Tanzquartier Wien

Raisa Kabir’s work draws on textile mobilities, embodied archives, and geographies of anti-colonial resistance. In this workshop, participants will learn how to use back strap looms tied to the body to create woven cloth between each other and fixed points in space. Material Bodies is a proposal to engage with one’s own body and with others, to explore the physical and spiritual tensions and connections between bodies, spaces, and land through the production and labour of weaving cloth.

In this session, Susana Ojeda invites participants to reflect on the power of diasporic communities to invoke knowledge and collaborative learning with more-than-human beings. Through screening the short film Moskitos, we will open a collective dialogue on some of the themes it explores – such as the power of community regeneration practices, decolonial interventions within the Viennese socio-political landscape, and the collaborative possibilities for learning alongside more-than-human entities. Moskitos depicts the ruins of European colonial civilisatory ambitions: a portal to a world and a future without us, in which other species flourish, and the earth reclaims her territory. A visual manifesto of an archaeology of a capitalist civilisation that failed. Moskitos, though, survived!

On 29 April 2006, a twenty-foot boat was spotted off the south-eastern coast of Barbados. On board, eleven bodies were found by the coastguards, preserved and desiccated by the sun and salt water. The ghost ship was adrift for four months on the Atlantic Ocean. It set sail on Christmas day in Praia in the Cape Verde Islands, full of migrants from Senegal, Guinea-Bissau, and Gambia en route to the Canary Islands. Each of these men paid £890 for their place on the boat.

This is an inadequate telling of this story that draws on the materials and tools at hand to make sense of the complicity of weather, ocean currents and state violence in the journey of this ship. Hovering between the film and the essay form is a questioning of the adequacy of the measuring of histories and affects connected to crossing, languages to make evident the materiality of the sea, and the both measurable and immeasurable horror contained in the figure of the ghost ship.

Esra and Enes Özmen, aka EsRAP, are two siblings from Vienna’s 16th district, Ottakring. The duo successfully produce hip-hop with German-Turkish lyrics that address topics such as identity, feeling foreign in their own country on account of a post-migrant background, rap as resistance, and being a woman in the male-dominated hip-hop scene. The usual allocation of roles is reversed with EsRAP: Esra delivers hard and fast rhymes, while Enes provides the sensitive-melodic vocal parts. Musically speaking, EsRAP find inspiration in the Turkish-Middle Eastern genre Arabesque, which they like to combine with modern beats.

In 2019, they released their debut album Tschuschistan, followed by Mamafih in 2022, and in collaboration with Gasmac Gilmore, the duo released …weil sie Wien nicht kennen in a sold-out Wiener Konzerthaus in 2023. EsRAP’s current live gigs feature a selection of their previously released songs. Plus an extra helping of charm, Ottakring-style wit and great rapport with the audience.

Geteilte Welten is a multisensory intervention in the memorial landscapes of the Berlin Tiergarten. The project intentionally jumbles up the various Holocaust monuments and other public sites in their manifold interdependencies, thereby linking (hi)stories of the Third Reich with (hi)stories of colonialism and migration. Through the interplay of different forms of knowledge and perception, Geteilte Welten (Shared/Divided Worlds) creates new approaches for communal remembrance and grief.

The workshop explores ways to correlate different (hi)stories of violence in a non-competitive, non-hierarchical way. Can embodied multisensory approaches break through such thoroughly solidified, disconnected narratives?

What are the hopes and dreams for a society based on solidarity? Cana Bilir-Meier’s cinematic, performative and text-based works move at the intersections of archival work, text production, historical research, contemporary media reflexivity and archaeology. This Makes Me Want to Predict the Past – Becoming a Storyteller shows how personal and collective memory and history can be linked through poetry, music, sculpture and film. How can we tell personal stories about resistance and resilience, and how can we anchor them in the collective memory and pass them on to the generations to come?

What happens when diaspora enters art education? How do we choose words and concepts to adequately translate lived experiences of migration, exile, and displacement? What are the effects of institutionalising and ‘departmentalising’ multifaceted diasporic histories and aesthetics? How do we choose methods that might grasp messy, entangled, complex diasporic realities? What enters a diasporic bibliography or curriculum, and what remains unsaid? How can the students’ personal experiences of diasporic belonging become part of – without being absorbed into – a formalised teaching-and-learning process?

This panel invites three researchers and educators specialising in different fields of art and culture and affiliated with different institutions to share their modes of working, thinking and sharing while navigating diaspora.

In this session, she combines workshop, talk, and DJ set in one continuous exploration of flow through music, movement, and self-expression. Participants are invited to engage with their creative potential, exploring how we can move fluidly through different versions of ourselves. The workshop part will focus on discovering individual and collective flow within bodily expression and deepening the connection between music and self-awareness. The session will conclude with a DJ set featuring live singing by guest vocalist Girishya Stella Kurazikubone, creating a further shade of embodied sound. Whether you come to ask questions, move together, or simply listen, the space is open for you to connect, flow and transform.