No play - Feministisches Trainingscamp No Play - Feminist Training Camp

Training programme:

Friday 13th May 2016, 20h,
Warm-up: Performance „π” by Las Hipókritas (span/engl)
In the exhibition space

El montaje π crea un espacio en el que el sonido se presenta en muchas de sus múltiples formas, desde el ruido más insoportable, pasando por la voz, hasta la melodía más dulce. Poesía y música se funden durante 50 minutos en los que las actuantes defienden un discurso surgido del pensamiento utópico feminista, creando así un espacio de reivindicación y lucha sin límites.

Se trata de poesía y música creadas por las actuantes durante más de 7 años de investigación y estudio feminista, literario y teatral. El nombre π hace referencia a la interminable lista de poemas que hemos escrito y seguimos escribiendo y a la infinita profundidad e importancia del discurso feminista en el mundo actual.

π is a space conjugated by sounds that can go from insufferable noise to the sweetest melody transiting through a field of voice. Poetry and music get distracted with each other in these 50 minutes when/where the actants defend a discourse that stems from feminist utopian thinking, drawing the lines of a limitless room for political demand and struggle.

The poetic and music materials in the piece are the result of 7 years of literary and theatrical feminist research by Las Hipókritas. The name, π, therefore addresses the endless list of poems resulting from such investigation, that have been written and are constantly written, addresses the incommensurable nature of feminist discourse and its importance in the moment we live in.

Friday 20th May 2016, 19h,
Opening and Performance „Lesbian Trash Queen“ by MC Xuparina (port/dt)

In this performance MC Xuparina declares the non-need of having a gender and she follows her true paradigms of a funk-pop-lesbian-trash warrior and reclaims the dress she once lost in a homage to the Queen of Samba.

MC Xuparina was born in a favela in the centre of Rio de Janeiro. As a child she was taught by her grandmother how to cook for a future husband. In the meantime, she was secretly making plans how to get rid of the enforcement of wearing a dress. Growing up, she went out on the streets to grab the mic to express herself in the funk scene. But as a MC, she was picked on by male musicians, who didn’t like a woman in the game. Since then, MC Xuparina proclaims herself as a black, lesbian against the oppressive system, and a defender of women’s justice.

Saturday 21st May 2016, 14-17h,
Workshop* „Feminist Repair Café“ (dt/eng)

by Elisa Garrote Gasch (Kunst-Stoffe e.V.) with Elektra, Flora Könemann & Birte Gerstenkorn (Flirtefunk)
Reparing electrical appliances, figuring it out together

more: flirtefunk.wordpress.com
www.there-is-something-wrong-with-the-view.net

Sunday 22nd May 2016, 20h,
Performance COOL FOR YOU: SEPARATISM (eng)

In her work, Vika Kirchenbauer discusses the troublesome nature of ‘looking’ and ‘being looked at’ as well as its affective impacts on the individual in larger contexts including labour within post-fordism and the experience economy, modern drone warfare and its insistence on unilateral staring, the power relationships of psychiatry, performer/spectator relations, contemporary art display and queer representational politics as well as the everyday life experience of ambiguously gendered individuals.
Her examination of enhanced modes of vision, institutional barriers and the casualties of political conviction finds further expression in COOL FOR YOU: SEPARATISM; a performance conceived especially for No play - Feminist Training Camp at nGbK.

COOL FOR YOU is the music/performance project of artist Vika Kirchenbauer
http://soundcloud.com/coolforyou
http://vk0ms.com

Tuesday 24th May 2016, 19h,
Listening event „Rhythm in the Archive“ by Andrea Zarza with Miranda Iossifidis (eng)

“No camera, no image or series of images can show these rhythms. It requires equally attentive eyes and ears, a head and a memory and a heart. A memory? Yes, in order to grasp this present otherwise than in an instantaneous moment, to restore it in its moments, in the movement of diverse rhythms.” - Henri Lefebvre

Join the curators of the ‘No Play Listening Lounge’ for a collective listening session and discussion on the themes that are audible in their selection of sound recordings. With an awareness that their selection is partial and fragmentary, they will use this as a point of departure for discussion in this listening session. Participants are invited to bring sounds and ideas about how to expand their selection.
The sound recordings in the listening lounge include field recordings, interviews, oral histories and contemporary music sourced from the British Library Sound Archive (London, United Kingdom), Pacifica Radio Archives (Los Angeles, U.S.A and other online archives and address the following themes: the reassuring female voice, self-defense, bodies and technology, reproductive labour, breaking things - resistance and the sounds of re-imagined futures.

Born in Madrid, Spain, Andrea Zarza Canova grew up between the U.S.A. and Spain. She currently lives in London where she works as Curator of World & Traditional Music and Audio Preservation Engineer at the British Library Sound Archive. She is also cataloguing the London Musicians’ Collective (LMC) Archive at the University of the Arts London and investigating the interplay between improvisation as a musical practice and the LMC’s functioning as a collective.
Miranda Iossifidis has recently finished a PhD in Urban Sociology at Goldsmiths College (London) and is currently writing about feminist science fiction and electronic music.

Friday 27th May 2016, 14-18h and 20h,
Haptic Technologies, Workshop + Mixed Performance Practice Performance by Noha Ramadan & guests (eng)

14-18h Haptic technologies
How we touch and how we are touched by the world informs how we act and in turn continue to perceive it. By working very specifically with touch we enable specific ways of perceiving and acting. Touch is a transfer of knowledge which occurs directly and in despite of ourselves, bypassing verbal and cognitive process.
At the beginning of this 4 hour session, we’ll lay down on the floor and seriously relax. Then by conversing with the principles of weight and bones and pressure, and through our skin and hands, we’ll charge up the body (including our perceptual apparatus) with information that offers us possibilities for movement that are different to what we might be used to. We’ll also use movement to explore the interrelationship between imaginative and material processes.

20h The Mixed Performance Practice Performance
Continuing the theme of ‘touch’, this performance/event brings together a group of artists who will attempt to perform their practices in an artificial and decidedly compromised situation of close proximity.

This (potentially noisy) co-habitation of dancers, a curator, a critic, a sound artist, a writer, a filmmaker and a visual artist, will be underwritten by a time-coded sequence of appearances, tasks and responsibilities. The event can only be speculative, and will find itself through testing the edges and behavior of different practices, which are simultaneously self-driven and completely dependent on the external situation. Hosted by someone addicted to knowledge but who owns none, the performers will somehow do what they usually do, bumping up against each other and attempting to communicate what we/they don’t yet know.

Noha Ramadan is a choreographer, performer and artist based in Amsterdam. She maintains a practice of perpetual digression, enacted through an interest in footnotes and their material counterparts in movement, text and visual forms.

Saturday 28th May 2016, 12-18h,
Workshop* „Bodies, Brains & Boundaries - Practice of Protection“ Part 1 (dt/eng)

Mutual empowerment for defending ourselves:
fighting back – being heard – supporting each other – celebrating our strength – share stories & strategies – exchanging tactics & techniques – figuring out individual strategies – learning skills to feel strong - getting ready to stay safe – overcoming inhibitions – understanding body mechanics – acknowledging our boundaries - speaking up & being loud - experiencing our capabilities – punching like a Grrrrrrl

… Finding ways of saying NO and making it mean NO cause our bodies are ours, our boundaries are not negotiable and we do not intend to take their shit anymore!

Open to all genders!

For those who just can’t get enough of the training or feel the need to talk through it all some more, we will be around and keep the space open for you an additional hour after the workshop ends.

Tuesday 31st May 2016, 19h,
Filmscreening „Born in Flames“ by Lizzie Borden (eng)

Friday 03rd June 2016, - 05th June.2016,
Workshop* „Collective FUTURISTIC SPELL!“ by Naomi Rincón Gallardo (eng)

Friday, 3 June, 17-20h

Saturday, 4 June, 12-18h

Sunday, 5 June, 14-18h

A 3 day-workshop exploring different strategies to collectively sketch a sci-fictional multi-lingual feminist spell.

Sunday 05th June 2016, 19-20h,
Listening event „No play – A Radio Play“ (eng)

by Anna Bromley & No play for reboot.fm - in the frame of “Lautstrom”

Tuesday 07th June 2016, 19h,
Filmscreening „A collectively curated filmscreening“ (eng)
by Cinenova Feminist Film and Video Distributor with guests Karolin Meunier and Sandra Schäfer

A screening of work from the Cinenova Feminist Film and Video Distributor London!
Programmed in collaboration with participants of the one-day workshop at No play Feminist Training Camp.

“Light Reading” by Lis Rhodes, 1978 – A series of still photographs to explore the language of presence and absence, of experience and history.
“Fireworks Revisited” by Bev Zalcock, 1991 – A lesbian re-working of Kenneth Anger’s homoerotic classic.
“Who takes the Rap - Immigration” by Lai Ngan Walsh, 1986 – The film covers the history of immigration law in Britain from 1903 to the present day. The voices of two women ‘rappers’ provide the commentary.
… and more!

The screening is followed by a discussion with Cinenova, No play and some of the workshop participants

Cinenova is a volunteer-run organisation based in London dedicated to preserving and distributing the work of women/feminist film and video makers. It was founded in 1991 following the merger of Circles and Cinema of Women, each formed in the early 1980s. Cinenova currently distributes over 500 titles that include experimental film, narrative feature films, artists’ film and video, documentary and educational videos made from the 1920s to the present.
What kind of skills or knowledge could Cinenova possibly contribute to a training camp: How to programme a feminist film screening? How to distribute women’s film and video? The collectively curated screening responds to NO PLAY’s call to negotiate and practice different strategies of resistance in different times – and asks what it means to actualise these images without historicising them.

http://cinenova.org

Friday 10th June 2016, 18h,
Reading „IN OUR OWN WORDS“ by International Women’s Space (eng)

Join the No play – feminist training camp for an evening with the International Women Space (IWS). We will get to know more about their important work as well as read collectively from their book “IN OUR OWN WORDS // IN UNSEREN EIGENEN WORTEN”. It was published in November 2015 and is a book where refugee women in Germany tell their own stories.
“IN OUR OWN WORDS // IN UNSEREN EIGENEN WORTEN” is a documentation of the lives and stories of refugee women in Germany – brave women who have fought difficult realities. The IWS approached the book-project in the Latin American tradition of testimonial literature – looking to amplify the voice of the voiceless.
The International Women Space is a feminist political group of migrant and refugee women in Germany. It was formed in 2012 within the occupation of the Gerhart-Hauptmann School in Berlin Kreuzberg. IWS challenges dominant knowledge structures and fights against discriminatory policies and practices, which oppose the emancipation of refugee and migrant women and all women. - https://iwspace.wordpress.com/

Saturday 11th June 2016, 19h,
Conversation „Partisan instead of Participation“ with Nora Sternfeld (eng)

The educator and curator Nora Sternfeld will engage in a conversation with the No Play working group and other visitors at the feminist training camp at nGbK. By looking at the usage of the figure of the partisan –to be regarded as taking a stance equally participative and reflexive, as well as anti-fascist and anti-racist– she will discuss the format and the implementation proposed by the No play Feminist Training Camp project.

Nora Sternfeld is professor for curating and mediating art, director of the curatorial program CuMMA at the Aalto University in Helsinki (cummastudies.wordpress.com) and co-director of /ecm — educating/curating/managing — Master Program in exhibition theory and practice at the University of Applied Arts Vienna (www.ecm.ac.at). She is co-founder and part of trafo. K, Office for Art Education and Critical Knowledge Production based in Vienna (w/Ines Garnitschnig, Renate Höllwart and Elke Smodics, www.trafo-k.at). Moreover she is part of Freethought, a platform for research, education, and production based in London (w/Irit Rogoff, Stefano Harney, Adrian Heathfield, Mao Mollona and Louis Moreno). In this context she is one of the curators of the Bergen Assembly 2016.

Tuesday 14th June 2016, 19h,
Filmscreening „Bambule“ by Ulrike Marie Meinhof (dt/eng U)

The 1970 television play Bambule portrays a few days in the lifes of teenage girls in a West Berlin children’s home, an authoritarian quasi-prison and center of classist, sexist, and heterosexist oppression. It follows them through different acts of dispersed and organized resistance against the institution. Pedagogy is understood as a center of conservative state ideology and the liberation movement that came out of the children’s homes in the 70s as important site of resistance. Bambule is the result of journalist Ulrike Meinhof’s detailed analysis of the fascist continuities institutionalized in homes like the Eichenhof in Reinickendorf, where the film was shot. Ten days before the film was scheduled to be aired, Ulrike Meinhof participated in the liberation of Andreas Baader, together with Irene Goergens, one of the girls she had met in the homes. They went underground as members of the RAF and the film was banned and not shown publicly before 1994.

Friday 17th June 2016, 14-20h,
Workshop* „Bodies, Brains & Boundaries - Practice of Protection“ Part 2 (dt/eng)

Mutual empowerment for defending ourselves:
fighting back – being heard – supporting each other – celebrating our strength – share stories & strategies – exchanging tactics & techniques – figuring out individual strategies – learning skills to feel strong - getting ready to stay safe – overcoming inhibitions – understanding body mechanics – acknowledging our boundaries - speaking up & being loud - experiencing our capabilities – punching like a Grrrrrrl

… Finding ways of saying NO and making it mean NO cause our bodies are ours, our boundaries are not negotiable and we do not intend to take their shit anymore!

Open to all genders!
The Participation in Workshop part 1 is not a requirement.

For those who just can’t get enough of the training or feel the need to talk through it all some more, we will be around and keep the space open for you an additional hour after the workshop ends.

Saturday 18th June 2016, - 19th June. 2016, (starts Saturday, 15h),
Workshop* „Being in Crisis Together“ (dt/eng)
by Feministische Gesundheitsrecherchegruppe Berlin (Julia Bonn, Alice Münch, Inga Zimprich)

Workshop input 3 to 6 pm and subsequent overnight stay (with pre-registration, limited number of participants, de/en or en)

In this workshop we want to introduce methods and exercises from our research on feminist therapy forms and groups, and try them out together. What can we learn from feminist approaches to therapy for our collaborations as cultural workers? Which assumptions, but also concrete references are important for us today? With inputs and exercises we want to figure out which roles women‘s spaces, common agreements, and women friendships can play in our interactions, and how they can strengthen and politicize our work. We stay over night at nGbK in order to commonly imagine new spaces and relations.

We are a group of women* artists, that meets on a weekly bases in Berlin. As a feminist research group we negotiate how we gather and distribute knowledge collectively and we allow this process of learning to have an impact on our lives. We work by trying out methods and exercises within the group, and by visiting and learning from initiatives, groups and institutions, which have developed alternatives in health care. We publish our research in workshops and zines.

www.illness-into-weapon.info

Tuesday 21st June 2016, 18-21h,
Workshop* “Sexarbeit in Berlin - Solidarität und Liebe?” by Peer Projekt / Hydra e.V. (de/translation possible)
on practical solidarity and what it can mean to team up with whore struggles.

A new law is under way in the Bundestag, the so-called “prostitute protection law”. This comes with threats of forced registration, a passport for whores, fines, forced counselling with authorities, and other things.

Why is this law so awful?
How does it affect all people that live differently?
What does sexwork in Berlin look like?
How to fight for better working conditions?
How can people support us who know nothing about sexwork?

Since 2012 the peer project of Hydra e.V. offers trainings and workshops in brothels, adult movie theaters, massage parlors: by whores for whores. We are sexworkers, former sexworkers and language and culture mediators.

The workshop is in german, whisper translations in english, romanian, bulgarian, french, spanish, polish, russian etc. is possible if requested a week in advance.

In 2013 at nGbK the group (with Bogg Johanna Karlsson) investigated the pronoun ‘we’ with the project WIR SPIELEN (WE PLAY). Their practise is informed by the idea that the structure of HOW we come together strongly influences WHAT we can do together.

Friday 24th June 2016, 17-20h,
Last Round - Talk and last drink

No play Feminist Training Camp at nGbK is almost over. On the final day we would like to call for a last round, a sort of closure where to share our experiences, questions, comments and suggestions.
Whether you have joined us for previous workshops, screenings, listening events, conversations, or not, we would like to sit down for a last round together. To listen to each other, have a drink, and say bye to the space and the time spent together in this setting.
17:30 - 18 h - Listening for the Future
18 - 19 h - Last Round
till 20 h - Good Bye Drinks

• workshop with pre-registration

Last Round - Talk and last drink