Out of Sight, in collaboration with wpZimmer, opens the final ON MOBILISATION exhibition on Friday, February 28 from 19:00. It is centered around artists work that amplifies the voices, languages, and sounds of bottom-up citizens’ mobilisation, while offering a space for reflection, discussion, and exchange.
Join us for the opening to mark this important occasion. Please save the date in your calendars, and we look forward to welcoming you in Antwerp!
The ON MOBILISATION project (2023-2025) ignites a process that connects and engages individuals to participate in positive change towards greater social justice and equality through cultural participation.
We respond to the need for transnational creation and circulation of knowledge and capacity building. In our practices we do not use our nation states to define us. But rather we work transnationally, queering and diminishing the importance of national borders by placing the similarities and differences elsewhere than in national identity. One world, same struggle.
The artists that take part in the exhibition are: Kalle Brolin, Siniša Ilić, Psychedelic Choir, The Agency of Singular Investigations, Danae Theodoridou, Davide Tidoni, Zorka Wollny.
The ON MOBILISATION timeline is presented as an archive of video-interviews with: Danae Theodoridou, Ahilan Ratnamohan, Marika Smreková, Kalle Brolin, Elisabetta Consonni and Daniele Ninarello, reflecting on their artistic processes, and the Mobilising Words card game is available for the visitors to play.
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:: PROGRAMME OF THE OPENING ::
Friday, 28.02.2025
Out of Sight, Somersstraat 31, 2018 Antwerp
19:00 – Doors open
19:30 – Welcome speech
21:00 – 21:30 SABOTAGE MANUAL by Psychedelic Choir
Concert dedicated to the current state of the world affairs, composed for Out of Sight opening
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:: ARTWORKS ON VIEW ::
THE BOTANICAL-POLITICAL DICTIONARY is part of an ongoing project by the Agency of Singular Investigations, researching the notion of expanded documentality. It introduces a secret language of flowers devised for coded communication on political subjects. What are the connections between orange blossoms and civil disobedience? Does exposure to mint oil make one more liberal-minded? Can a fragrant orchid persuade soldiers to lay down their weapons? The dictionary presents a collection of more than thirty flowers, each linked to a political concept of significance in the 20th century and potentially beyond. All entries, written by the artists, include historical notes describing instances of past political uses and effects associated with each flower.
Kalle Brolin, together with Baltic Art Center in Visby, worked for two years on the image of the peace movement in Gotland. The work began with visits and talks with people from Gotland who could be included in a broad definition of what constitutes a peace movement. Then a series of Peace Talks was arranged, bringing together all the people Kalle had previously come into contact with. Together, they discussed the image of the peace movement, while getting to know each other. The movement began observing itself. Finally, Kalle compiled a film which discusses the thematic questions developed over the course of his time on Gotland: How do we make a concrete image of an abstract concept such as peace? Which individuals and groups could be included in a broad definition of a peace movement? If form were to follow content, should a film be made with a dramaturgy not based on conflict? The name of the film is PEACE ON GOTLAND. It is in large parts built on collected image material from various sources.
ORIENTATION IN 100 REVOLUTIONS by Siniša Ilić is a picture on a textile, one hundred square meters large, a tool to imagine the totality of the world and to comprehend its revolutionary potential. How to think totality, how to materialise it as a spatial fact in an art space? As a hypothesis, an oversized picture is placed in the art or public space, covering the floor or walls, street, facade, demanding interactions with the people who share the space with it. Picture on textile ORIENTATION IN 100 REVOLUTIONS can also be seen as the performative structure, developed with theatre maker Bojan Djordjev in which it functions as a performative object with its potential of covering other objects in the space and trigger live action. Such action can be further followed by the fragments from the novel The Poem (1952) by Oskar Davičo, Yugoslav author and communist, in which the author lists various groups, identities and entities whose critical thought and action are needed to rebel. This text will be available in the space.
Following a performance score, LANGUAGES OF THE UNHEARD by Danae Theodoridou construct an online visual and auditory manifesto based on the language of signs and slogans coming from important protests in different European countries from the creation of the European Economic Community (EEC) or ‘Common Market’ in 1957 to 2020. Playing with the performativity of zoom’s feature to ‘rename’ ourselves, we changed constantly our names using the language of those signs, producing a written dialogue in the language of protest. During this dialogue, parts of our words were audio processed and fed back into the dialogue in different ways, creating a soundscape of languages of the unheard. This ‘silent’ conversation aims to reveal the materiality of the language of protest in order to create an embodied experience of its social force. What stays from our common fights in public space when we don’t have the proximity of our bodies? How can we turn immaterial language into a material ‘action’ in the way Arendt defined the term as the human ability to initiate something in public space that addresses the many without being able to control its outcome in advance?
THE BEST OF NoTAV by Davide Tidoni is a songbook that includes lyrics, contextual notes and reinterpretations of fifteen songs from the No-TAV struggle. Conceived as an historical documentation of the struggle, narrated through its own songs, the work also functions on a performative level. The ironic and seductive character of the musical rearrangements easily infiltrates the listeners’ attention, inviting them to sing aloud on their own. The publication of the songbook is accompanied by the music video THE GOLDEN YEARS OF SAN DIDERO. The video includes footage shot by the political police on December 8, 2011, during a demonstration against the newly installed TAV construction site. The footage was filed in the records of the trial for those events.
The participatory project EVICTION SONGS by Zorka Wollny consists of songs composed and recorded by musicians Arurmukha, Nadja, Schwund, The Inserts, Geigerzaehler, Rosa Mercedes, Persé & C. C. Estrés, who are actively involved in fighting the dramatic change of the Berlin landscape.The songs are based on personal experiences, newspaper texts, critical essays, opinions and slogans of activist groups; such as wagen communities, squatters, left-wing cultural animators. The songs created the sound installation that was presented for the first time at Skulpturenpark Berlin-Zentrum in 2021.
