NaturArbeit – Reading and sound art
July 20, 2024 | 19:30 – open end | in the allotment garden (Google Maps Link)
Curated by Carla Schäfer and Sandro Simon and the AvantGarden collective in cooperation with MESH. Drinks for a donation.
Exploitation and alienation of the self and from nature – this is how work is often described and experienced under capitalism. At the same time, work is not possible without nature. In this field of tension, four artists in NaturArbeit use text and sound to trace practices of resistance and solidarity, the merging of boundaries between body and nature, or more-than-human care. In doing so, they show that, precisely because of the climate catastrophe and growing social inequality, we must also rethink our working relationships in order to overcome our alienation from nature and from ourselves.
Antonia Alessia Virginia Beeskow (sound art) studied archaeology, applied theater studies and sound and reality in Cologne, Gießen and Düsseldorf, where she also lives. She is the winner of the NRW Förderpreis 2023 in the music category. As an artist, sound designer, author and performer, Beeskow works in the independent scene, radio play, podcast, installation, experimental film and theater and is co-founder of the collective Sailor Tune. In her work between sound, text and performance, she is interested in sampling, acousmatics, fragmentation and noise as hauntological narrative methods and atmospheric, affirmative use of different media as well as the archive as an artistic form. For NaturArbeit, she approaches the garden as a space between nature, imagination and artificiality and uses field recordings, samples and sound textures. Her processing of the sonic material becomes a sonic stroll and transports further plants, viewing the garden as a phantasmagorical clearing.
Carla Kaspari (prose) studied literature and musicology in Bonn and Paris. She lives in Cologne and works as a freelance author. Her texts appear in various publications and formats. Her debut novel “Freizeit” was published by Kiepenheuer & Witsch in 2022. For NaturArbeit, she presents excerpts from her second novel, which revolves around the themes of climate catastrophe and artistic work in a future dystopia and is set in one of the last remaining gardens in Europe.
Lisa James (prose) studied Media Arts and before that Professional Writing and English Literature and Writing in Pittsburgh, USA, and Cologne, where she now lives as an artist and author. Her poetry and prose have appeared in the literary journals DAS GEDICHT, ‘apostrophe and WORD, among others. Her short film Hallimaschkomplex was shown at the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival 2021. Her poetry cycle “Die Leerstelle, das bist du” was awarded 3rd place and the Audience Award of the Cologne Prize for Young Literature 2022. In 2021 she was Artist in Residence at Burg Hülshoff – Center for Literature near Münster and part of the open poems of the Haus für Poesie in Berlin. She was co-editor of the 5th edition of the Kurze Anthologie with a focus on multilingualism and translation. She works with text, installation and (moving) image. For NaturArbeit she will read from drafts of her debut novel about laboratory experiments and practices of care with and for plants.
Lorena Simmel (prose) lives in Berlin and studied Literary Writing and European Literatures in Biel/Bienne, Berlin and Warsaw. She has published poems, prose and essays in EDIT, Neue Rundschau and STILL, among others, and was a scholarship holder of the 16th Klagenfurt Literature Course. She received the Berlin Senate’s working grant for literature for her debut novel “Ferymont” before becoming a literature scholarship holder of the Jürgen Ponto Foundation in 2022. For NaturArbeit, she will be reading from “Ferymont”, in which she sensitively deals with the realities of life for seasonal workers in Swiss agriculture and their precarious working conditions.
Tanya Gautam (Poetry) lives in Cologne where she is a Doctoral Researcher at the Multidisciplinary Environmental Studies in the Humanities (MESH) research hub, after having studied English Literature, Philosophy and Psychology as well as English Studies in Pune, India, and Heidelberg. She is the founder of Moonlit Brooks, a spoken word poetry project and multidisciplinary event series. In her work, she explores informal and non-formal practices of cultural education, focusing in particular on ways of cultivating multispecies community futures through music and literature based practices. As a spoken word poet, Tanya explores the beauty and brutality in living, belonging and passing. For NaturArbeit, Tanya will perform some pieces that present her recent experiments in performing with more-than-human others, if they feel up to it.
AvantGarden
AvantGarden is a collective that organizes seasonal cultural events in Cologne. We started out in a garden in the west of Cologne and in recent years we have grown into various spaces in the city. Every summer, we organize concerts, film evenings, readings, lectures and performances in allotment gardens, backyards, former farms, wasteland, discarded MacDonalds or an old bank.
Our approach is interdisciplinary; we are interested in diverse forms of artistic expression, scientific discourse, political practice and culinary art and experiment with unusual settings and constellations. To this end, we also rely on cooperation with other initiatives, groups and individuals, on discussion and exchange, pay attention to low-threshold access and thus also try to create space for moments of community across differences.
In the urban (in-between) space, we look at topics such as ecology, coexistence and utopia and create loud and quiet sounds. We create a stage for local artists and perform in Cologne’s peripheral urban space on both sides of the Rhine, feel our way into empty spaces and bring people together in places that would otherwise go unnoticed.
