Antje Budde
Associate Professor at the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies (CDTPS), University of Toronto; since 2018 artistic research director of the Digital Dramaturgy Labsquared (DDL2), founder of several experimental arts collectives in Berlin and Toronto; studied in Berlin at Alexander von Humboldt-University and in Beijing, Central Academy of Drama (中央戏剧学院).
Antje Budde is a queer-feminist multi-media scholar-artist, founder of creative collectives and experimental labs, whose scholarly, community-building and creative praxis-based research across (live)media and histories is published in conventional and non-conventional forms. Engaging with the artistic praxis of “being for/with others” and provoking research of A/I or artistic intelligence, Budde has collaborative experience with researchers outside the humanities.
Multi-media workshops/performances/courses are focused on building agency, literacy and transferrable skills based on A/I (artistic intelligence), queering the Brechtian apparatus and multi-modal embodied learning, collective creation, social labor, materiality and making, critical creativity, and dialectical perfections of queer failure. Works are based on principles of togetherness (respect, relationality, interdisciplinary, cross-cultural), laughter (self-reflection, de-centering, dialectics, curiosity, play, silliness), and radical slowness (labor, accepting that human learning takes/gives time). Recent projects focussed on media anarcheology, collective creation, imagination/imaging, artful engineering, AI, ecology, sustainability, student mental health, multi-linguality, and Indigenous anti-colonial collaborations.
Artistic research (multi-media performances, videos, installations, lecture performances) was presented at international festivals, praxis-based conferences and art educational institutions in Brazil, Canada, Germany, Latvia, Serbia, Singapore, USA.
Student involvement as creative and organizational partners is very important and students have collaborated in many capacities both in arts and research projects as well as publications and were invited to international travels, continuing a praxis Budde experienced when a student back in the day.
Human Skin. Digital Mask.
Exploring A/I (artistic intelligence), building decolonial allyships and queerly knowing otherwise
This presentation traces entanglements between global capitalism, real-existing socialism/Stalinism, colonialism, technology and sciences in/as performances of critique with particular attention to creative, queer-feminist, decolonial, anti-racist attempts of allyship in the works of the Digital Dramaturgy Labsquared (DDL2). Alluding to the body’s disjointed double and embodied theatricality (dialectics of person/persona, skin/mask, body/avatar, material/symbolic) in Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin. White Mask or Peau noire, masques blancs (1952) autoethnographic elements situating and contextualizing artistic research will be interwoven with larger historical constellations and critique followed by concrete examples for artistic research in the DDL2.
Fanon - activist, psychiatrist and political philosopher - both experienced and demonstrated the detrimental effects of racism, dehumanization and colonization on the mental and physical health of black people affected. And most importantly, he offered alternatives when understanding the socio-economic constructedness, the making of blackness and whiteness as a result of racist mechanisms, blatant exploitation and disregard for human life. Create, don’t imitate (the oppressors), could be understood as a most relevant battle cry then and now. Or in short: do your own thing and don’t be afraid!
Fanon was an important trailblazer and innovative thinker in connecting the psychopolitics of racism with alternative ideas of liberation and healing in medical sciences. Antonin Artaud, could be thought of as Fanon’s artist-double in many fruitful ways. Certainly, Fanon as a scienrist and philosopher, much earlier than Michel Foucault or Gille Deleuze and Fèlix Guattari, diagnosed capitalism’s essentially schizophrenic and sickening nature.
Colonialism as a function of capitalism has newly built and/or reinforced already existing oppressive systems globally that purposefully complicate just and friendly relationships and community building between people along the lines of class, gender, ethnicity, race, religion, climate change and wealth. Traditions of social hacking orders have locally been reinforced and globally newly engineered. Social engineering and emerging technologies play a vital role in these processes, currently accelerated through highly biased algorithms that imitate and reinforce power politics that are in operation at large. How to understand these dynamics and what to do about them? How to create agency, digital literacy, dignity and mutual respect through embodied skills and knowledge-making that can inform democratic decision-making and vision-making? Using the Brechtian concept of the amateur – open-minded learners unimpressed by oppressive “standards of the industry” or the implications of the dominant order – the DDL2 and its predecessor DDL offer a creative and collaborative thinking machine or what Heiner Müller called a “laboratory for social imagination”. Sibylle Berg’s ideas on GRM brainfuck are certainly inspirational when resisting brain rot as are Sarah Ahmed’s Willful Subject, Halberstam’s Queer Art of Failure and many more. Furthermore, current worldbuilding in black futurism and earlier science fiction – i.e. Octavia Butler – as well as black and Indigenous creativity in the performing arts, science and AI technology in Canada in the context of struggles with colonial legacies will be addressed.
In addition, the keynote will introduce guiding lab principles like togetherness, radical slowness and laughter as well as the aesthetic-political provocation of A/I or artistic intelligence as a somewhat satirical, rather serious and purposeful queer gesture of defiance in the context of hysterical buzz-wording of artificial intelligence and generative AI and its colonizing tendencies. Furthermore, concrete examples or case studies will be offered to show how creative projects are conceptualized, funded and materialized when employing creative praxis as a means of being for/with others.
Nashilongweshipwe
Nashilongweshipwe is a resident cultural worker, educator and writer at Owela Live Arts Collective Trust (previously known as Kaleni Kollectiv) since its inception in 2014 . As a performance artist, his practice and research interests are in African performance archives and public cultures of social movements. He obtained a PhD in Performance Studies from the University of Cape Town and was previously trained at University of Witwatersrand and the University of Namibia. His musical and performance art work has been performed widely at festivals, museums, theatres and archives in India, Germany, Switzerland, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Cameroon, Senegal, United States of America and Namibia. He is a Lecturer in Drama and Theatre Arts at the University of Namibia where he trains theatre makers and teaches courses in performance, writing and applied theatre practices.
Archival F(r)ictions Between Museum Theatre and Digital Performance on the Namibian Genocide
Namibian contemporary artists are increasingly doing memory work that specifically deals with Germany’s colonial genocide of Nama, Ovaherero and San people in 1904-1908. This can be attributed to the current political moment in which calls for reparations have brought this history to the front. This turn to memory work in Namibian cultural production also reveals that contemporary artists in Namibia are experimenting with form and structure of performances, transgressing conventions of theatre and spoiling ‘neat images’ of realism and the linear story. This paper reflects on two site-related performances The Mourning Citizen and Ondaanisa yo pOmudhime (Dance of the Rubber Tree), as bodies of work that have been performed as museum theatre and digital performance. The presentation highlights how these two works of art staged in Namibia, Cameroon, Germany and online simultaneosly put various archives into conversation with each other in ways that are generative. The forms of museum site-relatedness and digital performance emphasise the rubbing together of embodied, spatial and institutional archives in productive ways. As such, these approaches offer alternative perspectives to memory work that are often lost in the margins and cracks of ‘official memory practice’.
