Every last Sunday of the month the Varia Library and the Rotterdam Electronica Depot hold Read & Repair events. Due to current circumstances, most of them have been in an online format. We invite you to visit our online space, make yourself comfortable, read or repair some things together, and share our thoughts and ideas.
In 2021 our Read & Repair sessions will be paired, we will take two months to explore one theme. During March and April 2021, we will be exploring the theme Sense-full Pedagogy. Sensory systems respond to stimuli and provide data for our perception. A sense is any of the systems involved in sensation. What do our senses read into? These sessions will choreograph unusual sources for us to read into, and care for the body that reads. Together we will ask how Sight, Sound, Smell, Taste, and Touch are part of learning.
On Sunday 25th April we have a READ with K MacBride followed by a REPAIR with Yun Lee.
READ
The text selection and our reading choreography in April was made by artist K MacBride.
K is an artist and editor. They work with performance, installation, writing, video, and event making, with and without institutions. Much of their practice focuses on relational entanglements, listening across and being attentive to difference, and working creatively towards an ethics of inseparability and interdependency. Collaboration and supportive practices are important to them; some of these look like art, some don’t. During times when they didn’t identify as an artist (and during times when they did) they worked in the care industry. They are currently undertaking PhD research, funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, at University of the Arts London with a research project titled “Listening as creative practice, listening and decolonial practices: plural methods, plural experiences.”
We'll be listening together to a recording of xwélméxw artist, writer, academic, and curator Dylan Robinson reading excerpts from his book "Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies" (2020, University of Minnesota Press) and from an essay in progress "Song Life." These recordings were made for the "Unsettling Scores" series curated by Liquid Architecture and are available here.
The session will involve:
- a short introductory grounding exercise
- time for listening to the readings together in our own spaces and sharing responses in an etherpad
- time for sharing in the pad after the listening part is finished
- (it will be possible to propose other materials for the group to listen to during the sharing)
For anyone not able to participate in real time in the session, the materials are avaialble to listen to or read before or afterwards. Sharing in the pad can happen before or after the time of the session too. K will check in on the pad for two days after the session.
For those who prefer to access the material in a textual format a transcript will be available from 23 April. Email info@varia.zone before then if you'd like to be sent a transcript.
There is no prior reading needed before we come together to Read, we experience the texts for the first time together and will send out a link for download during the event.
REPAIR
The Repair session of this theme is hosted by artist Yun Lee.
Yun Lee is an artist, performer, and curator whose work mostly engages with recording technology (the phonograph, score-making, the internet) to navigate shifting definitions of what being human is. Other works turn to acoustic phenomena to push the capacities of individual and collective sensorial experience.
Recently they have been working on the “School of Camouflage”, a research project looking at camouflage practices in visual, movement, and social cultural contexts. These practices include passing, deception, misdirection and masking.
School of Camouflage: Deception
Requirements: Internet connection, webcam, Among Us (Android, iOS, windows). If you cannot download the game for whatever reason, you can be one of the observers.
In this workshop, participants will be exploring principles of camouflage and deception, how they are effectively used in contexts including information warfare, how we can sense them, and how we can repurpose them in our own practices as artists/designers/technologists.
We will be playing (or observing) Among Us, an online multiplayer game based on teamwork and betrayal. We will draw from our experiences and observations from the game to come up with and discuss principles of camouflage and deception. We will then work with these principles to come up with strategies for our own work and daily life.
This workshop is for anyone who is interested in thinking, talking about, practicing strategies of camouflage.
Please drop us an email at info@varia.zone if you would like to join, as this workshop has a limited capacity.
About Among Us
Join your crewmates in a multiplayer game of teamwork and betrayal! Play with 4-10 players as you attempt to hold your spaceship together and return back to civilization. But beware...as there may be an alien impostor aboard!
One crewmate has been replaced by a parasitic shapeshifter. Their goal is to eliminate the rest of the crew before the ship reaches home. The Impostor will sabotage the ship, sneak through vents, deceive, and frame others to remain anonymous and kill off the crew.
While everyone is fixing up the ship, no one can talk to maintain anonymity. Once a body is reported, the surviving crew will openly debate who they think The Impostor is. The Impostor's goal is to pretend that they are a member of the crew. If The Impostor is not voted off, everyone goes back to maintaining the ship until another body is found. If The Impostor is voted off, the crew wins!
Download here:
https://innersloth.com/gameAmongUs.php
READ
Date: Sunday, 25th April 2021
Time: 11:00-13:00 CEST
Location: https://pad.vvvvvvaria.org/sense-full_pedagogy_song_life
NOTE: This reading session will be held in English.
REPAIR
Date: Sunday, 25th April 2021
Time: 16:00-18:00 CEST
Location: https://bbb.constantvzw.org/b/cri-yp7-stj-8oc
NOTE: This repair session will be held in English.
The further themes we'll be looking at in 2021 are Digital Solidarity, The Automated Body, Sense-full Pedagogy and Community Memory.
Read is alternatively guided by a Varia Library group member, the following Read (in the next month) is guided by a guest. Both sessions revolve around the same theme, with different texts and methods to read them. The guest Read session is accompanied a Repair session. The Repair session is a practical exploration of the same theme, led by a guest or a Rotterdam Eletronica Depot member. It is an active workshop you can experiment with at home, and one day in our Depot, when we can physically gather.
Our January-November 2021 programme is funded by Gemeente Rotterdam.