• Thu 20 10 2016 •
Your Body Is the City (exercises in mediumship) Federica Bueti

There are foreigners in the house. The house is a body, the body is a city populated by many, different voices. Who are they, what do they want? How do they speak to us? How do we speak through them? Over the centuries, mediumship has been associated with spirit channelling, with the works of shamans, jugglers, sorceress and hysterics: the shamans turn themselves into little birds, the witches unleash unknown forces, and the hysterics become the embodiment of society, of a dangerous symbolic mobility. But artists, dancers, poets and writers are medium too. They use their bodies (of works) as passage – from body to body, from bodies into objects, from individual to collective, from reality to fiction–and as a mode of relation, a way of getting in touch with the world of things and spirits. Mediumship is a matter of fine-tuning: a medium has fined-tuned her perception and is able to feel or hear the thoughts, voices and impressions coming from others, she lets the other speaks through her while her ‘I’ slips out of itself. What I mean here with mediumship is an embodied, relational mode of knowledge.

How to become medium to one’s own and others’ practices, and voices? How to breath, listen, read, sing and speak with the voice of others? When and in what ways does a practice open up the possibilities for encounters? And, what kind of knowledge is produced? How to invoke all the others that inhabit us, that live with us, in our practices? How do we see and portray ourselves through others? Within the framework of this year Katarina Zdjelar’s project Reconstruction as Construction: Tanz für Kathe Kollwitz for the Youth Academy, during the one-day workshop we will look at the examples of German dancer and choreographer Dore Hoyer, the work of French Feminist author Hélène Cixous and Italian Feminist writer Carla Lonzi who have been thinking through and experimenting with the possibilities of turning themselves into a medium for other voices and practices. By looking at the work of these women artists and writers as well as by using our own experiences and practices as departing point the workshop will address questions of mediumship, de-personalisation, objectification and embodiment, and the construction of genealogies.

Together, we will engage in an exercise in mediumship – in breathing, listening, reading, singing and speaking with the voice of others.

Federica Bueti is a Berlin-based writer, curator and researcher whose practice deals with investigating the politics of participation in curatorial practices. Bueti founded and directed the online thematic platform PIANOmagazine.org, and less/express, a fanzine commissioned by the American Academy in Rome. She is founder and editor-in-chief of ...ment, a journal for contemporary culture, art and politics (journalment.org). Bueti worked as exhibition assistant at the Alighiero e Boetti Foundation in Rome. From 2008–2010 Bueti collaborated with RAM radioartemobile in Rome, a non-profit organization active in the promotion of and experimentation on sound. Bueti completed her BA in Media Theory and Communication Studies at Libera Università di Lingue e Comunicazione, IULM, Milan. In 2007 the MA in Curating Contemporary Art at the Brera Academy, Milan, and in 2009 the first Gwangju Biennale Curatorial Course, an annual curatorial course organized by Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju, South Korea.