Ptarmigan operated in Tallinn from 2011-2014. We no longer maintain any presence in Tallinn, but this website will continue to serve as an archive of the activities produced at Ptarmigan during these years.
This month, William 'Bilwa' Costa (USA), formerly at Ptarmigan Tallinn last September where he led the Resonance workshop, returns with his collaborator, Martin Lanz Landázuri (MEX). Bilwa and Martin created the Resonance collaboration together and tonight will screen a performance they did in The Kitchen (NYC) last December. The screening is approximately 20 minutes and will be followed by a talk/presentation. Afterwards we'll have an open discussion about their collaboration and the nature of collaboration in general.
We'll have some snacks (and you are encouraged to bring your own to share) and some music in-between activities.
Ptarmigan presents a night of mixed sound and performance at Kodu Baar, featuring Helsinki's genre-bending Ö orchestra, in a night combining music, dance and performance.
Ö+R+E is a performance group from Helsinki consisting of three parts: orchestra Ö, media artist Roberto Pugliese, and dancer Emmi Venna. The performance will be a joint interaction of these parts. Venna and the orchestra guide and follow each other while Pugliese generates his visualizations live through dance movement and music. In addition, each orchestra musician will play their own individual rhythm making the performance a multirhythmic multifaceted multimedia spectacle.
As artistas plásticos - 'Espresito'
The most electrifying and sensual fashion dance of 2011 makes its 2012 comeback in Estonian venues. The show will be a combined corporal spectacle and an entertaining dance teaching session led by the Portugese creators of this world wide phenomena. We recommend you to study some basic Portugese before attending the show, unless you trust in your skills of reading South European body language.
Re:partisan
Tallinn's newest drone-pulse.
How ta tawk & dans rite is a site specific participatory performance incorporating dance, live music and digital art. Joey Chua Poh Yi, Rhys Turner, Anna Rouhu, and Guadalupe López will explore interchangeable professional roles and cultural norms in a performance which questions both the rites of passage into a given culture and the correctness of doing things right. Thematically How ta tawk & dans rite will link narrative vignettes of searching for love whilst taking a comic look at experiences encountered in foreign cultures.
Joey Chua Poh Yi: http://joeychuapohyi.wordpress.com/about/ Rhys Turner: http://www.rtek.com.au/
This performance is supported by the National Arts Council Singapore.
Photo credit: Heini Ruuskanen
How ta tawk & dans rite is a site specific participatory performance incorporating dance, live music and digital art. Joey Chua Poh Yi, Rhys Turner, Anna Rouhu, and Guadalupe López will explore interchangeable professional roles and cultural norms in a performance which questions both the rites of passage into a given culture and the correctness of doing things right. Thematically How ta tawk & dans rite will link narrative vignettes of searching for love whilst taking a comic look at experiences encountered in foreign cultures.
Joey Chua Poh Yi: http://joeychuapohyi.wordpress.com/about/ Rhys Turner: http://www.rtek.com.au/
This performance is supported by the National Arts Council Singapore.
Photo credit: Heini Ruuskanen
Carousel image: Rimbun Dahan, Malysia. Performed “Play. Move. Find.” with EU & me (2010)
How ta tawk & dans rite is a site specific participatory performance incorporating dance, live music and digital art. Joey Chua Poh Yi, Rhys Turner, Anna Rouhu, and Guadalupe López will explore interchangeable professional roles and cultural norms in a performance which questions both the rites of passage into a given culture and the correctness of doing things right. Thematically How ta tawk & dans rite will link narrative vignettes of searching for love whilst taking a comic look at experiences encountered in foreign cultures.
Joey Chua Poh Yi: http://joeychuapohyi.wordpress.com/about/ Rhys Turner: http://www.rtek.com.au/
This performance is supported by the National Arts Council Singapore.
Photo credit: Heini Ruuskanen
This month's Clip Kino brings the return of American propaganda films, as curated by Viktor Lillemäe. Last May, Viktor put together our first Tallinn Clip Kino and tonight he will be showing some additional clips.
Clip Kino events are self-organised screening events of short video clips & documentaries found online. It aims to drag aspects of normalised 'private' activity - of viewing downloaded content on one's own computer - into public space for screening, appreciation and debate.
This month's Svamp (a free, open sound and music workshop for both musicians and non-musicians) will meet again at Ptarmigan on Sunday afternoon.
As always, we encourage both trained musicians and "non-musicians" to attend. Please bring something to make sound with - an instrument or other object. Amplification will be quite limited so please prepare accordingly (ie: don't bring a laptop).
See you there!
A brief overview of the main non-profit organizations in Estonia working with educational subjects concerning environmental issues as well as globalization. We'll give some concrete examples how to be more active on the mentioned areas.
The seminar is connected with the termination of an international training program "Hemispheres" which tackled different international solidarity subjects.
The itenerary is as so:
14.00 Program introduction, What is Hemispheres?
15.00 Why to choose organic food? MTÜ Tagurpidi Lavka http://tagurpidilavka.wordpress.com/
15.30 Coffee break and tasty bites from Tagurpidi Lavka
16.00 Presentation of MTÜ Mondo http://mondo.org.ee/
16.30 Documentary film “You Deserve to Know” shot in 2009 in Kibera, one of the biggest African slums, tells its story unveiling the positive side of the slum, showing the power of information and people's grassroots initiatives.
17.00 Discussion
More info about Hemispheres.
Ownness Records presents: The Consequences of a Dynamic Lifestyle featuring Zack Kouns (Death Jazz - U.S.A.) and Alpha Strategy (Manic Pop - Canada) live in concert.
Alpha Strategy
Utilizing primitive oscillating circuits, vintage synthesizers, shouted vocals, and loops lifted from 1960s schlager, Alpha Strategy delivers music which is volatile and convulsive, yet meticulously arranged. Through the use of elements of pop structure, Alpha Strategy's music tips a hat to the frantic energy of Patrick Miller's Minimal Man, the unusual compositional directions found on the early singles of SPK, and the dark humor conveyed in the recordings of The Birthday Party.
A musician, label operator, interviewer and deejay, Rory Hinchey of Alpha Strategy has been active in these and many other capacities for over a decade.
Zack Kouns
Zack Kouns describes his music as Modern Liturgical, and Apocalyptic/Hermetic in its aesthetic. Recent work, including his Concealed History of Coming Races takes on a form of dark Appalachian bluegrass. Content to blur the lines between conventional genres, especially through the use of saxophone, harmonium, electronics, violin, vocals and many other tools, the unifying principle of Kouns' work is undoubtedly found in the soulful and passionate delivery of the songs themselves.
Undoubtedly one of the busiest and most insightful individuals in the realm of contemporary outsider art, Zack Kouns carries out activities as bandleader, performer, author, visual artist, researcher, prankster, and composer.
Two synthesizer building workshops in Hobilabor (hobilabor.ee) reveal their outcome.
Raw sound synth lounge is an early Friday evening of raw sounds, oscillators and wires, green and proud synthesizer builders with warm air and cold wind left outside.
Musical acts by the worksop partitioners Rene Rebane, Tanel Külaots, Eerik Kändler, Marko Pütsep, Allan Pilter, Vootele Vaher, SS Fabrique, Hannes Mets, Sven-Erik Viira, Lauri Võsandi, Tõnis Malkov, Juhan Vihterpal and Henri Hütt with their brand-new synthesizers. There will be time for twiddling around with sounds and machines, asking questions and bonding; followed by veteran synth-builder Toomas Savi out in public for the first time with his fresh solo-project named Motobor.
Contemporary art festival ART IST KUKU NU UT organizers are glad to announce the guest-curator of this year's festival: CHRIS FITZPATRICK.
On 23th of January at 7 PM there will be a sneak preview to this year's ART IST KUKU NU UT art festival by Rael Artel, and lecture by the festival's guest-curator Chris Fitzpatrick, held at Ptarmigan project space. Wine and hospitality will be provided.
Programme:
7 PM Gathering and wine
7.15 Rael Artel and welcoming words, introduction of the Festival's program and announcement of the stipend KUKU NUNNU.
7.30 Guest-curator Chris Fitzpatrick's (San Francisco / Antwerpen) presentation of his practices.
__
Chris Fitzpatrick (b. New York, 1978) has been working as an independent curator in San Francisco, California. He has organized various exhibitions and events for venues including Palazzo Ducale, Genova; Proyectos Monclova, Mexico City; Oakland Museum of California; the Exploratorium, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, amongst others. Fitzpatrick has been awarded residencies by Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, the Banff Centre, Alberta, and FIAC/Fondation d’enterprise Ricard, Paris.
Fitzpatrick’s writing and interviews have been featured in a variety of publications, including Rite Editions, Pazmaker, Mousse Magazine, The Baltic Notebooks of Anthony Blunt, as well as exhibition catalogs and books. Most recently, Fitzpatrick has been on the curatorial board for the Present Future section of Artissima 18, Turin. From February 2012 on he starts working as an artistic director of Objectif Exhibitions in Antwerp, Belgium.
_____
The event, Chris Fitzpatrick's trip and lecture is supported by CEC ArtsLink, Cultural Endowement of Estonia, Estonian Academy of Arts and Ptarmigan.
All welcome!
Mona De Bo is band playing experimental rock music from Riga, Latvia. Established in 2005 by Edgars Rubenis and Edgars Eihmanis as a drums and guitar duo it gradually evolved in a full band consisting of four to six musicians.
Mona De Bo has recorded three albums, the latest of which 'Pag Pag' will be released on January 9th, 2012 on the Latvian I Love You Records. The material on the new record shows Mona De Bo's continuing interest in slow rhythms and dense sounds, music that could be characterized by such tags as drone, slow-core, doom. Likely to it's predecessor 'Nekavējies, šīs ir spēles ar tevi' the new record incorporates also the sound of keyboards and a horn section. www.facebook.com/monadebo monadebo.bandcamp.com
Fast and Raw is a workshop on sushi making, knife sharpening and sushi eating. During the workshop participants will learn to make Hosomaki, Temaki, Nigiri, and Gunkanmaki sushi with a variety of different traditional (and untraditional) fillings. Those in the class will also learn how to sharpen a knife (bring a knife from home) by using a sharpening stone (because a sharp knife makes your sushi more delicious). For the finale of the class, we will have a large sushi banquet (which you should invite your friends/family to).
Leading the course is Justin Tyler Tate who has a Bachelors degree in Fine Art, a Doctorate in electronics and no qualifications in the field of sushi. He has never been to Japan but people, who have also never been to Japan, regard his sushi as “the best”.
Fake It Til You Make It is a workshop/working group for those curious individuals looking to broaden their experience and skill-set. Each session of FITYMI will be on a different subject which could fall under areas of expertise such as construction, making, baking, electronics, mechanics, cooking, jewelry, physics, plants, and whatever else can be imagined. It is the purpose of the workshop to learn new things for the sake of learning and it is for this reason that participants will only discover the subject of each session upon arriving to the workshop. During the class there will be a short talk about the subject and how to accomplish the objective of the FITYMI session followed by participants choosing how to proceed (experimenting with materials, accomplishing a project, discussion and/or playing) with food available at some point during the workshop.
Last month, we made inflatable items from plastic and fans. This month, who knows what will happen?
To cover the expenses of materials and food for the workshop participants are asked to ‘pay what you can’. We'll have food to share at the end while we reflect on what we made.
Running/organizing the workshop is Justin Tyler Tate who instructs other workshops such as 'Fast and Raw' - Intermediate sushi and Under Your Skin (Tattooing Workshop). Tate has a Bachelors degree in Fine Art, a Doctorate in electronics and has an insatiable curiosity for new materials, techniques and ways of making.
Please register here to let Justin have some idea of how many people are coming so he can prepare materials, etc.
We begin 2012's Liminal Images programme with a selection of films the reflect our January Tallinn environment: films about winter, changing seasons, darkness, growth and changes brought by industrialisation.
Winter Solstice Directed by Hollis Frampton USA, 1974 33 minutes "Shot at U.S. Steel's Homestead Works in Pittsburgh,...WINTER SOLSTICE is full of outpourings of fire, of smoke, of sparks, of molten metal--all erupting against an otherwise black background in an activated pictorial space. The complex abstract compositions that flash upon the screen in full-scale explosions of white light or in the aftermath of effervescent sparks reflect Frampton's painterly handling of the camera (hand-held and fluid) and his rhythmic use of color (blue frames are used to mark each cut). While WINTER SOLSTICE pays homage to the work of a number of New York school painters, its steel mill setting represents, as Frampton noted, 'A pretextual locus dearly beloved by our Soviet predecessors.'" --Bruce Jenkin Senkrecht/Waagrecht (Vertical/Horiztonal) Directed by Peter Liechtie Switzerland, 1985 5 minutes "In their sequence of movements and events, Roman Signer’s actions are conceived as space/time sculptures. In keeping with the opposing directions taken in these documents, the film is simply called Senkrecht/Waagrecht (Vertical/Horizontal). This oppositional tendency is underlined by the locations: winter/ice/water/summer/clouds/air. The “commentary” to the story is provided by the abstract signs of the sign-language used by the hearing impaired and above all by the music of Möslang/Guhl." Creation Directed by Stan Brakhage USA, 1979 15 minutes "... almost like the Earth itself - the green ice-covered rocks, the slicing feeling, the compressive feeling of the glaciers. The whole time I was watching I kept thinking that you were a master of the North, the arctic landscape - the dark red flowers in the dusky light, the deep blue light, the tall trees with the running mists, and Jane looking ... the ice, the water, the moss, the golden light. A visual symphony ...." - Hollis Melton" 31/75: Asyl Directed by Kurt Kren Austria, 1975 9 minutes "Asyl is one of Kren's most formally ambitious works, an experiment in time lapse photography, multiple exposures, and segmented images... Kren is here reconfiguring film as a medium in which time and space cease to be linear in any sense. The film is instead about totalities; it invites the viewer to think about the progress of time and the way it generally works in cinematic images, and by contrast to process the multiple layered times implicit in each frame of Asyl. This short is Kren's finest work, with a conceptual purity and inventiveness that are unmatched even in his consistently intriguing oeuvre." ** intermission ** Capriccio Directed by Zoltán Huszárik Hungary, 1969 16 minutes "Shreds and fragments of film poetry that make its own place on the edge of a document film. The film is a college of dialogue between nature, abandoned country, and human fancy. The director with sovereign poetry and a strong sense of grotesque introduces a myth of creation, human finality and continuousness of recovering nature. Huszárik's individual style of merry resignation appears here again with features of particular abstract sensibility. There is an inherent reflection of time, particularly the impossibility of coming back in the picture. Whereas a film by itself main idea is that its existence in the light makes present what can.t return, that film in the light and movement becomes something that can never be alone." By Night with Torch and Spear Directed by Joseph Cornell USA, 1942 8 minutes "This is the world made strange, an ultimate surrealist statement. Ordinary industrial machinery, seen through a bright pink filter, seems to glow with otherworldly energy, and the men tending to these strangely vibrant, effervescent industrial playgrounds are like sorcerers, conjuring inexplicable phenomena ... Cornell sees the cinema as a transmitter of poetic distortions, as a massive bank of images to be combed for magical moments, moments that can be amplified and reworked into something epic and unfamiliar. His was a totally original and remarkable cinema, and this short is perhaps one of the finest examples of his unparalleled ability to dig out the strange essence at the core of the ordinary." -- Only the Cinema Makimono Directed by Werner Nekes West Germany, 1974 38 minutes "Makimono is an Asian roll painting depicting a landscape. The subject of the film is the language of film itself, its mutability and its influence on the viewer's vision and thinking. While the film gradually progresses the viewer is gently invited to reflect on the development of the film in its expressive potential."
Join us for the first fermented foods club at Ptarmigan! This is intended to be a monthly event where people will bring fermented foods that they have made to share with each other. Foods can be traditional or nontraditional, but will all involve zymurgy in some form. Just bring something that you have made: sourdough bread, kefir, kim chi, sauerkraut, beer, wine, natto ...
This is purely a social gathering but we can discuss techniques, tips, and most importantly eat eat eat. We will consider Sandor Ellix Katz's WIld Fermentation book to be our bible.
Please register and let us know what you'll be bringing!
Svamp
This month's Svamp (a free, open sound and music workshop for both musicians and non-musicians) will meet again at Ptarmigan on Saturday afternoon.
As always, we encourage both trained musicians and "non-musicians" to attend. Please bring something to make sound with - an instrument or other object. Amplification will be quite limited so please prepare accordingly (ie: don't bring a laptop).
See you there!
This is the opening for Hannah's show A Series of Drawings Related to the Restoration Process, which runs from 15 Dec to 7 Jan at Tiib.
Tiib is a new gallery/art space in Pelgulinn co-coordinated by Ptarmigan. For more information, see www.tiib.net
Presented by Klemen Slabina.
A short introduction to what is hoped to be a joined meditation, will raise the following questions:
If educational ministers are (too often) the ideologues of political parties they belong to, what is teacher's role in contemporary organic solidarity? Accordingly, what is teacher's professional responsibility? Is teaching an attempt to transform hordes of generations into a relatively loyal mass? Hence, is teaching telling stories? Context of the talk is the claim that the role of education is to be bridging between reproduction of one's ancestors' social, economic, and cultural capital and one's ability of transitivity through the social hierarchy.
Fast and Raw is a workshop on sushi making, knife sharpening and sushi eating. During the workshop participants will learn to make Hosomaki, Temaki, Nigiri, and Gunkanmaki sushi with a variety of different traditional (and untraditional) fillings. Those in the class will also learn how to sharpen a knife (bring a knife from home) by using a sharpening stone (because a sharp knife makes your sushi more delicious). For the finale of the class, we will have a large sushi banquet (which you should invite your friends/family to).
Leading the course is Justin Tyler Tate who has a Bachelors degree in Fine Art, a Doctorate in electronics and no qualifications in the field of sushi. He has never been to Japan but people, who have also never been to Japan, regard his sushi as “the best”.
This 3 hour, intensive workshop is a short immersion into the world of tattooing from DIY, through prison, and into professional tattooing. All ‘tattooing’ during the workshop will be done on grapefruits but safety and prevention of diseases transmitted by blood will be covered as well as aftercare. As an introduction to tattoo culture we will begin the workshop by learning ‘stick & poke’, to create small images. As prisons have played a large part in the imagery and development of tattooing we will follow up stick and poke with a how to make your own "prison style" rotary electric tattoo needles. To finish the workshop all individuals will get to use a professional tattoo machine for line work, coloring and shading. Participants should leave the workshop with a basic knowledge of how to accomplish tattooing, by a variety of methods, in a safe and sterile environment.
Justin Tyler Tate was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia and grew up in Florida USA. He relocated back to Halifax to attend the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and has since migrated to Tallinn. Graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts his solo practice incorporates a variety of media; primarily sculpture, installation and performance. Over the past few years, he has exhibited his work across Canada and internationally. Tate's work investigates the relationship between the viewer and the object questioning the weight of viewership and creation alike.
Ilia Belorukov (RUS)
Ilia Belorukov is a young (born 1987) saxophonist from Saint-Petersburg, Russia. He works in the direction of free improvisation, free-jazz, noise and electroacoustic music. Ilia practices an experimental approach of sound extraction on different types of saxophones (alto, tenor and baritone) and on flute (inc. fluteophone). In his compositions and improvisations you can find out influences of John Zorn, Derek Bailey, Mats Gustafsson, Evan Parker and other masters of improvised music.
John W. Fail & Taneli Viitahuhta (US/UK/FIN/EST)
This is the first performance in over two years by John + Taneli, which will explore delicate improvised soundspaces using israj and reeds. Taneli is an active member of the free sound axis in Finland, performing solo and in groups such as Mohel, Horst Quartet and Boris Morgana. John works in the field of interdisiplinary collaborations but with a history of sound and music work. He is one-half of Lied Music and has released solo recordings, most recenty The 15,000 Day Boat Trip in 2010.
Helen & Eike (EST)
A first timer duo of two girls from Tallinn. Both have been influenced by various styles: folk, contemporary, jazz, pop and free improvisation. They will be performing together for the first time but sure have experimented before. They will be exploring accordion and flute sounds and maybe even something more.
Fake It Til You Make It is a workshop for those curious individuals looking to broaden their experience and skill-set. Each session of FITYMI will be on a different subject which could fall under areas of expertise such as construction, making, baking, electronics, mechanics, cooking, jewelry, physics, plants, and whatever else can be imagined. It is the purpose of the workshop to learn new things for the sake of learning and it is for this reason that participants will only discover the subject of each session upon arriving to the workshop. During the class there will be a short talk about the subject and how to accomplish the objective of the FITYMI session followed by participants choosing how to proceed (experimenting with materials, accomplishing a project, discussion and/or playing) with food available at some point during the workshop.
To cover the expenses of materials and food for the workshop participants are asked to ‘pay what you can’.
Running/organizing the workshop is Justin Tyler Tate who instructs other workshops such as 'Fast and Raw' - Intermediate sushi and Under Your Skin (Tattooing Workshop). Tate has a Bachelors degree in Fine Art, a Doctorate in electronics and has an insatiable curiosity for new materials, techniques and ways of making.
The Estonian Anthropology Society together with the Department of Social & Cultural Anthropology of the Institute of Humanities of the Tallinn University will be holding an interactive symposium on Saturday, 3 December 2011 at Ptarmigan. This one day event/conference will bring together anthropologists, scholars, and artists with the intention of finding the different CONNECTIONS between their varying discourses and practises. The symposium will feature performances by story-tellers, film-makers, anthropologists, journalists, bio-chemists, artists and architects with the intention to examine the common experiential grounds that these disciplinary strands share.
The aim of the event is to showcase how different practitioners coming from various disciplines have common grounds, how they can and even ought to be linked. We have matched up presentations into blocks, each of these pairings/trios featuring a presenter of anthropological research and a presenter or presenters in other discipline, and thrive to find similarities, connections, overlap, areas of collaboration, shared methodology, and so on. The aim is to provide an illustration on how various subjects can be approached “outside of the box”.
Programme
Download full programme (including timetable) here
Can the Ancestors Speak to Us?
Hasso Krull, Department of Culture, EHI, TLU
Culture is inheritance. It is handed over to us by somebody who was born earlier, and who in their turn got the inheritance from somebody who was born earlier. Thus it is a product of an unknown community that passed away long ago, but is still speaking to us.
Once upon a time this unknown community was called "the ancestors". Nowadays this concept has been replaced by a historicist concept of "tradition" that seems to be less personified. However, the concept of tradition is also lacking the mythical dimension that enables us to receive the inheritance in a non-diachronic way (i.e. synchronically). If the synchronic dimension is re-introduced into the historicist tradition, it produces the effect of a "midnight in Paris" used in Woody Allen's recent movie.
Nonetheless our everyday language also contains innumerable traces of the mythical past we imagine to be lost forever. It is not only the glacial wind of the ice age that breathes in every syllable we utter today: it is also the warm breath of the mythical ancestors who never receded into nothingness. Oblivion is just a mirage, an appearance of tabula rasa. That's why modern man has not been able to commit himself fully to a kind of amnesiac rationalism that the futurist thinkers of the 20th century so ardently desired.
The Power of Sound in West African Story-telling
Carlo A. Cubero, Department Social & Cultural Anthropology, EHI, TLU
In this presentation I will discuss the role that sound plays in the West African tradition of griots. Rather than understanding sound as a passive element of nature, I will discuss how the West African griot engages with sound as a foundation of experience. The Aristotelian gaze of Western thought seems to have downplayed the power of sound in constituting social life. In the griot context, sound can be organized into words, melodies, rhythms, meters, and most of all into forces. Words, in this context, have a power – a power to emote and have direct physical consequence on the listener. A deeper appreciation of sound could force us to overturn our static, spatialized world and make us consider in a new light the dynamic nature of sound, an open door to the comprehension of cultural sentiment.
I will contextualise this discussion within a film-making project that I have been engaged in for the past 2 years amongst West African migrants in Western Europe. I will show edited footage of some of my filmed material and argue that film-making as a method can get us closer to understanding the kind of cultural sentiments that are elicited in phenomenal experiences.
Encounters with the Other. The case of MoKS AIR. Examples from artists working in fields
Evelyn Müürsepp, freelance visual artist, cultural coordinator of MoKS Center for Art and Social Practice
To be an artist seems to be a privilege. One can create its own methods for research, there is no right or wrong, there is creative person for whose art any means are allowed. The valid reflections can come from the art-world itself and that is the story. But is it the whole story? By plundering through MoKS (artist- in- residency centre) 10 year archive there is plenty of artist examples to prove that there is also another story and other kind of strive what is gathering its forces.
Estonian for eschatophobes - a beginner's course
Sigbjørn Bratlie, MoKS Center for Art and Social Practice
My angle on the anthropological symposium will be through language, or linguistic anthropology. I would like to show a video piece I have made whilst here in MoKS, called "Estonian for eschatophobes", which is a sort of beginner's course in the Estonian language. My project has dealt with myself trying to immerse myself in the Estonian language, which I started trying to teach myself this spring. The video will last for approximately 12 min, and then I will talk a little bit about my use of language, linguistics and grammar in my art work. The focus in the beginners' course I have made is not so much the ever-optimistic "can-do" attitude that permeates beginners' courses in general, but focuses more on isolation, alienation, misunderstanding, and how fear, insecurity and other types of feelings influence the choice of words or the way we speak. It looks at "Estonianness" from the outside, as it were, using my clumsy and fragmented attempts at writing in Estonian, understanding Estonia and Estonians to tell a story.
Music and Social Changes in Russia: From the Gypsy Choirs to t.A.T.u.
Francisco Martinez, Glasgow University, UK
This presentation aims to examine the connexions between culture and social changes. For that I will expose a brief outline of music creations and practices in Russia during the last century. The analysis of such connexions will be developed applying Bourdieu’s concepts of “field of culture” and “practice” (habitus), besides the post-structuralist understanding of discourse as a “system of meanings”. In my opinion, both anthropological approaches to culture are particularly convenient in order to point out the dislocation of values and to contextualize discourses.
Therefore, I will program the most significant examples of musical creation in Russia’s XX century, putting them into the pertinent socio-historical context. Moreover, I will put particular emphasis on the potential of music in shifting the hegemonic discourse, at the same time that it reproduces the cultural patterns. Hence, during the presentation I will bear on several examples of musical practices (as folk festivals, jazz samizdat, bard performances, or rock clubs), besides defining the discursive meanings.
Opening a contagion of worms
Patrick Laviolette, Department Social & Cultural Anthropology, EHI, TLU
Social infection - instigating the desire for fear or risk taking behaviour in others - this is certainly part of the moral and ethical dilemmas that result from some of the research that is currently undertaken on adventure sport, dark tourism and urban exploration. Yet marginal play activities such as 'flânage/flânarie' as well as 'stalking' not only remove but can also add socio-cultural value to highly undesired spaces, places or restricted areas. That is, this talk is intended as a platform to consider growing concerns over the scouting of danger zones, our sensorial perceptions of them (from up close or at a distance) along with our movements within or skirting around their edges.
Workshop in Architecture and Vitality presentation
Dr. Pia Ednie-Brown, School of Architecture and Design, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia
Dr. Jondi Keane, School of Communication and Creative Arts, Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia
Scott Andrew Elliott, School of Art and Design, Aalto University, Helsinki
We will present the results of our workshop, 'Workshop in Architecture and Vitality', in which we have asked students to consider how to design an architectural structure that would increase vitality in a user. In this workshop, we have presented the texts and ideas of Richard Neutra, Wilhelm Reich, and Madeline Gins & Arakawa. Each of them have developed their own architectural structures which they believed would improve the health of a user, from psychological health to physical health and beyond into the possibility of creating architecture against death. Students have developed their own designs for spaces that would increase vitality, and build models of these designs.
The goal of this workshop is to experiment with ways in which environmental surroundings might affect our sense of vitality. Situating ourselves in the Ptarmigan Tallinn project spaces, we will explore a range of different ways to inhabit, modify and imagine environments, and the production of vitality through architectural means. A range of activities will be involved in a developmental process that will unfold across five days of intensive investigations with various materials, movements and models.
We will experience and explore Wilhelm Reich’s orgone accumulator, designed to improve the general health of its user through the accumulation of positive atmospheric energy called orgone. We will build models of architectural spaces and manipulate different elements of built surroundings. We will experiment with techniques developed by artist/architect pair Arakawa + Gins, whose work focuses on examining the relationship between the human body and built architecture, and how new architectural designs can affect the body. Through these precedents and practices the workshop ultimately aims to explore a life enhancing potential often believed to be an impossible outcome of architecture, in order to push the boundaries of architecture and our understanding of the connection between bodies and environments. Experimentation will be led by three architectural body-environment researchers: Dr. Pia Ednie-Brown (School of Architecture and Design, RMIT University, Melbourne), Dr. Jondi Keane (School of Communication and Creative Arts, Deakin University, Melbourne), and Scott Andrew Elliott (School of Art and Design, Aalto University, Helsinki). This workshop is being offered in conjunction with Aalto University School of Art and Design, but is open to others as well. Activities will build upon previous events by resident researchers, such as Tuning Fork, Vitality Machines, and Push/Pull. This workshop is being offered in conjunction with Aalto University School of Art and Design, but is open to others.
Workshop Outline
Day two (Thursday 1.12): Beginning of model-making process.
Day three (Friday 2.12): Stage two of model-making process, with other activities and interviews about vitality. Presentation of Vitality Machines film.
Day four (Saturday 3.12): Final stage of model-making and environment modification. Presentation at CONNECTIONS symposium.
Day five (Sunday 4.12): Final presentations, discussions, and documentation.
documents/resources