Diagrams of Friction #5: awakening

atmospheric preview with THE AGENCY and screening by Ane Hjort Guttu

01.08.17, 7pm at Naunynstrasse 53, 10999 Berlin

„Shape. Transform. Fight. This is beyond fitness. This is beyond enhancement.“ (THE AGENCY)

Is it possible that there is now – more then ever – space for a global protest movement? “This Place is Every Place” pictures the unfulfilled hope that the Arab Spring would be the big change. Yet, in Sweden everything stays the same.
Maybe Medusa Bionic Rise can provide a solution? THE AGENCY is looking for the shift coming from technologies of the self – imagining new configurations of bodies and technologies.

7pm
“Wake-up Drill” by THE AGENCY

8pm
talk with the THE AGENCY

9pm
“This Place is Every Place” by Ane Hjort Guttu

In „Wake-up Drill“ THE AGENCY gives an insight in the preparation for their upcoming performance “Medusa Bionic Rise“ which deals with a trans-humanistic fitness movement engaging in radical ways of self-optimization and lifelogging: Have you ever questioned the nature of your body´s reality?

„This Place is Every Place“ (2014) by Ane Hjort Guttu is a short fiction; a dialogue between two women in the suburbs of Stockholm; a study of the relationship between political and personal crises. The Arab spring is a backdrop for their conversation, and the film puts forward a connection between the global protest movements and the riots in the Swedish suburbs.

THE AGENCY (since 2015) works post-pragmatically with the phenomena of neoliberalism and offers ambivalent solutions aka performances. Their work deals with technologies of the self, post-human proximity and alienation. Their upcoming production Medusa Bionic Rise opens in Basel at 31. August 2017. THE AGENCY is Magdalena Emmerig, Belle Santos, Rahel Spöhrer and Yana Thönnes.

Ane Hjort Guttu is an artist, writer and curator based in Oslo. Through video works, picture collections, sculpture and photography her recent work has focused on the issues of power and freedom in the Scandinavian post-welfare state. Her work has been shown at South London Gallery, Kunsthaus Zürich and Images Festival, Toronto. Hjort Guttu also writes analytical as well as poetical texts that have been published at Sternnberg Press, e-flux journal and Frieze Magazine.

an ethnographic archive of digital distribution

Often imagined as a pensive white man, wearing clothes in earthy colors, an odd hat and a rugged leather bag with an infamous notebook, Boris Malinowski fit the description of the ethnographer. Yet, his notebooks offer unexpected insights:

“Today, Monday, 9.20.14, I had a strange dream; homo-sex, with my own double as partner. Strangely autoeurotic feelings; the impression that I’d like to have a mouth just like mine to kiss, a neck that curves just like mine, a forehead just like mine (seen from the side)” ¹.

One week after his arrival at Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea in 1914, a day after Malinowski began writing his diaries, a lifelong struggle started: homophily, the radical love of the same. In the face of extreme segregation – being all by himself in the tropics, not speaking the language of the indigenous, overwhelmed by ‘insomnia, overtaxed heart and nervousness,’ – he starts to feel desire for himself. It is this specific form of love for the same enhanced by narcissism that emerges when facing the radically different.
After every ‘jungle’ has been conquered by global capitalism in the last century, referring to Malinowski’s experience of homophily appears unfitting. However, autoeroticism has only shifted in the face of technology: From self-love in the face of the other to self-love without the other. Reality is organized in discrete units – ”digital islands of isolation that are drifting further apart each day.“ In discriminating accurately through their binarity, digits surround us with comfort and uniformity. Malinowski’s feverous jungle of endless depth and extraneousness has turned into seamless surfaces comfortably excluding the unknown. Engaged in this cosy architecture we find ourselves in Gated Communities. Personalized interfaces endure into sameness – we are encircled by ourselves.

Malinowski’s diary is both a space for ethnographic exploration and a documentation of homophilic ‘friction’ in its attempt to overcome his autoerotic segregation. warehouse aims to elaborate on this in changed socio-technical conditions. warehouse explores autoerotic segregation ethnographically and archives practices countering homophilies. From June to October warehouse will publish essays, artists’ moving images, interviews and performances on a weekly basis. Malinowski attempted to regulate and organize his struggles through the means of observing and writing on paper – warehouse will do so in offering a diagram of strategies countering homophily through frictional insertions: [entropy], [pray], [home], [adobe], [soft-fiction], [stranded]. A geometry to map a new normal; a topography for overcoming autoeroticism.

Fußnoten

Malinowski, Broniwslaw: A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term, London: The Athlone Press, London (1967), 12-13 ↩