisite for mutual respect and deeper understanding. That’s how I imagined where the future of art in a decentralized world should start.

Inherently, this project also proposes a new form of relationship between the artist, art institutions, and the audience by requesting equal contributions, mentally and physically, from all parties. Working collaboratively and remotely, this relationship, successful or not, becomes another focal point of the work.

Jasphy Zheng is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice explores topics including the inevitable failure of communication and the imagined collectiveness shared among individuals. With environmental installations, unannounced performance, ephemeral sculpture, and artist books, Zheng constructs situations as public interventions to raise our awareness of social and cultural environments in and out of the context of contemporary art. 

Zheng received a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design. Recent solo exhibitions include Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, China (2020); CCA Kitakyushu, Kitakyushu, Japan (2020). Notable group exhibitions include Para Site, Hong Kong (2021); HUA International, Beijing, China (2021); TarraWarra Museum of Art, Melbourne, Australia (2021).

We have stories for all the dark spaces inbetween 

We have stories for all the dark spaces inbetween considers the interrelation of data networks and Indigenous ways of knowing land and relation. The title comes comes from Aboriginal astronomy, where both the darkness and light of the night sky tell stories and inform our world. The expression invites us to consider networks of care, and how all things, not just the visible, need to be known and maintained to sustain us all.

These complex data networks are reflected in the management of communities and the land for which they are relation. Embedded within these knowledges are systems of care that reveal solutions to many of the worlds most urgent problems. These ancient data systems that have been perfected over millennia give a glimpse of the ways that Indigenous knowledges globally can lead a radical rethinking of responsibility and relation centred on sovereignty, respect and interconnection.

Indigenous knowledge systems on the continent now referred to as ‘Australia’ have been maintained through oral histories that trace back to the time when the world began, the oldest living continuous culture in the world that has been maintained through story, song, ceremony, land and people for over 100 000 years. Yet these systems of care have been violently degraded and disrespected in the centuries since colonial invasion brought capitalism and exploitation to our shores. Decentralising from the colonial violence wrought upon the land is the only way to restore our world.

Jazz Money is an award-winning poet of Wiradjuri heritage. Her practice centers around the written word while producing works that encompass installation, digital, film and print. Money is a trained filmmaker and also works as an arts worker, artist, educator and researcher, with a particular interest in working with First Nations artists and communities to realize digital projects. Through both her linguistic and filmic practices, Jazz’s fascination with technology, her innovative and expanding ideas on data sovereignty, Indigeneity on the net, and the possibilities to explore Indigenous futures and utopias create a vast and exciting platform to create new work.

In 2020 Jazz was awarded the David Unaipon Award from the State Library of Queensland and a First Nations Emerging Career Award from the Australian Council for the Arts. She has won numerous other awards and exhibited her work throughout Australia. Her debut book, how to make a basket, is forthcoming in 2021 from University of Queensland Press.

“Josiane M.H. Pozi’s piece Capture 03 0118 glimpses moments within the artist’s home – her sister, tucking herself into bed, or fantasising about her future family life; her mother, lamenting a messy kitchen, watching the news; herself, soaking in the bath.  These intimate scenes are both confined by and negotiated against complicated power structures.  From them grows a sense of desire and of necessity, and through these fragments of existence told through observation, conversation, music, dance, laughter, a sense of refusal is formulated.”

Josiane M.H. Pozi is an artist and filmmaker. She recently had her second solo show at Carlos/Ishikawa gallery London, UK (2021). Her first solo show, Pingey, was curated by Robert Snowden at Gandt Gallery New York in 2020. In 2019, she produced and screened work for South London Gallery in conjunction with Liz Johnson Artur’s exhibition If you know the beginning, the end is no trouble; for the group exhibition Unorganised Response at Auto Italia, London; and for the performance Lifetime in collaboration with musician Klein at Serpentine Galleries Park Nights, London.

Jota Mombaça is an interdisciplinary artist whose work derives from poetry, critical theory, and performance. In their highly political practice, sonic and visual words play an important role, relating to anti-colonial critique and gender disobedience. Mombaça defines themselves as a non-binary black bicha, born and raised in northeast Brazil. Bicha is traditionally a Brazilian slang word used against homosexual men. For the artist, it is important to reappropriate the term through this gesture of self-definition to highlight discrimination through social constructs and as a way of exploring how they want to present themselves as a person.

Mombaça is engaged in a constant investigation of the relationship between monstrosity and humanity, queer studies, de-colonial turns, political intersectionality, anti-colonial justice, redistribution of violence, visionary fictions, the end of the world and tensions among ethics, aesthetics, art and politics in the knowledge productions of the global south-of-the- south. Through performance, visionary fiction, and situational strategies of knowledge production, they intend to rehearse the end of the world as we know it and the figuration of what comes after we dislodge the Modern-Colonial subject off its podium. 

Mombaça has been included in such major exhibitions as the 32nd and the 34th São Paulo Biennial, the 10th Berlin Biennale and the 22nd Sydney Biennale. (Jota has not been in Documenta 14).

Stream is a video work and thought experiment in three parts. Part one is centred around a character named Bagong, who is derived from Javanese shadow puppetry known as Wayang. Presented as a digitally rendered avatar, Bagong is introduced to us in free fall, in the artist’s neighborhood of Parramatta (Dharug country,Sydney). Part two sees Bagong land in Dhir’s family home, and share a papaya with his mother, Sri. Part three takes on the format of a Twitch stream hosted by Bagong as a VTuber (virtual streamer). Bouncing between gaming worlds, Bagong and his friends muse on trust, cryptography and futures.

Original Soundtrack by Neil Cabatingan (Kuya Neil)
MUA by Nandini Dhir
Mother played by Sri W. Dhir
Additional footage and production by Chi Tran
Heinzbigred voiced by Max Wee
Zaccyboy101 voiced by Zachary Gough
RTX render by @scarpvfx
Additional gameplay footage of ‘Sonata in b minor for unity’ by Akil Ahamat
Made using: Adobe Suite, Discord, VRoid Studio, VSeeFace, VDraw, OBS Studio, No Man
Sky, Overwatch, NoClip.Website, Splice, Unity, Mixamo, YouTube
Stream was made on the unceded land, water and skies of the Dharug peoples.

Working with sculpture, video and internet objects, Kalanjay Dhir is interested in near-futurism and spirituality through mythological and speculative technologies. He has made work about rivers, games, space technology, sci-fi, myth, social media, Mountain Dew, urban development, progress and time. In his spare time he enjoys reading manga and imagining what things would look like if they were built with a secular devotion. 

Since graduating from Sydney College of the Arts in 2016, Dhir has presented solo exhibitions at Firstdraft, Peacock Gallery and Wentworth Point Community Centre and Library. In 2020, Dhir presented works at Next Wave Festival (online) and was the recipient of the Fauvette Loureiro Emerging Scholarship. Since 2017, Dhir has also worked from Parramatta Artists Studios and is a founding co-director of Pari, an artist-run space in Western Sydney. Dhir is currently developing new video works commissioned by Fairfield City Museum and Gallery and the Sydney Opera House. 

Rejaguarificacion

We believe in the speculative potential (alternative futures) of art to contribute to the decentralization of the world. In our work we seek to create new cosmologies and reconstruct lost or forgotten links with other beings/objects beyond the human world. Art in a decentralized world is that which maps other worlds, invisibilized but existing, and propitiates an ecosystem of knowledge. Our work calls for epistemic justice, recognizing knowledge and ways of inhabiting the world that have been excluded from scientific discourse, we also implement non-western technologies, understanding technology in an integral sense as a way of revealing and as the ability to connect different bodies. Art in a decentralized future will undoubtedly be recognized as technology. 

Lina Mazenett & Davi Quiroga have been working in Bogotá as a two-person collective for the past nine years. In their projects, they explore the interrelationship between organisms and the misnamed “resources” of our environment and how these relationships are appropriated and distributed by means of culture. They reflect on temporality, origin, and symbolism of some fundamental elements of the world economy, working with materials of fossil origin, such as tar, pitch, coal and a diversity of minerals to create works that connect humans with remote geological times. Their practice is inspired by a dialogue between mythology from Amazonian people and western science such as geology, astronomy, and economy, trying to reconnect ordinary and everyday elements with ancient knowledge and mythical time.

Recent solo shows include Consanguinity, La Cápsula, Zurich, (2021); Solo Show Art Dubai, Art Dubai, Dubai (2019); Desaparece una Cultura, Instituto de Visión gallery, Bogotá, (2018); Arbor Vitae, Botanical Garden, Bogotá; Astrum in Corpore, Fundación Flora ars+natur, Bogotá (2015), Imágenes Sedimentarias, MAMBO Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá, Bogotá (2014); Medusa, a Head Clothed in Night, Greatmore Studios, Cape Town (2013). Their work has been also featured in international group shows, such as at Pivô, São Paulo (2020) and Cristina Guerra Contemporary Art, Lisbon (2019).

Gowidja (After)

The western value system continues to govern Indigenous peoples, our knowledge and country in Australia.  A decentralised world can only exist in conjunction with the past and present time. 

Gowidja (After) undertakes a critical evaluation of centralised operational systems such as the governance and control of our cultural material in museums, galleries and collections, land management and extractive practices. Gowidja (After) presents a near and Indigenous-led future where all centralised governance and power has been dispersed outwards amongst Indigenous people and communities. In this future we have ownership of our cultural materials and objects, autonomy over our representation and agency to achieve our self-determinism. 

Moorina Bonini is a descendant of the Yorta Yorta Dhulunyagen family clan of Ulupna and the Yorta Yorta and Wurundjeri-Woiwurrung Briggs/McCrae family. Her works are informed by her experiences as an Aboriginal and Italian woman. Bonini’s practice is driven by a self-reflexive methodology that enables the reexamination of lived experiences that have influenced the construction of her cultural identity. In particular, Bonini uses video art as a means to experiment, translate, and reframe both personal and societal histories. By unsettling the narrative placed upon Aboriginal people as a result of colonization, Bonini’s practice is based within Indigenous Knowledge systems and brings this to the fore. As a young Yorta Yorta and Wurundjeri-Woiwurrung woman, Moorina is thinking of what we can learn from the past, which provides an interesting alternative when thinking about the construction of a decolonial future. 

Moorina holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from RMIT University and a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) from VCA. Her work has been exhibited within group shows and at various galleries such as Ballarat International Foto Biennale, Sydney Festival, Blak Dot Gallery, c3 Contemporary Art Space, SEVENTH Gallery, Koorie Heritage Trust and Brunswick Street Gallery. 

All Eyes On Me 

We are living in a technologically connected world stuck in an interlocking of systems. A world full of screens, sometimes white, sometimes black. And among all those complex systems, the Solar System is ruling our very existence. So basically the Sun is the key point. A godly principle giving light and life, but also bringing shadow and death. Yet we tend to forget this fact, and believe that planet Earth instead is the center, when it is peripheral.

I must begin by saying that I am an artist born black in a European country, from insular and continental descents, for whom images and words cannot be dissociated; and that the following reflections stem from this situation. And in regard to Art Histories, the western gaze has always tended to believe and act as if it was the foundation of them all, perceiving itself at the most central position.

So when I started to think about the meaning of the phrase: What is the future of art in a decentralized world? it appeared to me that the used terms were already kind of biased in themselves. I was in the coastal city of Dakar, in a very introspective state, and as far as my personal position was concerned (be it geographical, spiritual, professional, and sentimental), I knew that what was, and would be central to me could never be the same as for any other being. So what could possibly be a decentralized world?

In order to understand the term of decentralization, one must first talk about the center, and the place of things and beings. Because it is above all, always a matter of position.

As an artist, I have to be conscious of myself. It is through introspection and self questioning that I start my artistic process. It is also through elements and landscape observation that I find my inspiration.

The Sun. The sea. The windows. The puzzle. The architecture. The body. I see all of them as connecting surfaces, like screens. So in a metaphorical way, I tried to show these screens as possibilities to support a new way of creating centers and peripherals. A poetic way to talk about the relation between spiritual beliefs, and technological advances.

More than just an ode to contemplation, All Eyes On Me is talking about an endless loop between rising and setting. Of the sunset, but of the artistic inspiration too. And going through concepts of spiritual awakening and collective ecological awareness.

Naomi Lulendo’s works are materializations of an interest in the misappropriation of words, meanings, objects, and identity. Her work encompasses painting, sculpture, photography, installation, and performance. Using the concept of “play” as a tool to shape and create hybrid objects, images, and texts, she observes the individual and collective, social and political implications of human mobility and cultural encounters. In her work, Lulendo explores the notions of screen and surface, which constitute both receptacles and windows on social phenomena and individual experiences. She inventories symbols and images of various geographical spaces through which she observes their representations and their relations to fantasized territories, often qualified as exotic. The body, as an intimate and social space, is also at the heart of Naomi’s preoccupations as she confronts the collective imagination and the construction of identity. The artist’s works are impregnated with her biography, made up of dialogues between her Congolese and Guadeloupean origins and of living between France and Senegal.  

Lulendo is a graduate of the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-arts in Paris. In 2018, she participated in the raw académie 5, directed by artist otobong nkanga. Her work has notably been shown at Galerie 31project (paris); Galerie Allen (paris) in 2019; Palais des Beaux-Arts of Paris; the 13th edition of the Biennale d’art Contemporain de Dakar; and Galleria Continua (Boissy-le-Châtel) in 2016.

193824673_14795938408.mp4 (untitled), Paul Kolling, 2021

The video takes as its starting point the original idea and concepts of new, yet unreleased projects of terra0 (terra0 is an art work and research group centered around decentralized technologies built on the Ethereum network aiming to provide automated ecosystem resilience frameworks. It first appeared in 2016 with a concept paper describing how a forest could own itself. More info: www.terra0.org), and is set in an indeterminate future. It depicts the moment when a developer, who has spent their life working on the development of technologically enhanced and self-owning ecosystems, travels to the physical location of the first terra0 forest. It resembles an ordinary video livestream (e.g. Instagram) directed at an undefined audience. The visual world consists of trees that were created by biological growth algorithms and are therefore unique — they will appear again in upcoming projects of terra0 and thus ‘live on’ beyond this video.

Paul Kolling makes works about infrastructural and economic processes and their integration into environmental and social structures. His research into and (re-)appropriation of emerging technologies is rearranged to reveal new perspectives that can be obscured through complexity and rhetoric. The outcomes are technological systems, installations, and hybrid objects that strive to make complicated issues accessible. 

Paul is one third of terrao.org, a research group exploring the creation of hybrid ecosystems in the technosphere. His (other) projects range from objects and installation works for exhibits and galleries to publications, lectures and panel discussions. They have been presented and discussed at Ars Electronica, Biennale de Lyon, Drugo More, Furtherfield Gallery, Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof, Schinkel Pavillon, transmediale and Vienna Biennale (amongst others). He is a 2021 BPA (Berlin Program for Artists) participant. 

Eve and the Interface

Building from her experience developing a blockchain-based universal basic income protocol, Sarah Friend imagines a pluralistic community-currency utopia where there are many overlapping economic systems, each with its own heads up display. The protagonist, Eve, spends her days navigating this world accompanied by the Interface, a voice-activated virtual assistant that guides her as she switches constantly between these networks. In this world, there is no one way that money can exist or move, no one set of ideas about what is valuable – not even a standardized unit of measurement. 

One day Eve discovers an item that cannot be accessed via the Interface, and learns it has been blocked by someone who has mysterious powers seeming to reach through the entire pluriverse she inhabits. Curious and suspicious, she takes the first step of discovery, ending up suddenly stranded in an alien world.

Sarah Friend is an artist and software engineer who uses p2p web and blockchain technologies to address recent social and technological topics. She applies different scenarios of decentralization to redistribute wealth while engaging with digital communities to reimagine a fairer future. Her works range from browser-based experiences, to decentralized protocol art, p2p digital seed vaults, physical installations, and AR experiences. Friend reveals the potentials of the already existing decentralized protocols in disrupting the domination of the corporation and global players and engaging communities behind the web. In her playful and ironic interactive projects, she explores ways of overcoming surveillance systems and to establish new relationships between technologies and users.

Friend studied visual arts at the OCAD University, Toronto. She is on the advisory board and was formerly the smart contract lead for Circles UBI, a project which equalizes wealth distribution on the blockchain. She is also the founder and co-curator of the ongoing Ender Gallery, an artist residency taking place inside the game Minecraft. She is a participant in the Berlin Program for Artists, an alumni of Recurse Centre, and member of the organization of Our Networks, a conference on all aspects of the distributed web. Her work has been shown at many international venues. 

Kgolokwe Seperated Intersections

As an experiment in artistic and social decentralization, to create a future for sustainable art practice locally, we offer a solution that acknowledges the center while simultaneously looking at the area enclosed by the circle, and similarly, that which lies on the periphery. Through dialogue, we discuss our collective mission, to look to a future of art built on the ideals of a decolonized world. In so doing, we envision a space that insists on collaboration, self-reflection, and acknowledging our individual and cumulative privileges with radical solidarity.

In giving thought to the future of a decentralized art world, we look to our home in Botswana for stimulus. Kgolokwe: Separated Intersections is the premise upon which we propose the circular metaphor as a possible solution. ‘Kgolokwe’ is a Setswana word that can be used to describe a circle or sphere but is more accurately understood as a round thing.’ This speaks to a particular kind of cultural concept reflected in how we spatially organize ourselves locally that is linked to a circular geometry. By homing in on the circular intersections that characterize both rural and urban areas in Botswana, we consider the polysemic nature of public spaces that bring us together while simultaneously separating us.

The Botswana Pavilion was formed in May 2019 by four Batswana students at the Michaelis School of Fine Art: LegakwanaLeo Makgekgenene, Kim Karabo Makin, Thebe Phetogo, and Thero Makepe. The core team expanded within the same year to include Botswana-based artist Sade Shoalane as a core member. Concerned with the country’s creative development and artistic archive and influenced by the lack of Tswana representation in the international arts arena, the collective’s name alludes to the Venice Biennale, where Botswana is yet to participate.This lack of Tswana representation in art locally and internationally has stirred within the collective a need to support and validate young creatives from Botswana, in hopes to give rise to a new national creative identity. In so doing, the collective aspires to take full advantage of their creative potential and opportunity – amidst Botswana’s arguably naive creative economy, to grow symbiotically with international art contemporaries. By creating a platform for international visibility and art exchange, they hope to inspire a sustainable creative industry locally.

An Attempt to Connect

尝试连接

An Attempt to Connect is a performance work extracted from the working in progress sculpture. The sculpture parts during the performance were made of plaster, paper mush, wire, PVA glue, resin and silicone. By inserting the wire into the silicone tube, I completed the process of integrating sculpture parts from dispersed states into the whole.

In repetitive movements, the body cooperates with the materials of curved line, the materials with hard bone and soft limbs. The human body becomes a tool, a support, and an auxiliary equipment. And those fluctuated, tense, loose and restricted movements point to the wish to connect.

The Topic of Decentralization

When I attempted to understand the concrete things in the concept of decentralization, I perceived a lot of turbulent and interlaced lines. When the giant net radiated and infiltrated into our daily life, individuals might be refined into functional objects in the system.

An Attempt to Connect could be seemed as a model building for the abstract term of decentralization. At the same time, it is also contain the desire of telling an individual’s situation. In the performance, instead of the nationality, gender and identity of the body no longer be emphasized, it is the extremely simple action and the only purpose: connect. On the other hand, the experience of tension, excitement, anxiety and exhaustion of the performance also lead the body go back to daily life again.

Wang Yuyu’s practice revolves around the liminality of movement for the body and objects. She believes that the authenticity of everyday life can be expounded through somatic experiences. Her work explores how the sensual and physical level of experiences could be transformed through different methods, such as sculpture, installation, image, and performance, to discuss the relationship between the individual and the contemporary landscape of social life. Her practice is focused on the body’s participation in individual emotional expression and the possibility of narrative-weaving in a specific field. 

Wang graduated with an MFA in Sculpture from Slade School of Fine Art in 2016. Recent exhibitions include the solo show “Hook and Eye of Collar” (Antenna-tenna, Shanghai, 2021); and the group shows ”Fortune Exhibition of Li’s Family House” (White Space Beijing, 2021), “There” (Studio Gallery Shanghai, 2020), “Buddhist Youth: United Collective Indifference” (Goethe-Institut, Beijing, 2019), among others.