Parrhesia Talks. My Life As A Counter-Rhythmical Interruption Cat

in englischer Sprache

The term ‘counter-rhythmical’, invented by Friedrich Hölderlin, describes art’s role as an agent of rupture in an order, an interruption that also allows us to enter the world of solidarity, kindness, and empathy. Against a socio-political order that separates, divides, classifies, and excludes, Strauss’s work endeavours precisely to create counter-rhythms, or moments of Oneness that in-separate. She does so using a wide range of media, a mix of indigenous cultures, and by gathering people and doing collective actions. Her talk will present a procession of these examples of Oneness, which she understands as the creation of times and spaces for living the good life, in a Greek sense of the word.

This procession will start with her ongoing durational art work, Avtonomi Akadimia (http://avtonomi-akadimia.net), a self-organized, grassroots university she founded and organizes in Athens and elsewhere. She will then present rarely seen documentation of the ‘movement of movements’ that emerged in 2012 to get cultural institutions to transform radically so that they can be used for reloveutionary purposes: occupations of museums such as the Pergamonmuseum, the Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice, and of the director's offices of the Berlin Biennale 7.

Also, specifically for Parrhesia, she will revisit her early interactive 3D sculptures, which deploy pre-Socratic mathematical structures, once part of a unity of knowledge, into synthetic sculptures she calls ‘Cat Notation’. Taking up the a-disciplinary effects of Berlin Media Theory, Cat Notation is a musical structure that can be said to carry the ‘DNA’ of ancient Greece prior to the invention of the state as a dispositif of exclusion and borderization.

Joulia Strauss (http://joulia-strauss.net) is an artist, activist and multimedia sculptor. She was born in the Soviet Union as Mari, one of Europe’s last indigenous cultures with a shamanic tradition, and lives and works in Athens and Berlin. Her sculptures, paintings, performances, drawings and video works have been seen in solo and group exhibitions at the Pergamon Museum and Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin, at Tate Modern, as well as at the Tirana Biennale, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Athens Biennale, the Kyiv Biennial, the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe and documenta14, among others. She is the editor of Krytyka Polityczna Athens and (with Friedrich Kittler, Peter Berz, and Peter Weibel) of Götter und Schriften rund ums Mittelmeer (Wilhelm Fink, Brill, 2017). She is a member of Parrhesia: School of Philosophy, Berlin. Strauss has recently completed a film, Transindigenous Assembly (https://vimeo.com/888629382). She practices and teaches Qi Gong and Việt Võ Đạo Kung Fu.