Gatherings to Disappear
detailed program 2024
👇🏻 scroll down for program descriptions and bios
November 28 (Thursday) evening
18.30-21.00 - opening ceremony at SKH Dans
🌳 Murmurs of Gauze (A 1000 fanfares) with Roberto N Peyre
👄 Words of Welcome with the symposium team
🤖 Mobilized with Gabriel Widing
November 29 (Friday) daytime
13.00-18.00 - daytime gatherings I. at SKH Dans
🦴 Around the Vultures with Catalina Insignares
🔥 Think, Dream, Create, Pray Beyond the Ordinary with EHS CTEC
✳️ Gathering Session I. with presenters and symposium team
November 29 (Friday) evening
19.30-22.30 - at The Church of St. Peter and St. Sigfrid
🌰 Julian of Norwich reading night with Judith Kiros
🥁 music by Siri Anna Flensburg and Áron Birtalan
November 30 (Saturday) daytime
10.30-18.00 - daytime gatherings II. at SKH Dans
👼 The Choir of Not Knowing with Francis Patrick Brady
🪱 Becoming Earth with Tuva Hildebrand
🌪️ How to Disappear with Mariam Elnozahy
✳️ Gathering Session II. with presenters and symposium team
November 30 (Saturday) evening
21.00-late - closing party at STUDIO NYXXX
💃 😎 closing party artists TBA
𓁣 Nov 28th - THURSDAY
Opening Ceremony18.30-20.00 at SKH Dance
with Roberto N Peyre and the symposium team
🌳 Murmurs of Gauze (A 1000 fanfares)
opening performance Roberto N Peyre
A choreographical staging of the splicing n twinning at the threshold marking our entrance/departure the everyday yet to be remembered, in all its polyphonies of perversion.
Roberto N Peyre is a Swedish Artist of transatlantic heritage, based in Stockholm. He operates as an independent creator, educator, producer, curator and activist of fine art. Peyre's artistic work is a performative interdisciplinary practice that engages material cultures, choreographies, and recordings throughout intermedial installation, procession, and other interventions.
🪱 Words of Welcome
from the symposium team
ⲁⲛⲟⲕ ⲡⲉ ⲡϩⲱⲧⲣ̄ ⲙⲛ̄ ⲡⲃⲱⲗ ⲉⲃⲟⲗ
🤖 Mobilized – An Essay Pretending to be a Game
20.00-21.00 at SKH Dancewith Gabriel Widing
Mobilized is a participatory performance exploring the possibilities and challenges of the smartphone. Rather than asking you to turn it off when entering the theatre, we ask you to keep it ready for use. Your phone will be your interface to the piece. The format is based on simple instructions and choices that appear on your screen through text, images and sound. The instructions shape different situations and collective movements
🔴 Make sure to come with a charged phone!
Gabriel Widing is a theatre director and game designer, interested in performance, play and participation. His recent works include the mobile-based scenarios Ekstasis made with Nyxxx as well as Mobilized and Inferno Speeddate made with Nea Landin.
𓁣 Nov 29th - FRIDAY
🦴 Around the Vultures
13.00-15.30 at SKH Dance (Studio 16)hosted by Catalina Insignares
Connecting with invisible entities that are always with us and to which we constantly respond, in the way we move and resonate in space, more or less consciously. We'll put into practice ways of tending to these relationships through different modes of attention, to amplify our capacity to perceive. During the workshop, we'll be using touch practices, vocalization, deep listening exercises and collective oral poetry.
We'll practice letting the information that passes through the flesh and the imagination flow; letting different voices move through our throats. We'll touch a body to see with the seventh sense what it carries of the environment, of living and dead beings. The space of the workshop is one where the senses and humour will enable us to move affects that are sometimes perceived as negative.
Catalina Insignares is a Colombian choreographer and dancer based in Brussels. She’s interested in using the sensorial and fictional means of the body and touch to develop ways to communicate with the invisible. Her practice includes, among others, a duet danced with a participant over a few weeks (us as a useless duet—2015), a night reading addressed to sleeping bodies (useless land—2017), and sensory practices that listen to the connections we have with the dead (landscapes of the dead – 2019; to know the vultures so well—2022). She works always in collaboration and long-term associations.
🔥 Think, Dream, Create, Pray Beyond the Ordinary
16.00-17.00 at SKH Dance (Studio 11)hosted by EHS Center for Theology, Ecology and Culture (CTEC)
The Center for Theology, Ecology, and Culture (CTEC) is a small but lively interdisciplinary research centre at the Stockholm School of Theology (University College of Stockholm, EHS). CTEC’s purpose is to enact creative zones to explore and develop knowledge and action for a sustainable world. We collaborate with artists, activists, creative practitioners, eco theorists, ecologists, mystics, environmentally engaged churches and congregations. For the symposium, Petra Carlsson Redell & Dan Siedell from CTEC will guide us through an experience that explores how we might live, think, dream, create, and pray beyond the ordinary in the light of climate change.
✳️ Gathering Session I.
17.00-18.00 at SKH Dance (Studio 11)A gathering to close the day, to drift, speak, dream, repeat. Hosted by the symposium team, with presenters Roberto N Peyre, Catalina Insignares and the EHS CTEC.
🌰 Julian of Norwich reading night
19.30-22.30 at The Church of St. Peter and St. Sigfridintroduction by Judith Kiros
music by Siri Anna Flensburg and Áron Birtalan
Read a medieval mystic as it has never been read before! This event invites you to spend the evening, reading, listening, and drifting to the writings of the medieval English mystic and anchoress, Julian of Norwich. Her key work, the Revelations of Divine Love was written over a span of 20 years, following a series of visions she received on the 8th of May 1373 - and is now considered the first work in the English language written by a woman. Julian is also famous for committing to live the rest of her life as an anchoress - a religious ascetic who takes vows to remain permanently locked in their cell.
Julian's writings exemplify the very best Christian spiritual literature. With vivid and playful visionary language, Revelations… is a poetic powerhouse, attempting to reconcile the existence of sin and suffering with the mercy and providence of God. Through a contemplation of sound, space, and collective participation, you are invited to encounter this famously mysterious person in a new way: we will speak her words and hear them spoken, and maybe try catching some small revelations ourselves.
The event is hosted in partnership with the Church of St. Peter and St. Sigfried, home of the Anglican Church in Stockholm. The evening’s read will be introduced by poet Judith Kiros and soundtracked by Siri Anna Flensburg and Áron Birtalan, who’s been hosting nights like this since 2023.
Judith Kiros is a poet based in Stockholm. Her latest poetry collection, det röda är det gränslösa, speaks with and through Julian of Norwich's Revelations of Divine Love to consider isolation and community, sickness and devastation. Since its publication, Kiros’ book has received the Svenska Dagbladets litteraturpris in 2023, and the Sveriges Radios lyrikpris in 2024.
Siri Anna Flensburg is a singer and composer working in the realm of contemporary Scandinavian folk music. Before finishing her bachelor's at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm, her background -whilst growing up in Copenhagen- was within classical church music. She freely lets old archival recordings and dusty psalm books integrate into dark ambient synthesisers and electric field recordings.
Áron Birtalan is an artist, musician, and student of theology, whose work explores languages of intimacy between angel, creature, and computer. Working with relationships and sense perception as artistic materials, they host guided games, mystical practices, musical releases, unruly thoughts, and hybrid publications. They are currently a PhD Candidate in artistic practice at SKH Dance.
𓁣 Nov 30th - SATURDAY
👼 The Choir of Not Knowing
(or The Forgetful Kindred Kin and the forgotten getting of the gotten form)10.30-12.30 at SKH Dance (Studio 11)
hosted by Francis Partick Brady
A participatory performance or LARP about a fictional community that has constant amnesia and is in an eternal process of forgetting and rediscovering their recent history. They sing songs in an attempt to remedy their poor memory and hold on to what lessons might be important. Stories and emotions that have been forgotten resurface and the community is able to remember things through song and choir together. This project is inspired by Sacred Harp singing from the Appalachian mountains and traditional pub singing in the English town of Sheffield. Sacred Harp is a singing tradition that emphasises singing together for amateurs and was designed to be accessible to non-literate settlers in America who wanted to sing together at Church.
The fictional community takes it turns to tell stories through noises, tones and vibrations. Each individual takes it in turns to direct the choir to remember something from their communal past. Made as a participatory artwork it will prompt participants to consider how history and memory shape, and often distort, the pursuit of utopia. The project occupies the porous boundary between utopian ideals and the potential for those ideals to devolve into fascism.
Francis Patrick Brady is a visual artist working with fabric, sculpture, painting, song, storytelling, playing cards, Virtual and Mixed Reality experiences. He uses play and participation as strategies to challenge the existing rules of everyday life. Often they create artworks that build an alternative world running parallel to our contemporary times as a method to engage and involve the public in the creation of the work.
🪱 Becoming Earth
or, the Song of the Flesh13.30-15.30 at SKH Dance (Studio 16)
hosted by Tuva Hildebrand
An embodied research into the nature of being - through sensing, moving and relating. How can we hear the earth moving through us and notice that our bodies are in a constant movement of deterioration? Can your body remember the touch of the ocean in your mother's womb on your cellular membrane? In this workshop, we will practice listening to the materiality of the body as a formation of the matter of the earth, and the cycles of life, death and regeneration which move within, through and outside of you.
How can your self simultaneously dissolve and appear through the intimate act of sensing your body in co-existence with its environment? We are touching and being touched, moving and being moved, forming and being formed by everything we sense all the time. We will practice diving deep below the surface of the skin of your consciousness and move from the flesh of the subconscious that lives beneath what we know in language. I invite you into a practice of being in intimate dialogue with the materiality beyond symbols and signs and exist in a collective state of non-doing, not knowing; of always becoming and never arriving.
In this workshop, you will be guided through physical explorations relating to your own body, the environment and other participants in the room. This guidance is supported by anatomical images, hands-on partnering graphics, poetic and metaphorical imagery, scientific facts and philosophical ideas. Your body has the same amount of fluid to mass as the earth has water to land. And, did you know that your bones have the same mineral levels as the fertile soil our food grows from?
Tuva Hildebrand is a choreographer, dancer and somatic practitioner, who in her workshop will draw from her past artistic research Sensuous Repair: An Ecosomatic Exploration and Body and Earth, and her current project the Song of the Flesh. Her practice is influenced by BodyMind Centering, Alexander Technique, Skinner Releasing Technique, Contact Improvisation, Traditional Chinese Medicine, but foremost studies with female somatic dance practitioners and improvisers among others Eva Karczag, K.J. Holmes and Miranda Tufnell.
🌪️ How to Disappear
archives and memory in Palestine and elsewhere16.00-17.00 at SKH Dance (Studio 16)
hosted by Mariam Elnozahy
In response to the prompt "Gatherings to Disappear," I will be screening two films by artist Noor Abuarafeh which deal with the disappearance of Palestinian archives and artworks. Abuarafeh looks at the possibilities of remembrance in the Palestinian context, in which materiality is always in danger of being lost, damaged, stolen or destroyed. How do we think about disappearance and memory? Following the screening, I will lead a discussion with the group.
Palestinian artist Noor Abuarafeh has built a complex body of work that attests to history’s construction, documentation, and interpretation. Through the replications, repetitions, and gaps in stories, memories, and archives, she imagines alternative mythologies and materials for the future. In recent years, Abuarafeh has looked at history’s manufacture through the processes of preservation that occur in museums and exhibitions. Reflecting on what individuals, governments, or private interests choose to safeguard or endow with exceptional significance, Abuarafeh articulates the tension between what is included in the project of nation-building and what is left out.
Mariam Elnozahy is a curator, researcher, and writer. She currently serves as the Artistic Director of Konsthall C in Stockholm, Sweden where her program “Sacred Spaces” invites artists to address questions of religion and society. Her work often addresses histories of globalisation, development, and resource extraction.
✳️ Gathering Session II.
17.00-18.00 at SKH Dance (Studio 16)A gathering to close the day, to drift, speak, dream, repeat. Hosted by the symposium team, with presenters Francis Patrick Brady, Tuva Hildebrand and Mariam Elnozahy.
💃 😎 Closing Party
21.00-00.00 at STUDIO NYXXXartists TBA
𓁣 EXTRA EVENT
🌻 Tending Grief in the Wake
November 27th (Wednesday)
13.00-16.00 at Filmhuset Research Studios
presented by Camille Barton for FutureBrownSpace
Communal forms of grief and the importance of grief tending in community to reduce isolation, build trust and get clear on what we care about so we can move towards this together. I'll touch on how this connects to Black Feminist Study (such as Christina Sharpe's work "In the Wake") and this time of modernity being hospiced. Camille Barton’s debut book "Tending Grief: Embodied Rituals for Holding Our Sorrow and Growing Cultures of Care in Community", is published in April 2024 by North Atlantic Books.
👈🏻 back to symposium overview
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