D’EST Cycle #2: Postsocialism as Method. Anti-Geographies of Collective Desires

Image Caption: Perseids Pearlshower Ceremonial Event, ceremony and film by Katya Katipa-apai Nikonorova and krёlex zentre, 2017

D’EST Cycle #2: Postsocialism as Method. Anti-Geographies of Collective Desires
curated by krёlex zentre, Nhà Sàn Collective, and Fehras Publishing Practices with Ulrike Gerhardt and Suza Husse

The Hometown Sky is as Blue as a Song / Postsocialist Time Slips

Video art festival under the trees in Schloss Biesdorf
June 9th and 10th, 2023
District*School Without Center at Schloss Biesdorf
Address: Schloss Biesdorf, Alt-Biesdorf 55, 12683 Berlin
Transport connections: S-Bhf Biesdorf (S5) or U-Bhf Elsterwerdaer Platz (U5)

D’EST is a nomadic platform and online archive for video art, experimental, and documentary film that maps artistic forms of historiography at the intersection of postsocialist, queer-feminist, and decolonial narratives and imaginaries. From 2023, a new constellation of curated video art chapters, a nomadic cinema format, and a publication channel will be created. The second D’EST cycle Postsocialism as a Method. Anti-Geographies of Collective Desires explores the legacies of global and postmigrant socialisms and the potential of their unfolding into the future.

The first three chapters of this new cycle are created by the artist collectives krёlex zentre, Nhà Sàn Collective and Fehras Publishing Practices. They trace rarely told stories from the Cold War from Central Asia, Vietnam, North Africa and West Asia and their creolizations in postmigrant Germany and Europe. The curated intermedial constellations interconnect socialist imaginaries and life worlds from different and sometimes contradictory situated geographies that continued or emerged despite coloniality, totalitarianism, and capitalism.

On June 9th and 10th, 2023, D’EST launches the new cycle with an open-air video art festival in the park of Schloss Biesdorf [Biesdorf Palace], the municipal gallery of the Marzahn-Hellersdorf district. Together with the old trees of the park, which was landscaped from 1867, and the stories they store, the Ciné Moon Mobile offers a performative and sculptural shelter for moving images and encounters. The Ciné Moon Mobile is developed by Aziza Kadyri and Kim Bode/NAILS*hacks facts fictions especially for the nomadic manifestations of D’EST. Embedded in performance, music and discourse formats and moments of cooking together and drinking tea, the first two chapters of the new D’EST cycle present video and film screenings under the open sky:

The chapter Trời quê hương trong xanh như lời hát [The Hometown Sky is as Blue as a Song] by the artist collective Nhà Sàn Collective from Hanoi and the diaspora, deals with Vietnamese pop music of different eras as an archive of political desires and as a condensation of social and ecological traumas and utopias. Contributions by Nguyễn Văn Song, Nguyễn Duy Anh, Síu Phạm, Nguyễn Tan Hoang, Vu T. Thu Ha and Quynh Dong.

The Almaty-based imaginary institution for translocal queer imaginaries from Central Asia krёlex zentre presents Postsocialist Time Slips: experiences of loss, silence, terror, resistance, compassion and love lead to temporal and political slippages, where buried memories can be touched, capitalist times and patriarchal architectures can be reappropriated collectively and sadness and joy merge into something resistant and healing. Contributions by Nazira Karimi, Bakhyt Bubikanova, Gulzat Matisakova, lucine talalyan, Anna Shahnazaryan / Tigran Khachatryan / Lara Aharonian / Lala Aslikyan / Are՛Martirossian / Olya Azatyan / Sevan Petrossian and others, Katya Katipa-apai Nikonorova & krёlex zentre and Dilda Ramazan.

PROGRAMME

Accessibility information
Free entrance
Languages spoken at the event: English, German, Russian, Vietnamese
The film and video programs are shown in original languages (Vietnamese, Russian) with English and German subtitles, some are 18+ (sex)
The events and an accessible toilet (entrance door 1m in width) are at ground level and accessible without steps.

Friday 9 June 2023, 6 – 11 pm

from 6 pm
Ciné Moon Mobile
Roaming habitat with video station and bar
by Aziza Kadyri and Kim Bode/NAILS*hacks facts fictions

The Ciné Moon Mobile is a hybrid vehicle and mobile shelter for D’EST’s nomadic video art programs, for the narratives, images, gatherings, dreams, and reflections of the cycle “Post-Socialism as Method. Anti-geographies of Collective Desire.” Developed by Aziza Kadyri and Kim Bode / NAILS*hacks facts fictions in collaboration with D’EST, the hybrid sculpture draws inspiration from the history of the anti-colonial ciné-trucks that circulated in various non-aligned countries from the 1950s onwards, showing resistance films and generating local collective film productions. The name and textile based iconography of the Ciné Moon Mobile conveys Aziza Kadyri’s artistic engagement with the feminist legacy of her great-grandmother Oybibi’s 9 moons dowry. Oybibi – whose name translates as “the moon lady” – cut up the dowry and sent the moons to different strands of her extended family. Using the moons and indigenous techniques and narratives stored in them from the Jizzakh region in Central Asia, the artist draws a rhizomatic web of relationships of women* and their stories and resistances from 1920 to the present in contemporary Uzbekistan.

In Schloss Biesdorf, the Ciné Moon Mobile interacts with the ecologies of the Schlosspark and polyphonic neighborhoods, hosting the screenings, performances and conversations in the open air.

7 – 8.30 pm
Postsocialism as Method. Anti-Geographies of Collective Desires
Tea talks, images, texts and music in English and German language
with Aziza Kadyri, Fehras Publishing Practices (Kenan Darwich, Sami Rustom), Kim Bode, krёlex zentre (Maria Vilk & Ruth Jenrbekova), Nhà Sàn Collective (Nguyễn Quốc Thành), Suza Husse and Ulrike Gerhardt

The tea talk begins where traces of socialist imaginaries and lifeworlds from heterogeneous yet monolithically historicized places connect on the basis of a cup of tea and a friendly smile. Coloniality, totalitarianism, and capitalism may have profoundly altered these people, their situatednesses, identities, and geographies, but the objects, images, texts, and music tell counter-stories of vulnerability, resistance, unproductivity, and of the to-be-mapped anti-geographies. We want to share these post-socialist experiences and desires during the tea talk.

8.45 – 9.45 pm
Trời quê hương trong xanh như lời hát [The Hometown Sky is as Blue as a Song]
Film and video programme curated by Nhà Sàn Collective
Works by Nguyễn Văn Song, Nguyễn Duy Anh, Síu Phạm, Nguyễn Tan Hoang, Vu T. Thu Ha, Quynh Dong

The screening chapter Trời quê hương trong xanh như lời hát [The Hometown Sky is as Blue as a Song] consists of sonic moments of 1990s Vietnam within films and video works by Vietnamese-born diasporic artists living in Vietnam, USA, and Switzerland. Lively sonic memories of that era of the late 1980s and early 1990s ripple through the music and audio-visual imageworlds resonating from this screening chapter. ​​The collective and personal experiences of this free market economy and globalization era echo through a never-ending stream of songs, creating glimpses of desire, nostalgia, sex, death, humor and chaos.

9.45 – 10.45 pm
Postsocialist Time Slips
Film and video programme curated by krёlex zentre
Works by Nazira Karimi, Bakhyt Bubikanova, Gulzat Matisakova, lucine talalyan, Anna Shahnazaryan / Tigran Khachatryan / Lara Aharonian / Lala Aslikyan / Are՛Martirossian / Olya Azatyan / Sevan Petrossian a.o., Katya Katipa-apai Nikonorova & krёlex zentre

That’s how we escaped and found ourselves on the rooftop of a residential building, at the clandestine queer ceremony where everything that was got married with everything that wasn’t but could have been, and probably, will.

Postsocialist Time Slips offers a series of falling-outs from the present, a sequence of short ruptures in the linear time grid of the modern capitalist order of things. The screening chapter is a one-hour trip consisting of six video works from Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Armenia. Time slips reveal a previously unseen aspect of the past, present, or future with a special focus on hidden histories and unimaginable futures.

Saturday 10 June 2023, 4 – 11 pm

from 4 pm
Ciné Moon Mobile
Roaming habitat with video station and bar
by Aziza Kadyri and Kim Bode/NAILS*hacks facts fictions

Inspired by the history of the anti-colonial Ciné-Trucks, which traveled to various non-aligned countries since the 1950s with the support of the Soviet Union to screen resistance films, Aziza Kadyri and Kim Bode/NAILS*hacks facts fictions developed the Ciné Moon Mobile, a flexible architectural aluminum structure that houses textiles and geometric elements that reflect the traditional historical iconography of Suzani embroideries from the Jizzakh region of Uzbekistan. In Aziza Kadyri’s adaptation of these dowry textiles, the moons become haptic fixed points that unite the different experiences of women* in her family since the 1920s. The roaming Ciné Moon Mobile is a video art and experimental film sculpture, a vehicle, a habitat as well as a hospitable, multifunctional organism.

4 – 7 pm
How to return to gold
Performance, instant noodles, cassette tape
by/with Phan Dong Thai, Nguyễn Quốc Thành, Quynh Dong

Tear a piece of gold leaf into the bowl of instant noodles, pour boiling water
Play, stop, take out the cassette tape, turn to the other side
Remember coral eyeshadow she wore

The hosts invite the audience to a happening with rules given on a sheet of paper. The visitors are encouraged to select, design a process that suits them to start their own return to Đổi Mới (Renovation). Đổi Mới is usually thought of in relation to the economic reforms initiated by Vietnamese government in 1986 with the aim of shifting from centrally-planned to market-oriented economy.

6 – 7 pm
9 Moons
activation of the Ciné Moon Mobile with Aziza Kadyri and Kim Bode/NAILS*hacks facts fictions

The Ciné Moon Mobile forms the new roaming D’EST habitat with video station and bar and is used for screenings, performances and talks in public space. Aziza Kadyri from Tashkent/London combines indigenous textile traditions, digital art practices and anti-colonial research practices for an installative storytelling on the experiences of female family members during the Soviet era in Uzbekistan. Kim Bode/NAILS*hacks facts fictions from Berlin explores landscapes as material and physical space, as collective idea and political terrain.

7.30 – 8.30 pm
Tea Talk with krëlex zentre and Dilda Ramazan
in Russian, English and German languages

The krëlex zentre employees Maria Vilkovisky and Ruthia Jenrbekova together with the Kazakhstani curator and art worker Dilda Ramazan will discuss all things Central Asian, including the imaginary institution the two practitioners founded and the non-imaginary projects they carry out on its behalf. The center of the tea talk will be the screening chapter Postsocialist Time Slips, which the duo curated for D’EST.

8.45 – 9.45 Uhr
Postsocialist Time Slips
Film and video programme curated by krёlex zentre
Works by Nazira Karimi, Bakhyt Bubikanova, Gulzat Matisakova, lucine talalyan, Anna Shahnazaryan / Tigran Khachatryan / Lara Aharonian / Lala Aslikyan / Are՛Martirossian / Olya Azatyan / Sevan Petrossian a.o., Katya Katipa-apai Nikonorova & krёlex zentre

That’s how we escaped and found ourselves on the rooftop of a residential building, at the clandestine queer ceremony where everything that was got married with everything that wasn’t but could have been, and probably, will.

Postsocialist Time Slips offers a series of falling-outs from the present, a sequence of short ruptures in the linear time grid of the modern capitalist order of things. The screening chapter is a one-hour trip consisting of six video works from Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Armenia. Time slips reveal a previously unseen aspect of the past, present, or future with a special focus on hidden histories and unimaginable futures.

21.45 bis 22.45 Uhr
Trời quê hương trong xanh như lời hát [The Hometown Sky is as Blue as a Song]
Film and video programme curated by Nhà Sàn Collective
Works by Nguyễn Văn Song, Nguyễn Duy Anh, Síu Phạm, Nguyễn Tan Hoang, Vu T. Thu Ha, Quynh Dong

The screening chapter Trời quê hương trong xanh như lời hát [The Hometown Sky is as Blue as a Song] consists of sonic moments of 1990s Vietnam within films and video works by Vietnamese-born diasporic artists living in Vietnam, USA, and Switzerland. Lively sonic memories of that era of the late 1980s and early 1990s ripple through the music and audio-visual imageworlds resonating from this screening chapter. ​​The collective and personal experiences of this free market economy and globalization era echo through a never-ending stream of songs, creating glimpses of desire, nostalgia, sex, death, humor and chaos.

D’EST Cycle 2: Postsocialism as a Method. Anti-Geographies of Collective Desires is a project by the nomadic art space District*School Without Center in cooperation with Schloss Biesdorf and Archive Books.

Funded by the Senate Department for Culture and Community and ifa.