New Alphabet School

What could a school look like that seeks to make both learning and unlearning a common interrelated practice? How can a space be built around care, refuge, implication and vulnerability, negotiating positions and responsibilities?

How can (un)learners in this space challenge privileges and habits of hierarchy, as well as authorship, productivity and competition?
#Commonings: More information and program overview

11.30 pm
Welcome Words of the Day
with Mahmoud Al Shaer and Gigi Argyropoulou

2–4 pm
Undercommoning in the Remix
Activation in Conference room 2
With Chara Stergiou
In English

Collected sounds and interviews with Commonings contributors and participants will be streamed daily from Wednesday to Saturday from the firefly frequencies radio platform. Undercommoning in the Remix presents itself as a radio stream and DJ Lecture that work through sampling, mixing and attentive listening. Thinking of sound as a social agitator and a subtle carrier of affect and knowledge, sampling here is employed as a practice of attuning to the unheard and producing what feels urgent to be uttered. This workshop also aims to mix and bring together whatever has been considered unfit or invalid due to a general demand for containment. Thus, how can one sonically reuse what seems unlikely, uncategorizable or inadequate in structures by inventing an uncommon remix? How can listening to it change one’s relationship to the most implicit “undercommons”?

4–5 pm
Altars to the Invisibles
Final Ritual in the Assembly, Hirschfeld Bar
With Laura Fiorio and Francisca Cortéz Ferrario, in cooperation with Ruth Gonzalez Renovato and Mariel Miranda
In English

Over the course of the first three days of Commonings, small rituals for sharing narratives of invisibility have been performed at this altar space in the Assembly. For the final ritual, participants are invited to a collective moment where there will be a closing ceremony and an opportunity for an encounter and contamination. This ceremony invites all those who contributed in the previous days or those who would like to continue to nourish a reciprocal listening.

4 pm
Maroon Un-Archiving
Performance in the Main lobby
With Ivonne González and Paulina Marquez

To contest and to reject the archival practice of kidnapping, accumulation and burial of the maroon memory through a colonialist lens is the base, the backbone of Maroon preservation and survival. It is a way of existing, recreating, re-inventing and re-signifying the language of resistance that was received from our ancestors. There is no set theory when speaking from the “we” and when carrying the evocation of the memories of the Maroons.

These artistic actions happening daily from Thursday to Saturday serve to accompany the processes of repair and healing of Maroon communities, to grow like healthy trees and bear good fruit, even after the most painful storms.

Ivonne González and Paulina Marquez propose a collaboration with the Fugitive Library to produce writings and drawings (however ephemeral and changing) of the different Maroon cultures that were transmitted to them. Their intervention will establish a dialogue between the memory of the Maroon communities on the other side of the Atlantic and the fugitive being in Africa, and will be realized in Cléophée Moser’s installation with completely vegetal elements and textures.

4–6 pm
Let it out!
Activation in Conference room 2
With Jacob Eriksen and Agata Kowalewska

Participants are invited to a shouting room in the HKW building. In the intimate setting of the room, one can shout into a microphone that records it. The shouts are later played at random from the rooftop terrace of HKW through a loudspeaker aimed at the sky.

Let out the feral emotions that can’t be tamed! Whether rage, ecstasy, frustration, boredom, joy or sadness, participants are invited to release their bodily, nonverbal response or shout from the bottom of one’s throat, lungs, belly. The shouts will then be shared with the universe from the rooftop terrace.

5–6 pm
Imagining the Future
Conversation in the Assembly, Hirschfeld Bar
With 28 magazine (Mahmoud Al-Shaer) and Majd Kayyal
In English
More information soon

6–7 pm
Light Archive
Guided meditation and conversation in the Assembly, Hirschfeld Bar
With Maya Varichon El-Zanaty

As people interested in changing the paradigm of time and as those who are aware of systemic violence, the endless accumulation of evidence is a primary source of anger, pain and trauma that is very alive in the body. This occurs individually and collectively, in an emotional and physical way, but also at a more subtle, etheric level.

In the form of a guided collective meditation, this protocol will use the art and sciences of energies to create a healing technology based on an archival process. Designed on the principles of self-healing and alchemical processes of transformation, participants will create an immaterial library conceived of as a medicine to cure the spectral wounds of traumatic memories trapped in people’s bodies. Tapping into ancestral knowledges from ancient Egypt, India, China and West Africa, a collective channeling process will take place to transmute the old energies carried by the spirit of modernity into a powerful creative fire.

7–8 pm
Dëpp – Guissguiss yu wuté (Inversion – Reverse glances)
Performance at the Outside Pond at Sunset
With Mour Fall

Those rituals are inscribed into the relation that the human cultivates with Nature and forces that apply on it, it is a gate between the visible and the invisible, a breach that is opening in Time.

Drawing inspiration from “Ndëpp” healing practice, an individual and collective ritual specific to the Lebou culture and the Wolof people, Mour Fall will offer a performance building on the non-verbal modes of communication and the means of historical-cultural transmission specific to Senegalese and African culture. The intention is to invite visitors to reverse the gaze, to imagine the situation backwards, and to act it out to feel it in one’s body.

By invoking rhythms, onomatopoeia and sonorities, he will stage an act of collective healing, drawing on the mystique of ritual to repair social, intimate and inter-cultural relations.

From 9 pm
Jam Session
Migro, Ergo Sum Performance
with Marinho Pina, Sérgio Carlitos Pereira, Susana Ferreira, David Shongo and the participants of the Migro, Ergo Sum Workshop

A jam session is a communicating activity: one needs to listen to others so that each person can express themselves in their own way and later, in harmony. As the Migro Ergo Sum workshop is about how to talk and listen each other, there’s no better way to put it into practice than in a jam session. This session is not only about music, but other forms of storytelling and is open to others who didn’t participate in the workshops. More information here

From 10 pm
Alibeta and Band Performance
Concert in the Assembly, Hirschfeld Bar
With Alibeta and the Band

#Commonings: More information and program overview