SSMF 2022: “Pause”
Rest & Renewal
How can we rest at a time like this? This panel addresses pause as rest and its potential for renewal in the midst of capitalist labor expectations. From hammock dreamscapes at the Piazza Roma, to poetic prose on shorelines of the island of Antigua, the projects in this panel show what the body knows to do. From timescapes spanning a decade on one single city block, to unrestful artistic practices during Covid, the projects help us make peace with time and space.
Moderated by Florence Madenga, University of Pennsylvania
Saturday, March 26, 9:30 AM — 10:45 AM Eastern
Riposo / Pasithea
Lena Chen
Carnegie Mellon University
with Michael Neumann (Riposo) & Isadora Söderström (Pasithea)
Riposo is a site-specific installation at the Piazza Roma in Vimercate exploring rest and relaxation as politically subversive antidotes to our current system of production. The city square is surrounded by banks, restaurants, and other businesses. Riposo disrupts this system of profit and dominance with a hammock installation in which the public is invited to rest, meditate, and sleep. The hammock is designed with a fabric that features the Piazza Roma digitally manipulated into a surreal dreamscape.
In Pasithea, The artists carry a hammock from MUST Museum to the city center of Vimercate. They walk clockwise in Piazza Roma as church bells ring. By interrupting the town’s commercial activity through public acts of meditation and sleep, they use rest to become receptive to inner wisdom and to spiritually fortify themselves.
Michael Charles Neumann is an interdisciplinary artist who has created photography, sculpture, and installations. He has been in playful and critical engagement with the emerging technologies to find where virtual and physical space overlap. Exploring bodies and virtual magic, his most recent body of work creates a virtual body through a series of analog and digital procedures that question the boundaries of our bodies and experiences.
Isadora aka Cristina Söderström, was born in Sweden, grew up in England and Spain, and lived in Berlin before moving to Cork, Ireland. Building upon a theatrical background, her latest artistic research focuses on the crossroad between theatre, performance art, and rituals. She has toured and performed internationally, most recently in Sex Toy, a feminist play about sexual objectification of women.
No Theories for the Liquidity of this Desire
Amber Rose Johnson
University of Pennsylvania
No Theories for the Liquidity of this Desire is inspired by Dionne Brand’s writing, in Map To The Door of No Return, on desire as a navigational tool for diasporic subjects. In the text and in the film, desire is mobilized as a method of embodied knowledge production. The film also draws influence from the prompts of Alexis Pauline Gumbs’, Dub: Finding Ceremony. Filmed on the shorelines of the island of Anguilla in March 2021, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the visual work captures a ritual practice performed by a female figure with salt, stone, and sand at the ocean’s edge. The visuals of the film are overlaid with original poetic prose on desire, misdirection, and what the body knows.
Reflecting, Realigning and Rearing
Indu Lalitha Harikumar
When the pandemic began, there was only panic, inside my head, and outside in the world. In the first year of the pandemic there was no sense of security, everything was changing constantly. Financial security loomed large. What if one of us got the dreaded Corona at a time where hospital beds were few, and ones in private hospitals were too expensive. Somehow to cut down all the anxiety, I paused to look at larger problems other than me. I used my Instagram account to raise funds for migrant labourers, which made me feel that I was being useful, I felt I was in control, it made me not worry about the what ifs. It somehow made me feel like someone would look after us if Corona came closer home. Was I able to stop work? Not at all. The Pandemic has meant reflection, reinventing and showing up for others and me. Slowly, as one year became two, I began to pause. I went deeper within, and seeking a space of rest began looking inwards rather than everywhere else. My art became a way of thinking through, documenting, and sharing that inner journey. At the same time, I began to slowly amass the mental resources to work on a longer project, a story of my grandfather, that intimately links my personal history with what is not there in history books.
MILWAUKEE NIGHT AND DAY
Dick Blau
University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee
Yinan Wang
Temple University
A photofilm. Distilled from ten years of looking at one square block in the middle of an American city. A film made from stills that challenges them to move. Beauty, pathos, and turmoil, all in the course of a Joycean day.
SSMF 2022 