Throughout the month of June 2019, Astrid Noack’s Atelier and the backyard set the stage for the performance continuum “The Place is Alive” which consisted of 30 days of performance with more than 50 contributing artists

June 30, a number of the participating artists are returning to reflect on what documentation (in varying media) means to keeping something alive. During the day, participants will explore various documentation and reflection formats and explore how documentation can be a forward-looking process and an active form of resistance. A key question for the day will be how a performance as a social art form can live on in a way that keeps its social and collective dynamics and critical potential alive.

In a continuation of “The Place is Alive´s” initial attempt to revitalize and ‘common’ ANA in a situation where profit and rapid urban development is an all-dominant agenda, participants will critically and reflexively engage with the history of gentrification around Astrid Noack’s Atelier – the construction of private housing in the backyard is going on right now – as well as with the current seriously changed audience situation.

Program:

10.00 – 11.00 Welcome speech for children and adults / morning coffee and breakfast

11.00 – 11.30 “Kompas Klipning” by Annika Nilsson

11.30 – 12.00 “The Laughing Game” by Antoinette Helbing

12.00 – 14.30 Lunch break / open video archive and reading of The Place is Alive Poetics

14.30 – 15.00 Feldenkrais exercises on the building site, everybody is welcome

15.00 – 15.30 “Zeamietyderne eller Kvinden, Krigeren og Den Gamle Mand” by de9trin

15.30 – 16.00 “Sketch # 2” by Karin Bergmann

16.00 – 16.30 “In duo with earth” by Birgitte Skands

16.30 – 17.00 “Time Travel to Astrid Noack’s Atelier 1936/2036” by Kristine Agergaard / J&K

17.00 – 17.30 “Arbejder” by Charlotte Bergmann Johansen

17.30 – 19.30 Dinner / open video archive and reading of The Place is Alive Poetics

19.30 – 20.00 “Astrid Noack” by Victor Vidal

20.00 – 21.00 “Dagbøger 1988 – 2019” by Camilla Graff Junior

21.00 – 21.30 “Fra nedrivningsarkivet” by Felix Becker

21.30 Farewell speech and drinks

There will be artist talks after each performance. Language: Danish and English depending on the audience.

NOTE corona / covid-19ift; We have hand sanitizer and a plan ready if we get too many.

The audience is welcome to come and go throughout the day. We serve meals and beverages throughout the day.

As part of the biennial Alt_Cph 20, Patterns in Resistance, the collectives YNKB, ANA and Salon Hysteria presents a conversation between Silvia Federici and Nazila Kivi on Witches & Work; on Revolution from the Kitchen; on utopias and colonizations of care.

This talk will take its starting point in the Danish midsummer tradition of ritualistic witch-burnings. Departing from Silvia Federici’s work in ‘Caliban and the Witch – Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation’ (2004) the talk will center around the persecution of women*and others deemed witches and how it connects to the emergence of capitalism and the subordination of reproductive work. We will touch on Silvia Federici’s works on Wages for Housework and Counterplanning from the Kitchen and bring back still relevant reflections on work, reproduction and the dismantling of the capitalist-patriarchal system that keeps affecting us all, especially in times of distress.

Sign up for the webinar here:

https://event.webinarjam.com/register/3/y1yr6t5

SILVIA FEDERICI
Is a scholar, writer and philosopher and the author of the ground breaking Caliban and the Witch, among several other books and publications. Her work is influential in the fields of gender, witch hunts and their political history and a feminist-marxist approach to reproduction.

NAZILA KIVI
Is an independent scholar on reproduction and decoloniality, editor, essayist and co-founder of the feminist magazine Friktion. She teaches gender study courses, among others the course From Witches to Cyborgs: Gender, Race and Resistance.

….

PATTERNS IN RESISTANCE

Patterns in Resistance is the 2020 iteration of the art biennial Alt_Cph, hosted by Fabrikken for Kunst og Design. The biennial unfolds within messy knots between crafts and technology, between privilege and histories of resistance, between care and community. It is curated by Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology

ALT_CPH

Alt_Cph is an independent biennial gathering selected institutional partners, artists and contemporary artist-run and alternative exhibition spaces across Europe. Each time, a new team curates the biennial and involves its audience in the pertinent questions of the present.

YNKB

YNKB is an artist group based on Ydre Nørrebro, the most densely populated area of Copenhagen and also the part of Copenhagen with the highest percentage of immigrants.
YNKB wants to leave the elitist centres of Art and want to establish cultural and artistic activities where people live. Because YNKB see art as a collective research project on a global interrelational and human scale based on humanity, openness, self-determination, participation, generosity and warmth, YNKB wants to use dialogue and participation as a method of involving participants and audiences in a common artistic process.

SALON HYSTERIA

Salon Hysteria is a space for next level conversations on society, politics and science. Salon Hysteria is a space for feminist knowledge production.

The studio space of Astrid Noack is a time traveling vessel slowly being undermined by a changing cityscape of rapid development. The atelier of Astrid Noack was part of a community of workshops, now torn down to make way for speculative real estate. The construction of an underground car park and a 7 story housing estate are encroaching on what used to be a public area in front of the studio. It is now isolated, and cut of from its former existence, as part of a neighborhood.

The artists Astrid Noack and Florence Henri both lived and worked in Montparnasse at the end of the 1920s and beginning of the 30’s. They both worked with the rendition of bodies and portraitures. Henri worked as a photographer and shot a series of images of her studio window, reflecting the buildings of her street through a mirror. Henri also made portrait compositions, of a community of artists, reflected in mirrors, recording space, still life on mirrors, images of reclining bodies, flat geometric planes of plant samples, hair, fabric, shells, views through metal mesh, shutters and shop windows reflecting flaming skies.

Florence Henri and Lotte Beese met at the Bauhaus, as students, in the second part of 1920s. Here they both worked with photography, experimenting with mirrors and spacial transformations. Lotte Beese was the first woman to be admitted to the architecture program at the Bauhaus, in Hannes Meyer’s program, whom she later worked with in Berlin and Moscow. Beese also worked in Brno, here she became a member of the Czechoslovakian communist party KSČ, while raising her newborn child on her own. No longer feeling safe in Brno because of her political position, she left for the Ukrainian city of Kharkov, where she made ground-plans for the sotsgorod (socialist town) built in conjunction with the Kharkiv Tractor Factory. Later, she worked in the May Brigades studio designing new cities in the Soviet Union, amongst others, plans for the town of Orsk. She eventually ended up in Rotterdam, where she took part in the reconstruction of the bombed city after World War II, working as the head architect of several new districts. Lotte’s ideas of urban planning involved ‘a core’ circumscribing categories of housing, group, neighborhood, district and city. Each group, with a set of buildings, responded to different needs and functions, creating an architecture for a diverse community within public greens. These were not designed as isolated garden cities but as an area for an urban population.

While staying in the Astrid Noack atelier, Pia Rönicke will engage with the space itself, within its insularity, looking through the openings into surrounding areas. The studio will be an observation point, to be expanded and transformed out of its current position, as a projection for other plans and objecthoods, in using some of the optics of Florence and Lotte. The mirror will be a tool for transforming the spacial barriers, looking beyond walls, re-rendering the environment. The mirror not only reflects, but also creates patterns, as it is visible in Lotte Beese’s urban plans, patterns for a community. The studio will inhabit and re-project parts of Beese’s radical patterns, in a reiteration and re-imagination of space, while connecting with the local history of both common land, manufacturing and workers’ housing. 

After the Letter is part of an ongoing project, including the works, Dream and Action, find equal supporting it (2012) and Notes on MB (2014). These works looks through the radical practices of artists, designers and architects, thinking with historical events, in an attempt to re-stage and affect time through spacial re-imaginations.

After the Letter will take place over two periods. In May, the first occupancy of the studio will be closed to the public.  The second period, in September, will be public, and elements of the working process will be on display with a series of gatherings that will relate to the project in various ways. Info and dates will be announced later.

Pia Rönicke holds an MFA from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and has studied at California Institute of the Arts. She is currently working on a Phd at Malmö Art Academy.

The exhibition programme at Astrid Noack’s Studio is supported by The Danish Arts Foundation, Nørrebro Lokaludvalg, BKF’s udvalg til fordeling af kulturelle midler and Zeuthens Mindelegat.

Johan Tirén is invited to do a site-specific exhibition project at Astrid Noack’s Atelier. The project consists of two parts, a shorter residency in May (postponed to October 2020), followed by an exhibition in February 2021. The idea is that the experiences, and findings from the research stay, is developed into a public project to be shown in ANA or in the surrounding public space of Ydre Nørrebro.

In the project with the preliminary title “While the city grows” Tirén will from an artistic point of view look into some of the key issues and questions we face in todays urban development. For whom are we building the “new” city, what happens to the people and the businesses that are already in place? And if everything is planned, where do we find the openings that the unplanned is offering us today?

Johan Tirén (b. 1973) holds an MFA from Malmö Art Academy (2004) and has studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (1998–2003). He works in different media, such as drawing, graphics, video, and text, and uses his research-based artistic practice both inside the art institution and outside, for instance in city planning processes with a special focus on social problematics concerning sustainability and planning. He strives to be open and precise in his artistic work, looking for a political acuity that does not loose sight of art’s poetic qualities. Tirén has exhibited widely, for instance at Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, Galleri Tom Christoffersen, and Overgaden, and has together with colleague Anna Högberg done public commissions for Statens Konstråd and Örebro Kommun.

The exhibition programme at Astrid Noack’s Studio is supported by The Danish Arts Foundation and Nørrebro Lokaludvalg.