Siegmar Zacharias: Artistic Research as a Diffractive Method
Wednesday, February 12, 2020 9:00 am – 12:15 pm EST/GMT-5BCB’s The Factory, Eichenstr. 43, 13156 Berlin-Pankow
Lecture and Workshop
As part of the course Making A Performance. Devising Theater as Artistic Research (Nina Tecklenburg), the performance artist and theorist Siegmar Zacharias will give an introduction into alternative ways of knowledge production and embodied research.
No artistic experience is required.
Students and scholars from all branches of research are warmly invited!
The lecture will give an introduction to what Donna Haraway and Karen Barad have called diffractive methods:
“[F]eminist theorist Trinh Minh-ha [...] was looking for a way to figure ‘difference’ as a ‘critical difference within,’ and not as special taxonomic marks grounding difference as apartheid. [...]. Diffraction does not produce ‘the same’ displaced, as reflection and refraction do. Diffraction is a mapping of interference, not of replication, reflection, or reproduction. A diffraction pattern does not map where differences appear, but rather maps where the effects of differences appear.” Haraway (1997)
The physical model of diffraction will be discussed through examples from Siegmar Zacharias's own and others artistic research practices in the contemporary dance and performance field (Meg Stuart Tanzkongress, Valentina Desideri, Alice Chauchat). We will address the question of what kind of knowledge it produces, and how it can be employed as an analytical tool to engage in embedded and embodied research in all fields. The workshop invites participants to experience by way of doing diverse modes of diffractive artistic practice.
Siegmar Zacharias is a performance artist and theorist. Her works produce situations of embodied dirty thinking together through matters and matter. She develops formats of performances, installations, discursive encounters and curation/invitation dealing with questions of agency, liquefaction, modes of knowledge production as collaboration, ecology of artistic practice. She collaborates with human and non-humans, uncontrollable material, such as smoke, slime, the nervous system and death. Recent works include: Training for political imaginaries / The Other Thing (a series of durational immersive symposia with artists, activists, theorists), Drooling Lecture Series (a series of performance lectures researching fluid ways of thinking in collaboration with slime, saliva and a voice box); Slime Dynamics; The Cloud: a cosmo-choreography made by animals, vegetables, minerals, humans, concepts and emotions.; Dirty thinking; invasive hospitality.
Siegmar studied philosophy und comparative literature in Berlin (FU) and London (UCL) und Performance Art at DasArts Amsterdam. In 2018 she received a TECHNE scholarship for excellency and innovative research to pursue her PhD project: Intimacy & Alienation – learning from uncontrollable materials. Towards a posthuman feminist poET(H)ICS.
Date & time: Wednesday, February 12, 2020
Lecture: 9-10:30am
Workshop: 10:45am-12:15pm
Venue: BCB’s The Factory (Performance Space)
Eichenstr. 43, 13156 Berlin-Pankow
NOTICE: Please be aware that photos / videos might be recorded during BCB events for use on websites, social media and in publications. As a participant in the event, you are presumed to consent to the recording.
BVG Directions: Bard College Berlin's Factory is in Niederschönhausen, a 12-minute tram ride from the “Pankow” S/U-Bahn station. Take the M1 tram towards the destination “Rosenthal Nord” (not "Schillerstrasse") and exit at “Friedrich-Engels-Str. / Eichenstrasse”. Bard College Berlin’s Factory is 2 blocks away on the right side with a large red banner in front.
Photos copyright: Siegmar Zacharias
Email: [email protected]