The Strange Half-Absence of Wandering at Night
_by Johanna Steindorf (BRA/GER)
#exploration #nighttime #gendered perspective #transgressing #urban narratives
28.06.15 / 21:30-22:30 _buy your ticket here
DETAILS:
_duration: 1 hour
_PLEASE NOTE: it’s a self-guided individual tour; participants start in an interval of one minute
_language: EN
_number of participants: 30
_age restriction: over 18 only
_accessibility restriction: not suitable for people with mobility problems
_each participant is asked to bring along mobile device or mp3 player, headphones
_PLEASE NOTE: this tour requires downloading a soundtrack - link to the download will be provided once the tour is booked
Starting point: traffic light by the car tunnel at Puschkinallee on the side from Treptower Park / S-Bhf Treptower Park
28.06.15 / 21:30-22:30 _buy your ticket here
DETAILS:
_duration: 1 hour
_PLEASE NOTE: it’s a self-guided individual tour; participants start in an interval of one minute
_language: EN
_number of participants: 30
_age restriction: over 18 only
_accessibility restriction: not suitable for people with mobility problems
_each participant is asked to bring along mobile device or mp3 player, headphones
_PLEASE NOTE: this tour requires downloading a soundtrack - link to the download will be provided once the tour is booked
Starting point: traffic light by the car tunnel at Puschkinallee on the side from Treptower Park / S-Bhf Treptower Park
EN /
In this audio tour, participants accompany a female protagonist through Treptower Park at dusk. She embodies the spirit of fictitious and real women who claimed their freedom to wander, thus challenging the restrictions and conventions of their culture and time. The audio piece mixes narrative, text excerpts, music and field recordings.
DE /
In dieser Audio Tour begleiten die Teilnehmer*innen in der Abenddämmerung eine weibliche Hauptfigur durch den Park. Sie verkörpert den Geist fiktiver und realer Frauen, die ihr Recht auf ein freies Herumgehen behauptet und damit die Restriktionen und Konventionen ihrer Kultur und ihrer Zeit herausgefordert haben. Dieses Audio-Stück mischt Erzählungen, Textauszüge, Musik und Tonaufnahmen des Ortes.
_author / guide:
Born in Quito, Ecuador, raised in various countries across Europe, Asia and Latin America, Johanna Steindorf is a media artist working with participative performances, audio, photography and video. Often using narrative and mobile strategies, her work Focuses on the subject of migration, nomadism, gender and walking. She Studied at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro and the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. Over the years Steindorf Participated in different group exhibitions in Brazil, India and Germany. A PhD candidate in Media Arts and a scholarship holder at the Bauhaus University in Weimar, Johanna is currently researching on the artistic strategy of the Audio Walk and its relationship to the subjects of gender and migration.
Website: www.johannasteindorf.de
In this audio tour, participants accompany a female protagonist through Treptower Park at dusk. She embodies the spirit of fictitious and real women who claimed their freedom to wander, thus challenging the restrictions and conventions of their culture and time. The audio piece mixes narrative, text excerpts, music and field recordings.
DE /
In dieser Audio Tour begleiten die Teilnehmer*innen in der Abenddämmerung eine weibliche Hauptfigur durch den Park. Sie verkörpert den Geist fiktiver und realer Frauen, die ihr Recht auf ein freies Herumgehen behauptet und damit die Restriktionen und Konventionen ihrer Kultur und ihrer Zeit herausgefordert haben. Dieses Audio-Stück mischt Erzählungen, Textauszüge, Musik und Tonaufnahmen des Ortes.
_author / guide:
Born in Quito, Ecuador, raised in various countries across Europe, Asia and Latin America, Johanna Steindorf is a media artist working with participative performances, audio, photography and video. Often using narrative and mobile strategies, her work Focuses on the subject of migration, nomadism, gender and walking. She Studied at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro and the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. Over the years Steindorf Participated in different group exhibitions in Brazil, India and Germany. A PhD candidate in Media Arts and a scholarship holder at the Bauhaus University in Weimar, Johanna is currently researching on the artistic strategy of the Audio Walk and its relationship to the subjects of gender and migration.
Website: www.johannasteindorf.de
Picture: courtesy of the artists
Interview with Johanna Steindorf1. Could you talk us through your tour, 'The strange half-absence of wandering at night'?
In this tour, the participant is guided by a female voice that is constantly taking on different identities while leading the person deeper into the park and the nighttime.. 2. Your current research centers around the audiowalk as a creative strategy. Could you explain the concept, and necessity, of developing creative strategies? Taking a walk is a way to simultaneously create and access a type of knowledge that not only has been stored in the invisible confines of the mind, but also in the materiality of the body. Therefore, experience and memory are forms of embodied knowledge. As an artist, I am interested in gaining access to this type of embodied knowledge by using the audio walk as an artistic strategy and creating mediated situations that operate at the intersection of the body's subjectivity and its surroundings. While the other senses are not interfered with, at additional layer of privatized sound is added to the ears. The participant's movements are then synchronized with the environment by instructions or a rhythm defined in the audio track. It is precisely the correspondence between the person, the content of the audio and the location that creates impacting on experience for the participant of the audio walk. This is where I recognize this artistic format's potential as a method for artistic research. 3. Do you think the city is built for multiple senses, or for some more than others? I believe that the cities are built on a predominantly visual perspective. |
4. How far does your practice inform theoretical research and vice versa?
Throughout my artistic research, theory and practice have become more and more interconnected. Especially during the process of developing this work, there was a constant movement of switching between one type of material and practice to the other: The idea for this tour resulted from on extensive theoretical research, which caused me to create a series of nocturnal walking experiment in public space. The feedback and ideas generated through these experiments were then the actual starting point for the tour and its general mood, but the texts are researched to integral part of the narrative as well. 5. What, for you, is the importance of wandering as opposed to just walking or following? To me, "wandering" means exploring at one's own pace. People might be entering a space (the park) that is well known to them, yet it obtains a new quality through the audio and the experience as a whole. By combining the audio and walking at this specific time of day, I want to evoke a different type of awareness towards this environment and its relationship to the person walking. 6. What are your thoughts on the gendered-ness of the city, how urban spaces define gender and how gender defines the city? The research area of feminist geography deals with questions Precisely thesis, including the restriction of women's mobility in the city. Space and place are described as being gendered and sexed, and gender relations and sexuality in turn as 'spaced'.1 I believe that gender, ethnicity and other specific aspects many (individual and subjective or not) have a strong influence on how we experience the city. 7. Could you elaborate on your methodology? Where do you start developing your projects (with textual or sensorial encounters, observation, mapping, a mixture of all or with something else entirely)? Literature and other narrative format have a strong influence on my work. But personal experiences, memories and the encounter with a specific person can also be the trigger for a concept or idea. In general, working with texts (my own and of other authors) has been important to my creative process of part. 8. Is there a balance between the politicized statement and the slow unfolding of events in your work? I hope that. While taking on audio tour, it is almost impossible for the participant to remain detached and not to be - physically, intellectually, emotionally - involved in both what she or he is listening to and what is happening in the immediate surroundings. My aim is for the participants to consciously experience this shift between day- and nighttime in a space that is so friendly and harmless during the day and during the night often seems threatening. But there is not solely this political statement, that is definitely present in the narrative, there is a more poetic approach towards the observed transformations over the course of time. 9. Could you tell us about some of the women who inspired your tour? So Virginia Woolf and one of the female characters she created (Clarissa Dalloway) were definitely key figures to me, but artists: such as Kinga Araya and Maya Deren, as well as Researchers Examined as Rebecca Solnit and Andra McCartney Played at important role. Other women I encountered - but remained anonymous to me - that were very present in my mind while developing this tour. 1 McDowall, Linda (1999): Gender, Identity & Place: Understanding Feminist Geographies. |