Studies in Remoteness III

art, upcoming

Call for Participation:

BEYOND PLUNDER.
Remoteness in archipelagic and aquapelagic thought

8-11 April, 2027
Department of Culture and Aesthetics, Stockholm University, Sweden
in collaboration with Konstnärshuset (Artists’ House) and Slipvillan Gallery, Stockholm

Aimé Césaire’s writing gives us place as scattered shreds of beloved wastepaper floating upon the water and islands as articulate bodies (annulosa) composed of rings. A locus that floats, held within a “carêne” – an old Genoese word referring as much to a walnut shell as to a ship’s hull. Césaire’s beloved home is fragmented, pieced together from scraps of bodies, paper, nuts, and boats. 

With its third symposium, the international collaborative project Studies in Remoteness takes up Césaire’s archipelagic and aquapelagic thought to theorize across places and peoples subjected to dispossession, extraction, and environmental ruin (Glissant 2009, Martínez-San Miguel & Stephens 2020, Turnbull 2025). Such places and peoples, like Césaire’s islands, are scattered. So too are circumpolar communities scattered. Indigenous homelands fragmented by borders and colonial infrastructures are scattered. Diasporas are scattered. How do we think across these scattered states of remoteness? What relations become visible when we resist the enclosure of “situated” context and address the scattered condition of remoteness as connectedness and affiliation – perhaps, as the ungrounded, fluctuating, tensile rhizome through which solidarity and theory alike can emerge? 

Césaire offers us the metamorphic term hors-flibuste. Translated to English as unfreebootable, modified from the colonial Dutch word vrijbuiter (plunderer, robber), the term gently conjures the image of a loving bond that knows and refuses the logics of extraction, and thus bears witness to people–place relations beyond plunder. We wish to start there, with the unfreebootable love of places-laid-to-waste and with love-languages of resistance that entangle theoretical and poetic thought. This is already exemplified by Césaire – who alongside Édouard Glissant, who first articulated archipelagic thinking – was a Black diasporic poet and decolonial theorist. Césaire and Glissant lived lives that inextricably entangled scholarship and artistry; their works are also consequently expressive of both situatedness and cosmopolitan belonging to the wider world.


Buffer Zone, Sacrifice Zone, No-go Zone, Exclusion Zone, Security Zone

Through the attention of contributors to political logics of wasting (Liboiron & Lepawsky 2022) and necropolitical infrastructures (Mbembe 2019), the symposium Beyond Plunder expects to foster a site for critical inquiry of distance, marginality, and peripheralization. The peoples and places living under colonial and imperial systems that devalue them are increasingly labelled with the term “zone” and drawn into political imaginaries of remoteness as the unlivable site where no one, in their right mind, would or should remain. Even so, these logics of destruction implicitly expose the very entanglement between bodies and lands that colonial and imperial epistemes would seek to deny: For who would displace the burdens of extraction, ruin, and dispossession onto others, except those who already (if only negatively) recognize a deep mutuality – an enduring interdependence – of people and place?


A Sea of Islands: Archipelagic conversations from the Polar to the Equatorial 

In her recent book Ice Geographies (2025), scholar Jen Rose Smith (dAXunhyuu) discussed Fijian anthropologist Epeli Hau’ofa’s articulation of Oceania as “a sea of islands”, and his contrasting of Oceanic homelands and homeseas with imperial vision, which has long reduced such places to “islands in a far sea” (1994: 152). Addressing Oceania within her work on Arctic colonial politics of race and indigeneity, Smith found resonance in how Oceania and the Arctic alike have long histories as military testing grounds used by nations that construct such places as “remote” for strategic advantage. Thus, when Smith interacts with Hau’ofa’s work, she emphasizes “remoteness” not as a the far remove of Oceania and Arctic from each other, but as a colonial construction which systematically diminutizes and devalues both places among the vast elsewheres which then compose colonial peripheries. 


Who we are looking for 

Studies in Remoteness is dedicated to fostering an intellectually rigorous and practice-inclusive context equally open to researchers, educators, artists, curators, architects, community leaders and elders, activists, students, among others. The project aims to create meeting grounds for collaborative and community-based research and artistic work that critically and productively inquires infrastructure, visibility, performativity, and historicity. As a study circle within the Nordic Summer University, we are able to offer ECTS points to students. 

For this symposium, we look forward to applications from people whose work contributes to re-evaluation and re-theorization of people–place relations and systems of plunder, expendability, and waste. We aim to bring together contributors who might think archipelagically and aquapelagically across a diversity of land and seascapes – moorlands, bogs, fells, desert, steppes, taiga, tundra, estuaries, mudflats, and dune fields – and the communities who live there. We would warmly welcome contributors who work in island studies (nissology), circumpolar studies, human geography, blue humanities and oceanic studies, Indigenous studies, diaspora studies, critical heritage studies, Baltic and Nordic studies, environmental humanities, posthumanism, human ecology, art history, performance studies, and critical colonial studies, among others. We particularly invite proposals that engage with voices and worldviews often marginalized or erased in dominant knowledge systems.

How to Apply 

The Studies in Remoteness April 2027 session “Beyond Plunder” will be structured to privilege lingering attention and in-depth conversation among participants. Therefore, spots for contributors are limited. Applicants are invited to envision contributions up to one hour in length (research presentations, performances, artist talks, experiments, and reading and/or discussion sessions).

Applications should include
[a] An extended abstract (up to 600 words) of the proposed contribution (1-2 pages);
[b] up to 1-page bio of the presenter(s).
2-3 pages total please. Precaritized artists, students, and scholars living in Stockholm and the surrounding region who express exceptional need can be considered for participation with the fee waived. 

Email applications to: lindsey.drury@fu-berlin.de and helenahildur@gmail.com by 15 January 2027. Applications will be accepted on a rolling basis, applying earlier is encouraged. 

Costs 

While travel and hotel for the April 2027 symposium in Stockholm should be self-organized by participants, the Studies in Remoteness co-coordinators will organize an inexpensive overnight option in the city. We also warmly welcome requests for support letters for individual funding applications for those attending and regularly correspond with our participants about funding opportunities that coordinators and contributors are pursuing. 

Symposium & Membership Fees 

Nordic Summer University Annual Membership is a contribution made by all participants annually to support the volunteer-run, democratic, and independent academic organization. 

  • 70 € – Reduced rate fee (20 € for the symposium, 50 € Nordic Summer Uni. membership fee)*
  • 150 € – Standard fee (50 € for the symposium, 100 € Nordic Summer Uni. membership fee)**
  • 230 € – Supporting membership (80 € for the symposium, 150 € Nordic Summer Uni.)*** 

*The reduced-rate fee is for individuals with an annual income below €25,000, as well as students, early-career researchers, retired, unemployed, working in precarious or low-income circumstances. 

**The standard fee is for individuals with an annual income between €25,000 and €50,000.

***The supporting membership fee is for individuals with an annual income above €50,000, as well as institutions or individuals whose membership is funded by their institution, employer, or research grant.

About Studies in Remoteness 

Studies in Remoteness: Sensoria of Absence, Distance, and Neglect is coordinated as a study circle within the Nordic Summer University by performance historian Dr. Lindsey Drury (Freie Universität Berlin / Germany) and artist Helena Hildur W. (Sweden), with team members Theol. Dr. Shiluinla Jamir (Nagaland/India) and PhD candidate Tinka Harvard (Åbo Akademi, Finland/USA). The April 2027 symposium Beyond Plunder is organized in cooperation with Prof. Dr. Karolina Enquist Källgren (University of Stockholm, Sweden).

Studies in Remoteness does foundational theoretical, artistic, and historical work toward initiating a new field of interdisciplinary research in critical remoteness studies. To unpack the geopolitical, environmental, and cultural dimensions of “remoteness” – particularly, in the circumpolar North – we center Indigenous scholarship and critiques of extractive colonialism, as well as artistic and embodied approaches, in a series of six symposia across the Baltic rim between 2026-2028. 

The project turns its attention to the notion of “a place far away”– be it the regional peripheries or cartographic borderlands between nation states; the residential areas of Indigenous/minoritized communities; historical testimonies and lacunae; sub-cultural meeting spots or your neighbour’s kitchen. Theorizing modernity by turning to its so-called outskirts, the project inquires sensoria of absence, distance, and neglect that have blossomed along the frontiers of colonial empires and sedimented among the margins of modern infrastructures of “global connectivity”. With lingering attention, Studies in Remoteness intends to unsettle conditions of obscuring or exoticizing – resolutely acknowledging histories, topographies and epistemologies with an eye to how these might come into “intense proximity”, as coined by Okwui Enwezor. 

As a three-year collaborative research project, Studies in Remoteness brings together a network of scholars, artists, and activists to engage in community-based research practices. By establishing a co-creative space for community building and artistic practices – open for the sharing of facts, questions, concerns and practices – we believe that our work will prove enduringly relevant.


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Studies in Remoteness condensed study plan summer 2027 – summer 2028:

  • Nordic Summer University Summer Session and Summer School, 23-30 July 2027
    (Hola folkhögskola, Kramfors, Sweden) Topic: Infrastructures of Remoteness 
  • Winter Session, March 2028 (Kilpisjärvi Biological Station, Enontekiö, Lapland, Finland)
    Topic: Sacredness and protection 
  • NSU Summer Session and Summer School, July 2028 (Baltics, venue tba)
    Topic: Being Lost


Read more:

Studies in Remoteness Userblog at Freie Universität Berlin,
https://userblogs.fu-berlin.de/remoteness/

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Call for Participation, Sources Cited: 

Césaire, Aimé. 1939. Cahier d’un retour au pays natal. Paris: Volontés. 
— . 1950. Discours sur le colonialisme. Parislation, Poésie en étendue. Paris: Gallimard. Hau’ofa, Epeli. 1994. “Our Sea of Islands”, The Contemporary Pacific, Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 148- 161. 

Glissant, Édouard. 2009. Philosophie de la relation, Poésie en étendue. Paris: Gallimard.

Liboiron, Max & Josh Lepawsky. 2022. Discard Studies: Wasting, Systems, and Power. Boston: MIT Press. 

Martínez-San Miguel, Yolanda & Michelle Stephens. 2020. Contemporary Archipelagic Thinking: Toward New Comparative Methodologies and Disciplinary Formations. London: Bloomsbury. 

Mbembe, Achille. 2019. Necropolitics. Durham: Duke University Press. 

Smith, Jen Rose. 2025. Ice Geographies: The Colonial Politics of Race and Indigeneity in the Arctic. Durham: Duke University Press. 

Turnbull, David. 2025. “Archipelagic/Aquapelagic Processes and Shifts in the Geography of Reason and Law in Island South East Asia: An Approach to Resisting the Enclosure of the Common Heritage of Mankind”. Theoria, 72(185), 32-57.: Éditions Réclame. 

“Time Work” Symposium In Hindsight

art, recent work, time-out

With two months hindsight; what did we bring from Studies in Remoteness’ Summer Session with the Nordic Summer University in Latvia?

On July 23, I arrived in Saulkrasti and reached hotel Minhauzen Unda; a Soviet-time building complex, close to the Baltic sea shore and surrounded by a deep, airy wall of high pine trees…

Arriving in Minhauzen Unda, Saulkrasti, Latvia

–

…and with the high-flying fabulist Baron Munchausen installed to be the patron of the establishment.

Time table for Time Work. Debt, inheritance, and intergenerational practice
(NSU Circle 1, Studies in Remoteness’ Summer Session 2026)

On July 24, all study circles were gathered, and participants greeted with a welcoming dinner. About half of our circle are returning friends from the Winter Session in Berlin, and the other half are newcomers; a good mix, and again a wonderful bunch of people. With the new morning, our programme begins with a brief introduction, followed by a workshop with Agnese Cēbere: Forming Words in Latvian… an appropriate start to ground us in this place where we are all newcomers. Afterwards, we split up in smaller groups to listen to each others’ thoughts on the concept of “remoteness”.


Saturday morning, July 25: “What is ‘remoteness’ to you?”


A large piece of canvas – serving as a tablecloth during the Winter Session in Berlin – is now turned into an improvised projector screen for Tinka Harvard’s lecture on The Melt Archive: Water, Memory, and the Work of Attention.

Preparations, arrangements, notations; writer, poet and theologian Tinka Harvard in lecture.

Leaving her notes behind to speak from the heart, Tinka’s words opened up another poetic dimension where oceans and melting ice speak memories of destructive powers as well as awareness, care and love…

Raging wildfires in California kept our next speaker Adrian Centeno hostage; we missed him dearly, but were treated with architect Monica Tușinean’s reflections on tensions between an architects’ prestige and the craftsmanship of builders.

From the next days, only a few highlights remain… because the flow and intensity of exchanges left little space for documenting.

Sunday is a day of outdoor workshops: walking, pausing, observing, drawing and reflecting. Prof. Paul Landon brought us to the scattered ruins of a Soviet era summer camp; left to decompose in the greenery, drawing hard-handed courtship from graffiti tourists…


Prof. Paul Landon introducing the group to the uncanny familiarity of modernity’s ruins

…and on Monday, the canvas screen is improved by Nikola with a string and clothes pegs from the always helpful reception ladies; now ready for Dr. Shiluinla Jamir’s presentation Rethinking Contemporary Animism from the space of Remoteness, with respondent Prof. Bendanglemla Longkumer joining us online from Fiji.

Tuesday, July 28: Excursion Day. A long, lonely walk along the stretch of sandy beach, where the Baltic sea may gift a piece of amber or a “witch stone” to some lucky wanderer. I was happy to just breathe with the winds and waves – approaching, withdrawing…

–

…soothing, powerful and precarious. Pebbles and gentle sunshine; undercurrents, quicksand.

How do we move along with the flow of life, without hurting or getting hurt? How do we act responsible, and where does one’s responsibilities stop? How do we act freely?


Going, returning. Bare feet touching ground. Landscape turned real estate; layers of history.


Contemporary architecture and Soviet summer camp estate for sale; two sides of the same road

For Tuesday evening, the canvas screen found a new application, displaying (reverse) filming in Guy Dolev’s performance lecture Cow Park; a hommage to the struggle of the Jerusalemite Armenians to protect their historical ground – once a field for grazing cattle, today a parking lot carrying great significance in the community’s social life.


Artist, researcher and teacher Guy Dolev setting up the Cow Park scenography

Wednesday, then, is largely dedicated to lectures on historical events in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania; three countries with very different, although sometimes converging, fates. This lecture series form the sub-project Shared Stages, Entangled Pasts, funded by the Baltic-German Liaison Office and connecting us to distinguished scholars in the region. We’re also invited to track the bear regalia of the Mamalilikulla people all the way from 19th century Canada to a museum depot in Berlin; to follow the anarchic movement of vagabonds in 1920’s Germany; and to visit the late 20th century’s “countercultural” hippie/settler/prepper utopias in US West coast states – in three lectures by (respectively) Lindsey Drury, Timo Kaemmerer and Johanna Gilje.

Thursday is already wrap-up day – but first, a few more beautiful contributions… among them, setareh fatehi’s Parallaxing-(i): a walk on a shaky bandwidth took us on a walk in the park – in Saulkrasti, and simultaneously, via a groupchat, in Tehran – recreating human dignity in remote presence; followed by Nikola Markovic’s film Spectral Garments and Reworking of Time in the Balkan Family Archive, starring Nikola’s grandmother… an excerpt from a larger work that I hope to come back to in the future.

The canvas made its final appearance as an archival surface during the closing discussion; a playground for the winds, waves and undercurrents of a weeklong shared experience.

Gala dessert and clean-up time; leaving Latvia by bus and ferry

After the last evening’s gala dinner, and the last morning’s cleaning and resetting of our assigned space, only the goodbyes remain before homeward journeys begin. Back home, I handwash the canvas and enjoy a sweet soft almond candy from Tehran with home-made rhubarb lemonade – immersed in the richness of the experience.

A time to rest and reflect. A canvas carrying memories. A stone, gifted from one of the magic-working reception ladies.

For the months ahead: process, discuss, think forward, make decisions… More (very) soon!

Mapping Praxis X: Obinna’s Itinerary

art, beauty, recent work

This object has taken form slowly, over the course of more than a year – beginning from a second interview with Obinna, one of the returning participants of the Praxis of Social Imaginaries study circle. Our very first conversation took place already in the summer of 2024; Obinna then told about fertile farmlands in the hilly parts of Enugu State (Nigeria) and the University of Nsukka, the light and heat of a brief stop-over in Dubai, and the whiteness of snow-covered Turku (Finland)… and offered me a seashell from a sandy Danish shore. When we met next time, in March 2025, I was still hesitating over how to begin this mapping; I asked Obinna for more information on his birthplace. In addition to providing more details, Obinna gave me a startling cue: “it has to be a 3D map”.

By then, I had done some reading on historical maps. I also knew that Christianity is the predominant religion in southern Nigeria – maybe that was what sparked an association to the 6th century traveler, monk, and zealous Bible reader Cosmas Indicopleustes.

Cosmas Indicopleustes’ world model, showing the World Ocean embracing a continent crowned by a huge mountain, behind which the sun passes – thus creating the difference between night and day.


During the partial solar eclipse of March 29, I made a cardboard maquette of Cosmas’s peculiar world-as-a-shrine model. The semi-circular sides of the lid brought another association as I watched the moon disc wandering across the sun: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel Half a Yellow Sun.

From cardboard maquette to wooden chest with doors and lid; hibiscus print on East African fabric; painting sketchwork, tempera painted world map (modified) and lapis lazuli lid

Over the next months, I cut the bottom and walls of the chest from parts of an old door, and fit them together with hemp string; crafted papier-mâché for the vaulted lid; and formed a mountain and a little house from air-drying clay. I asked for Obinna’s opinion on Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. I read that deeply moving novel of hers, and furthermore some articles on Nigerian art history – learning a little more about the complexities of this giant nation. In August, we met briefly again; among other things, we discussed instances of cultural appropriation versus cultural exchange, and Obinna brought my attention to the ancient Nsibidi writing.

During the following autumn and winter, various renderings of Obinna’s Itinerary were tried and rejected. In the end, this mapping came out less focused on social interactions, and more tuned in to the inherent beauty of the world and the ways we imagine it.

Half sun, half moon; hibiscus wallflower borrowed from a textile design by Wax Mama; green foliage and Nsibidi script; a journey through clarity and confusion…

Studies in Remoteness II

art, upcoming

Call for Participation:
TIME WORK. Debt, inheritance and intergenerational practice

Second gathering of Studies in Remoteness, part of the 2026 Summer Session of the Nordic Summer University. 

Paul Klee, Angelus Novus (monoprint 1920); photo credit Wikimedia Commons

CfP excerpt:

“Let’s call it ‘time work’: those practices that negotiate the relations between the living and the dead. Time work is not merely conducted by archivists and historians, but by grave diggers and undertakers, documentary filmmakers and memoirists, knowledge bearers, politicians, war journalists, practitioners of living traditions, speakers of dead languages, as well as by any and all who keep something – a story, a trinket, an heirloom, a song – holding onto it to remember. Time work is not easily done without feeling; It is driven by the weight of mattering, it is attention called by the fact that now – this, our, now – is in-part composed by the shadows of what and who came before. Time work is haunting work, it whispers of recurrences (‘this happened before’), and implicitly describes the present as a thing pushed to the surface of existence by the collective force of innumerable spent lives, over centuries, over millennia.

In the summer 2026 Studies in Remoteness symposium, we explore the ways that time work might destabilize the remoteness of history (its absence, distance, and neglect). How might we describe the work that transforms time into a weighted force that accumulates, persists, and can be carried forward, often across generations? Through what actions is one accountable to the past? What does it mean to hold or carry an inheritance? In what ways are people indebted to those who came before, and how might the living “pay the debts” that have accumulated over generations? What kinds of temporalities do different approaches to time work produce, and what social relations are then enabled or foreclosed? Through these questions, the symposium reflects on the entanglement of debt and history, exploring debt as an enduring paradigm that variously informs intergenerational relations, systems of oppression, and historical justice.

We particularly invite proposals that engage with voices and worldviews often marginalized or erased in dominant knowledge systems.“

 – READ THE FULL CFP HERE –

 

Dates: July 24- 31, 2026
Place: Saulkrasti, Latvia

Welcome to apply!

Duplicity / Duplicität Symposium (day four of three)

art, recent work, time-out

…yes, day 4 out of three – because the programme got so rich, that it just didn’t fit within the settled time frame.

On this wintery Sunday morning, some participants decided to rest and digest, while others were homeward bound – to Trondheim, Porto or Los Angeles… The rest of us made a choice between the Weathering exhibition at Haus am Waldsee, or a sound walk / dérive in the former East Berlin district of Lichtenberg.

Screenshot

Landsberger Allée – Arendsweg – Pyramidenring – Alte Rhinstrasse
(Google Maps screenshot)

I head for the sound walk, taking the M6 tram to the stop at Schalkauer strasse where Katt is waiting. Soon enough, Eli and Paul join us. Incessant through traffic rumbles along the Landsberger Allée, and a biting wind rattles the flaglines in front of IKEA as we cross the huge parking lot. South of the walkway, the windowless metal façade of a giant wholesale warehouse closes the view. Above Rhinstrasse, a towering high-rise: Die Pyramide – a prestigious 145 million € project completed a few years after the German Wiedervereinigung, soon a cause of financial disputes, later sold to a real estate developer… now a post-modern monument well past its prime.

From Pyramidenring, we turn left to proceed along the back side of this glass-and-granite complex, where it turns into a long stretch of lower building blocks alternating with narrow yards where trees stripped of leaves comb the wind. From Eli, we learn that Alte Rhinstrasse marks the border to a no man’s land, of sorts; or rather, a “some men’s land”, since violent right-wing groups claim the space beyond this old road – now a backstreet – making it a no-go place for those in focus of their aggressivity. A little further up the street, a rusty boom barrier and a sentry box with flaking paint still monitor a former industrial area, disused since decades.

“90’s Curtain Wall Grotto, Berlin”; photo by Katt Hernandez

A man exiting from a gym in the Pyramide’s side block allows us to slip inside to hide from the cold a few minutes. As we gaze at empty windows, empty stairwells, empty name plates on metallic information boards, Katt evokes images of families walking by on their way to the shopping malls on a sunny autumn’s day… A phone signal rings; it’s Lu, looking for us and asking us to send her a live position on Whatsapp. We hurry out to meet her in the street, and suddenly find ourselves back at the Landsberger Allée just outside the main entrance of the Pyramide. To our surprise, the doors are unlocked and we can walk inside.

Screenshot

“Die Pyramide” main entrance (Google Maps screenshot)

Vast, blank surfaces. No sounds of human presence, except for our own footsteps; we fall silent, too; unsure about how to behave. Cautiously, we sneak towards the high row of black pillars… behind which a security guard is relaxing by the reception desk. He offers us various folders and prospects from the enterprises housed in this office hotel. We thank him politely and return to the street, where the M6 line takes us back to the city center. We finally join with the remaining group for a warm Georgian lunch at Kin Za restaurant, before breaking up.

However, this sound walk / dérive stays with me. In little more than an hour, a stroll of perhaps 2 kilometers in seemingly dull surroundings caught an incredibly complex image of recent German history, architecture-as-ideology, financial manipulations, flows of communication and commodities, varying conditions for people’s everyday lives, and the continuous cycle of quiet growth and decay within the city’s ecosystem of flora and fauna. I hope to hear Katt’s violin tell more about this brinkscape practice… and I’ll bring the experience into the continued work of Studies in Remoteness.

Duplicity / Duplicität Symposium (day three of three)

art, recent work, time-out

… and how could the spirit of the second day be carried forward now – bursting with intellectual and emotional energy as it was?

The answer turned out to come almost by itself, with a change of pace: from yesterday’s parallel strings of concise case studies swiftly followed by verbal exchanges of Q’s and A’s, to extended presentations creating space for a deeper listening; for resonance, outwardly and inwardly…

 

The first feature of Saturday’s programme, sound artist Hector MacInnes‘ Collective Listening from Echo to Interference, carried us from Berlin to the the Isle of Skye, inviting us to roam and rest within a delicately composed soundscape of voices: repeated calls for contact, interlaced with distinct impressions and reflections on records, intimacy, and distance – evoking feelings of loss and sadness, imbued with a sense of care. A tentative call for solidarity?

Above: Hector MacInnes in dialogue with the group, after the Collective Listening experience
Below: Katt Hernandez waiting to present Brinkscapes as Practice (left);
“Kungens Kurva strange utility hut”, photo credit Katt Hernandez (right)

 

Next, musician and composer Katt Hernandez performed a dérive in urban peripheries, cutting through notions about desolate wastelands by addressing the warehouses, shopping malls, and vast parking lots as comforting sites of everyday human presence and protective anonymity, fondly naming them brinkscapes. The rhythmical sequence of pictures, speech, and silences unfolded as if tuned to inaudible music – eventually set free to sound by the fiery and tender voice of Katt’s violin.

The journey continued as media artist, professor Paul Landon took us to Arctic landscapes in the Cold War era, where military demands employed the “perceived nothingness” of supposedly uniform expanses of dazzling snow, as the DEW (Distant Early Warning) system was erected across Alaska and Canada; a massive effort turning self-sustaining ecosystems into a backdrop for the demonstration of power and cutting-edge technology.

For the extended lunch break, Paul sent us on a mission:

– Go for a walk in the neighbourhood and look for an empty space that resonates with you; document what you find, so that you can present it to the group; stay with your chosen spot for a while, trying to perceive, understand and interpret it; from this experience, think of a public intervention to amplify, alter, celebrate or comment on its particular emptiness.

And so we did.

Two hours later, the group reassembled to share the documented emptinesses: an inaccessible yard; a snow-covered balcony; a construction pit; a beanie hat lying in the street, lost from the head it used to protect; a gap in the flow of consumer goods in a vendor machine…

Above: Prof. Paul Landon sharing pictures from his personal collection of emptinesses
Below: an emptiness captured by Caitlin McHugh

We shared photos, and more: we shared, unguardedly, our sustained attention, our awareness towards qualities and emotions, our personal renderings – stirring interest, reflections, compassion, and friendly laughter – in a flow already present yesterday, now broadening and deepening like a river.

For my own part, this workshop remains a highlight; first, spending time on my own in the midst of these intense days, and then returning, respirited, to co-create with to peers, now become friends.

Duplicity “emptiness” excursion along Grünewaldstrasse – Paulsenstrasse – Rückertstrasse – Brentanostrasse
(photos by HHW.)

A coffee break, then another workshop: Phenomenographies of Absence and Duplicity. Re-drawing Post-Communist Industrial Ruins by architect Monica Tușinean. Drawing and tracing paper rolled out all along the table, graphite pens and thick black markers distributed, instructions given…

Above: re-imagining Romanian industrial heritage sites by drawing “phenomenographic vignettes”,
workshop by Monica Tușinean
Below: Essi Nuutinen gives us monsters

The playful excitement of the drawing workshop was gently redirected into focused common attention by Tinka Harvard, serving as moderator for the programme’s last section. As eyes turned back to the projection screen and the room fell silent, Essi Nuutinen introduced us to the Icelandic finngálkn, or onocentaur; a hybrid human-animal being, signifier of inherent duplicity and vehicle for imaginative moral thinking; a creature of folklore and Christian allegories appearing in the mediaeval book known as the Physiologus. The Icelandic manuscript in itself carries a story of transformation, as it went from being a valued keeper of knowledge, to having its pages torn apart and perforated by hundreds of tiny holes – surviving the centuries repurposed to separate coarse meal from finer… a sieve. A membrane. 

After moving upstairs to another venue – the DanceLab – the intertwined themes of ethos, body, and mediaeval history were continued by Lindsey Drury, in her performance lecture Bitter Gall: Dance and Colonial Nausea. History inherited as the “past-in-body-present”; the body, a receptacle torn by conflicting forces; ethos, the values and practices that sifts out the self. 

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From Lindsey Drury’s performance lecture Bitter Gall: Dance and Colonial Nausea

I cannot reduce this performance lecture into words; I will not even make an attempt. But it stays in my sieve, like the coarse and nutritious elements of stone-ground wholemeal – not to be disposed of, not to throw up, but to be digested over time. I will carry it with me, as a part of who I am, for times to come. 

For a final vignette, I return to an engraving visible in one of the photos above: Sebald Beham’s The Peasants’ Feast (month of December). I see the woman. I see her steady gaze beholding her witless, spewing partner, while leading him forward in dance; her expression does not tell of any judgment.

Duplicity / Duplicität Symposium (day two of three)

art, recent work, time-out

Come the second day of this adventure… beginning at 10am sharp with Elsewhere as structure: a panel on coloniality, migration and distance, with two of the speakers present online from Southeast Asia. Urban ethnographer Dr. Elisa Bertuzzo opened the panel with another flip of perspectives, recounting how colonizers of the past proudly filled Europe’s novel, prestigious botanical gardens with “exotic” plants – while today’s immigrants are accused of spreading “invasive” species when growing kitchen vegetables from their home places in South European backyards. PhD student, architect, and designer Lu Lin shared her work on dual belongings and cross-cultural design proposals, carried out between China’s Wenzhou region and Italy, together with immigrants and returnees. Concludingly, Dr. Theol. Shiluinla Jamir reflected on Lifestyle as Resistance (an intriguing essay by Prof. Veena Talwar Oldenburg in 1990), raising questions on how moral life is performed in a socio-spatial sphere of “remoteness”, and what it could be to lead a good life.

From the “Elsewhere as Structure” panel: hybrid meeting preparations;
two slides and a close-up from Elisa Bertuzzo’s presentation;
a mapping exercise shared by Lu Lin (all photos by HHW.)

 

After lunch, the programme divided into three parallel tracks in the Graduate Students’ Panels. I sadly missed out on the Epistemologies and the Erasures panels, as I followed four presentations on Embodiments – by Sophie Schultze-Allen, Caitlin McHugh, Tinka Harvard and Cadenza Zhao – insightfully moderated by Prof. Paul Landon and artist Jody Wood, with beautiful exchanges also between the panelists.

Sophie Schultze-Allen on “Decolonial Ecologies in Dance”, and feedback snapshots from Cadenza Zhao’s presentation on “Embodiment of Duplicity” (all photos by HHW.)

After a coffee break – offering some time to share reflections more informally – we all gathered to listen to presentations on Distance, Performance and Documentation by PhD student and theatre director Omid Mashhadi (Dokumentartheater Berlin), and visual artist Dr. Kerry Guinan (Centre for Art and the Political Imaginary, Gothenburg-Stockholm); again, generating many thoughts as well as lively exchanges.

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Slide from Mashhadi’s rehearsal work with Ukrainian refugees at the Dokumentartheater Berlin;
participants taking notes;
a slide with content creators from Nepal, Egypt and Ukraine on live video stream, from Guinan’s work “Portraits”;
snapshots from discussion between Mashhadi and Guinan (all photos by HHW.)

To complete this abundance of experiences and perspectives, we were finally invited by artist Jody Wood to calculate our Virtual Credits and Residual Guilt Reserve in her workshop Abrechnungsbüro – an engaging, thought-provoking and fun exercise, followed up by a conversation between the artist and philosopher-writer Lieke Knijnenburg. Aptly moderated by PhD student Sofia Attolini, it also involved participants, and continued well into the Berlin evening, during dinner at a nearby Chinese family restaurant…

Above: “Abrechnungsbüro” snapshots
Below: social practice artist Jody Wood and composer Olga Krashenko in following discussion
(all photos by HHW.)

…and we still have a full day ahead in this symposium. More to follow…

Duplicity / Duplicität Symposium (day one of three)

art, recent work, time-out

Time is almost 2 pm, and we’re at the Institut für Theaterwissenschaft of the Freie Uni. Berlin: a building once known as the Haus der Deutschen Forschung –  in the years of WWII containing a lecture hall and a library, a ballroom, a casino, fifty offices and an air raid shelter; and, according to journalist Ernst Klee, housing a “cover-up community”, where “an enormous ‘degree of agreement between politics and science'” took place. 
Zur Geschichte des Instituts für Theaterwissenschaft

Today, on January 29th, 2026, the coffee table is set outside the DanceLab, and name tags are waiting to be written and attached. People arrive, crossing the imposing foyer to find their way, continuing upwards via the symmetrical double staircases, heading for our more modest localities on the top floor. The footsteps and voices, the greetings and questions and answers tell of uncertainties as well as excitement.

Within an hour, we have welcomed most of our participants. It’s time to move; we’re going to the Berlin-Brandenburg Office for Everyday Culture, where the recently installed director Jonas Tinius will host the first session of the Duplicity symposium…

Due to EU General Data Protection Regulations, I’ll share only a few photos from the actual session here; Dr. Orlando Vieira Francisco (i2ADS Research Institute in Art, Design and Society, University of Oporto) presenting on Formenvielfalt-Farbenvielfalt: New Ecologies from the Museum to Artistic Research – an artistic line of thought, which (to my understanding) touched in a very personal way on the polarity between form and colour / drawing and painting / discerning and integrating… followed by Dr. Monica Tușinean (architect and researcher at the University of Stuttgart), sharing her work on post-communist industrial ruins in Romania – from which I borrow a slide (below). 

Slide with hare borrowed from Monica Tușinean’s presentation “Phenomenographies of Absence and Duplicity”



Dr. Jonas Tinius both opened and closed the panel, first by presenting the (Para-)Archive as a site for investigations into how archives come into being; and, eventually, by taking the whole audience on a guided tour in the Archive’s enchanting basement.

Click the link, and follow Jonas Tinius along on an earlier tour in the Archive’s basement:
euroethnoberlin Landesstelle Re-Opening! 

For those of us foreseeing (and lucky) enough to have reserved a space, the evening continued in a Wedding apartment with performance artist and cook Joël Verwimp’s In-home dinner and artist presentation WHEN IS A SHIRT? Collective Futures of Fascism.

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Joël Verwimp, “WHEN S A SHIRT? Collective Futures of Fascism” performance
Photo credits: Essi Nuutinen

Duplicity / Duplicität Symposium (Day 0)

art, time-out, upcoming

After a final round of proofreading, the whole batch of programmes is printed out; and so is the letter that will be read out loud to accompany Joël’s in-home performance tomorrow. Coffee, tea, snacks and fruit are purchased and brought to the Freie Uni. Signs showing the way to all locations are made and printed, and mounted on doors and signposts inside the building. The nametags and pens are ready for use. Joël has done his shopping, too, and now prepares the performance dinner.

One more thing: Monica’s workshop requires two rolls of paper; one normal drawing paper, and one transparent, the kind that architects use. Tinka and I head out in the city to find it; it’s already dusk, as we slip along a rivulet through an area of allotment gardens. We find the store and pick up the paper rolls – Monica confirming over the phone they’re the right ones – and then start on our way back… but in our excitement, we keep walking on and on, missing a left turn and crossing the river before we find ourselves back on the map again.

This city of Berlin – in itself a cluster of townships, gathered around the river Spree and her smaller siblings, sprawling out towards the lakes and wetlands – may be more imbued with history than any other place I’ve visited. Also, much of what I remember from central Stockholm in the 1960’s and 70’s  is still present here; the small backyard workshops and industrial buildings; the old, sometimes (not always) dilapidated houses with stone tilings, glass mosaics and flights of stairs disappearing into darkness; the ruderal spaces – neither parks nor gardens, but tiny spots of wilderness living on by their own – and the geographical proximity between vastly different urban structures and communities, that one may experience in just passing from one block to another.

Yes, a long and busy day… and tomorrow, it will begin for real.

 

Duplicity / Duplicität Symposium (Day 00)

art, upcoming

Tuesday morning begins with breakfast at Lindsey’s, then a slippery walk on pavements all covered with black ice. Yesterday, S-bahn trains were cancelled due to ice on the tracks; today, luckily, they’re back in traffic. The trip from Wedding to Steglitz takes approximately 40 minutes, then another walk from Rathaus Steglitz to the Institut für Theaterwissenschaft at Freie Universität Berlin. Here, the sidewalks are carefully sanded since our path coincides with the direction to a meeting point and facility for the community of blind Berliners. Gratefully, we trod along following a gentleman finding his way by help of the white stick.

This is my first visit to the Freie Uni. (and, in fact, to Berlin). I try to make myself familiar with the venues booked for the symposium, as Lindsey prints the first copies of the event programme. It’s difficult to imagine that all these things are actually going to take place here; that all these people will soon show up in person… Still two days to go.

For the afternoon, I decide to visit Haus am Waldsee further out in the Southwest part of the city, to see the exhibition we’ve added as an option for Sunday’s programme: Weathering by Beverly Buchanan.

Leaving the Freie Uni, I see a man writing something in the snow covering the windshield of a yellow car, then continuing to the next one to leave another message, before he strolls on along the road… Arriving at the Rathausplatz, I realize today is January 27th – the International Holocaust Remembrance Day. 

The Haus am Waldsee turns out to be a museum of modest proportions, a patrician villa within a large English garden, dedicated mainly to contemporary art since 1946. The ongoing exhibition – works by Black American Artist & Diva Beverly Buchanan (1940-2015) and London/Amsterdam-based artist Ima-Abasi Okon touches me deeply. Buchanan’s equally headstrong and compassionate way of moving forward as an artist, bringing forth the dignity of vernacular architecture in rural US Georgia (and thus, of its builders and dwellers) and carrying out toilsome projects rooted in experiential understanding of power structures and history; paired with the walls painted by Okon with bee pollen soaked in water, in a colour floating between dirt and gold, and conveying a heavenly scent through the light-filled spaces.

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In the evening, Remoteness team member Tinka arrives from New York City and we move into the hostel apartment that Lindsey has provided for us. Tomorrow will be a busy day…