2020
non-site/event museum
> documentation-speculative fiction-worldling
Emily WeltherThe non-site/event museum is an online archive of the non-site/event, an imaginary gathering of artworks and artists. The non-site/event was imagined as a confluence of the festival Take it Bend it or Leave it, which took place in the Netherlands, and the artistic residency I was doing at Casa Bicho, in the Brazilian Amazon, during the fall 2020.
The non-site/event museum is constantly being (re)created by Utropyka and by each viewer's particular gaze. The process of curating the content of the museum has been an act of reimagining and recontextualizing works by artists Isabella Arboleda, Digz, Eryfili Drakopoulou, Cecilie Fang, Gustavo Tomé Garcia, Lucas Koester, Antrianna Moutoula, Giovanna Chiara Pasini, Maria Pisiou, Foivi Psevdou, Ana Luisa Brito Ribeiro, Peim van der Sloot, and Ella Tighe. It has been a process of transforming the documentation of works presented in the festival Take it Bend it or Leave it, that took place in Arnhem in 2020 in the frame of the Home of Performance Practices master program at ArtEZ University of the Arts. The (non)original documentation was produced by Anushka Nair, Emily Welther, Korina Kordova, Eryfili Drakopoulou, Jessica Renfro and Barbara Lehtna.
Through this process of transformation, the reimagined works were also transposed to an alternative reality, the non-site/event. The non-site/event has been happening forever between Arnhem and the Amazon. The non-site/event museum is also located between these places, as well as right here. To get there/here you can take a boat, get a ride with the Anaconda, go through the dark forest, follow the traces, run with the Jaguar.
The documentation material that consists the permanent collection of the non site/event museum was curated and transformed through Utropyka's Amazonizing Practices, informed by Amazonian mythologies, cosmologies and perspectives on the body, humanity and environment. The Amazonizing Practices research is a PORTAL, a ritual of indefinite duration and no structure, where Utropyka attempts to separate herself/themselves from what is familiar (as in the first phase of a ritual, according to Victor Turner). Amazonizing is a practice for re-enchanting the planet.
The Amazonizing Practices invite extra-human beings — beings in the convergence of the pre and the post (historical) humans — to choreographic experiences of ‘embedded and embodied carnal empiricism’ (Braidotti). These experiences/methods account for the event’s location in terms of space — (non)fictional geo-political or ecological dimension — and time — memory, implanted memories, constructed memories, genealogical dimension and bodily fictions (Ibid. translated/amazonized by Utropyka). To Amazonize is to awaken the ‘vibrancy of matter’ (Bennett), it is to see the intelligence of matter to act and self-organize. To Amazonize is to summon immanence. Just like in the anthropophagic act of consuming the body of the deceased in order to acquire her/their qualities. From an anthropophagic perspective, the act of eating a corpse is an act of hyper-subjectification, rather than objectification; it is a becoming (Viveiros de Castro). The cannibal metaphysics locates knowledge and meaning-making in the material world.
Taking the Amazonizing Practices as lenses to digest the material available from the festival Take it Bend it or Leave it, Utropyka created the non/site event museum. Utropyka is interested in approximation, foreign worlds, ancestrality and epistemic disobedience. She/they are interested in the realm of possibilities, rather than probabilities. What else could the work of each artist become in the context of a festival where artists investigate the givens and relationality from the perspective of the selves which people the Forest?
Taking the virtual platform as a skeleton, Utropyka treats the documentation material as flesh, as a Forest. Due to the fractal quality of the (To) Forest practice, there is a number of actions which may activate it: observing, zooming in, zooming out, cropping, reproducing, multiplying, displacing and juxtaposing. Through such actions Utropyka activates bodies (setting them in motion), animates matter, transforms images. Finally, To Forest enables Utropyka to de/re/form existing forms and imagine, speculate, suggest and decide what the newly established forms could be-become".
Link: non site/event museum
*PLEASE DO NOT SEE IT ON YOUR PHONE*