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…

Duplicity / Duplicität Symposium (Day 000)

art, recent work, upcoming

Still a couple of days to go before the opening on Thursday. Preparations…

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Ice on the tracks delayed train traffic throughout Denmark and Germany yesterday, and offered plenty of time to make name tags from scrap paper and safety pins.

Finally, a warm welcome and a tasty meal in Berlin, followed by the final (?) proofreading of the symposium programme.

Download the full programme here:
Duplicity/Duplicität Winter Symposium Programme

Looking forward: 2026

uncategorized

Looking forward, I see hope.

No matter how chaotic, violent and confusing the present, the Earth still travels with the Universe. Snow still falls in the North – sometimes. Birds come to the feeder.

I am connected to people living under conditions of war, of oppression and of poverty; they resist. As long as they do, I cannot give up.

I see acts of care and kindness. I have the freedom to support others; to contribute to my neighbours, to the human and the more-than-human.

I see hope, like the full moon shining in the winter night; like snow lightening the darkness; crystallizing swiftly like ice fractals.

2025: Looking back

art, painting

Looking back, I see the flow of time. I light a candle in the stillness of the winter night. Countless starry points shine back at it from inside my heart, connecting me with somebody just across the road, as well as with other, more faraway places… with Stockholm, Fulltofta and Toulouse; with Kyiv, Järna, and Ermetzhof; with Bengaluru, Berlin, and New York; with Tyresö, Tokyo and Turku…

A constellation of love, friendship, creativity and care.

 

Frank’s Itinerary

January: the past year began with the maps of Robertho and Frank finally completed. I was invited to write an article on the Mapping Praxis project, for a “special issue” of an art journal, and took it as an incitement to collect my thoughts on maps and mapping.

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February: with the mapping text more or less finished, I realized that the journal that issued the invitation might not be quite the high-standard scientific publication that it claimed to be. In the end, I decided to withdraw the article, to instead take up the more rewarding work of making another map… This one, again, presented me with new challenges. The story of “I” – my partner in dialogue – was layered in ways that the preceding ones weren’t; I chose to add an underlying lining, visible only in certain places; and to insert “zoom-in” spots, using the sketchwork that “I” had provided me with during our first conversation. It took quite a few tries, and some emailing, to make the map resonate with the emotions and conceptualizations of my conversation partner.
And on February 22nd, I had the honour to meet street artist Gamlet Zinkivskyi from Charkiv on one of his sparse visits outside Ukraine – giving an artist talk at the “Ukraine Culture Now” event.

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March: in the first days of the month, the Praxis of Social Imaginaries study circle held its last gathering at the Sigtuna Foundation. Parallel with reading and discussing Olaus Magnus’ A Description of the Northern Peoples, ideas of how to launch a continued study circle emerged from informal conversations…
On the last day of the gathering, I was approached by fellow participant Titi, wanting to share her story for another embroidered map – a task that I happily welcomed. I also had the opportunity to reconnect with Obinna, and ask him some complementary questions about his itinerary (which was now next in turn for a visualization). This time, the challenge came explicitly from my partner in dialogue: Obinna’s map had to be a three-dimensional one, since his native place is in the mountainous parts of Southeast Nigeria. Recalling the chest-like world model of the 6th century traveler and Christian monk Cosmas Indicopleustes, I immediately began working with it on returning home. A partial sun eclipse happened on March 29th, and I could watch it while making a cardboard maquette… which sparked the idea of “half a yellow sun” on the gable of the chest (I then hadn’t read the book with the same title by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie).

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April: a six weeks’ teaching commission began, leaving little time for the Mapping Praxis project. As spring flowers came to bloom, I managed to make the vaulted papier-mâché lid of the chest, though.
And to learn to know the folk high school class was – as always – a joy; this type of education very much promotes care, curiosity and collaborative approaches… My presentation on the institutional theory of art (aka the art world theory) was met with immediate and creative response.

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In mid-May, the teaching commission was finished, and I could go back to the mappings. Now Obinna’s chest was assembled, and a 3D mountain was made to fit inside. I decided to use egg tempera for the painting, and tried out a floral design, borrowed from an African textile and reminding of a hibiscus flower. It turned out that Obinna highly approved of Chimamande Ngozi Adichie’s novel – and so, the sun was there to stay on his map.  
As the planning for a continuation of the Praxis circle proceeded, I also attended Researching Imaginaries;  an online lecture programme launched by the Centre for Art and the Political Imaginary at HDK-Valand (Gothenburg University) and the Royal Institute of Art (Stockholm). The programme stretched over five days, presenting interfaces between politics and contemporary art ,explored by artistic researchers from Eastern and Southern Europe as well as the Nordics.

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June is a very busy time in the garden. Nevertheless, the lid of Obinna’s chest got painted, too – in lapis lazuli blue.

 

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July: traveling to Jyväskylä for the Nordic Summer University Summer session 2025, where our proposal for a new study circle, under the title of Studies in Remoteness, was finally presented. Initiated by Dr. Lindsey Drury and the working team in early March, the proposal now got approved by the NSU Board, and by the General Assembly of NSU members on July 26th. Along with Lindsey, I found myself study coordinator for the three coming years.

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In August, I took a day in Åbo / Turku, to meet again with Obinna, Titi and Dorcus of the Praxis circle. Returning home, I had gathered more information to be visualized in the Mapping Praxis itineraries. I could also improve “I’s” itinerary with some tiny animals made out of wood… and finish my reading of Half a Yellow Sun.

*



September: the lapis lazuli lid of Obinna’s itinerary somehow called me back to studio painting; I took a couple of weeks off from the Mapping Praxis project, and spent time with a blue / orange Human Being Image.

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October: the Remoteness team was gaining momentum, with bi-weekly online meetings. It remains the working group, where study planning and connected tasks are constantly processed; meanwhile, the executive bits are mainly the work of coordinators. In October, we published our very first Call for Participation for the 2026 Winter Session – a three days’ symposium set to happen in Berlin in late January.
The last days of October – during the autumn break – I spent in Igelsta primary school, doing maintenance work on Star Roads, the commission I had for the city of Södertälje in 2018. Seven years later, there’s still no deliberate damage done to it, but quite some wear and tear. (After all, these kids are teenagers!)

The autumn break stretched into the first days in November, and I worked through the weekend to finish my work before school started again. Unexpectedly, I found myself sharing the space with several dozens of young basket players – as it turned out that the city of Södertälje proudly hosted an annual basket cup finale for schoolkids, and Igelsta was one of the venues. We went along well, though, and I accomplished my task in time (more or less).

Sadly,  one of these days a young person was killed nearby the school . No basket player, certainly, but a former student at Igelsta school – one of the kids that may have been sitting in the space that I now was renovating. On the short walk from the school to the train station, I passed a place where candles were lit for him. I stayed a while, sharing the moment with some of his friends.

May peace be upon his memory. May no other kid have to suffer his fate.

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December: I had three short-term commissions for the folk high school this autumn – the last one being to give an introduction to lino cutting. I took this as an occasion to refresh my experience in lino print, and realized that this technique could be useful for the making of Titi’s itinerary. As for Obinna’s map, I now had to look into the ancient Nigerian Nsibidi scripture, which I knew nothing about before.

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A year passed. Encounters, conversations, experiences and emotions finding their way into images and objects – while Earth still travels silently and swiftly with the Universe.