CTM Festival 2020: music beyond borders


CTM Festival 2020: music beyond borders


Collater.al Contributors · 3 years ago · Art

CTM Festival 2020 celebrated and evolved the concept of liminality, hybridization and transgression comprehensively considering all of them as are not enough in and of themself.
The Festival drew inspiration from music and contemporary art and offered several inputs to expand the considerations beyond the disciplines and the meaning of boundaries – in their acceptance of multifaceted spiritual practices and social rituals as well as aesthetic, psychedelic, and other transformative experiences. 

Liminal spaces are zones and abstract ideas whose limits and goals remain uncertain: what does it really mean to enjoy music performances in their peeks and limits? What does it mean to interpret arbitrarily arts? What does it really mean a 360° clubbing experience? Could it be exhaustive to examine carefully in advance all the performers and gigs or live an immersive music experience means to let yourself go into a deep and naive journey without preconceptions? 

Based on these reflections, it started our experience at CTM 2020, in Berlin.

The acclaimed HBO series Chernobyl is also known for its remarkable soundtrack.
The sounds of this work are captured from an actual power plant (Ignalina – Lituania), including pumps, reactors, and turbines which created a constant sense of anxiety – performed in a stunning location (Bethonalle –  Silent Garden), earlier used as a former crematorium that operated for only six months before the crematorium was finally closed down.
The overall experience was enriched by acoustic instrumentations and field recordings combined with astonishing changing-lights and smoke-effects.

It has already been written almost everything about Berghain: from the absurd theories about bouncers’ selection strategies to the club’s descriptions as an enchanted black universe full of stairs, corners, dark spots, and hidden places. You can pretty much do whatever you want in this place, and moreover nobody will ever know – if it’s your concern.
Anyway – Thursday night was a soft-clubbing night.
I found interesting the perception that all the people in these ambiguous spaces find ourselves more clearly; it seems that somewhere precarious between a past that is no longer present and an ever-becoming future could help to stimulate both imaginations and freedom – that’s liminality, maybe.

Interstial Spaces

The proposed artistic perspectives in this exhibition open up interpretations of in-betweens and thus, at the same time, question their opposite: the places that are supposedly “real” and concrete. It is thus revealed that unambiguity is arbitrarily produced through coexistence.
The Interstitial Spaces exhibition takes the questions of CTM 2020’s theme beyond the margins of music through an accurate selection of different atmospheres and immersive rooms.

Inferno

In the catastrophic theories on technology and control, the artists Louis-Philippe Demers and Bill Vorn introduce “Inferno,” a participatory robotic performance enacting an experience of hell and punishment. Addressing many persistent anxieties around the relationships between humans and technologies, and the shifting boundaries between them, “Inferno” envisions infinite punishment as endless automation and subordination to the machine, as participants are drawn to the spectacles and thrills of submission.
Participants are divided and split allowed only partial control over their own bodies. In this liminal experience of purgatory, the ambiguous possibility of salvation hangs overhead beguiled audience members, who submit to a spectacle of suffering.

The 2nd night at Berghain was characterized by a lineup full of nu-gabberisms, drum’n’bass evolutions, between anxiety and ecstasy, panic and after-hours enhanced by explosive multi-disciplinary connections – it’s quite rare to become involved in “a unique commission between Uganda’s Nyege Nyege Festival and CTM, Gabber Modus Operandi are joined by Wahono (of Uwalmassa, a Jakarta-based project that explores connections between contemporary electronics and traditional Indonesian sounds), and Uganda’s Nakibembe Xylophone Troupe, one of the few remaining groups that perform on the embaire—an extremely rare and gigantic indigenous wooden xylophone that is simultaneously played by eight musicians.”

You Will Go Away One Day But I Will Not

Through this immersive installation in the tropical greenhouse, Alves and Dalt attempt to open a space for the multifarious voices of the forest—organic and inorganic, human and non-human, speculative and lived—while also pointing to their silencing and erasure by European colonists.
The political impact and the role of communities are quite prominent and create such experiences and practices affect political and cultural impact.
Is it enough to practice forms of experimental politics in a liminal space that has to make do without tangible utopias?

Transmediale – The Eternal Network

The Eternal Network is a group exhibition about the persistence of networks, with a focus on their potentials and limits in response to current social and technological changes.
In times of environmental and political turmoil, networks have lost their mass appeal and are the subject of widespread backlash: blackouts, propaganda, hate speech, addiction, and a human desire to disintermediate from the platforms of surveillance capitalism. Still, networks are ubiquitous, and thus both the poison and cure for the act of organizing within activism and politics alike. With the now more tangible limits of networks in mind, the exhibition asks how effectively they respond to future models of sociality, technology, and politics.
By connecting “The Eternal Network,” critical net cultures, and contemporary artworks, the exhibition closes the loop between the pre- and post-internet moments. With the backlash against networks in mind, it re-examines the legacies of critical net cultures, asking if and how they will continue to have an emancipatory relevance in the future.

CTM 2020 – as they used to highlight – throws itself into limbo in hopes of stimulating a critical discussion of our present and possible futures.
They thrust us into the grey zone between the two sides of a supposedly clear demarcation.

At the end of this all-embracing days in Berlin, we feel like we’re in between. Within ambivalence and perpetual evolution, we float on air without assurance nor sureness – a bit dazed.
How and in what shape will we emerge? What/who will we encounter along the way? Is there anything else beyond this liminal zone?
At Berlin-Tegel gate, we feel like we were fluctuating forms, minds, and bodies both regenerated and deflagrated.

CTM Festival | Collater.al 3

Text by Marco Gardenale
Pictures by CTM

CTM Festival 2020: music beyond borders

Art
CTM Festival 2020: music beyond borders

CTM Festival 2020: music beyond borders

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What is post-internet art?

What is post-internet art?

Anna Frattini · 6 days ago · Art

The expression post-internet art can be divisive and at times incomprehensible. Let’s clarify this term a bit. The term emerged in the early 2000s when Marisa Olson, a visual artist and curator who was collaborating with Rhizome was searching for a definition to describe her work as a visual artist—a combination of online and offline creations. Olson’s intention was not to coin a term that indicated the future of contemporary art after the invention of the internet, but rather to find a word that would help her and the collective she co-founded, Nasty Nets, define that branch of art that celebrated, albeit with criticism, the world of the internet. Due to many misunderstandings, this term and its creator have faced numerous criticisms over the years.

post-internet art
Marisa Olson, Performed Listening: Boomerang (2008)

Today, post-internet art means the artistic strand that deals with the impact of the Internet in the world of art and culture. Unlike Net Art, which used the Internet as a medium in the late 1990s, times have changed. Now artists like Amalia Ulman, Jon Rafman and Cory Arcangel use content from the Web to create works that reflect on the relationship we have not only with the Internet but also with social media.

  • Argentina’s Amalia Ulman has used a variety of mediums over the years, from painting to smartphone apps, exploring the links between consumerism and gender identity, social classes and aesthetics.
  • Jon Rafman’success came with 9 Eyes, a series in which the artist “stole” some shots from Google Maps using the Street View mode. His critique of the internet world has reached far, incorporating its rich vocabulary and visual culture to develop poetic narratives capable of capturing the tension between the human and the machine, as seen in his recent exhibition, Ebrah K’dabri at Sprüth Magers in Berlin last April.
  • Cory Arcangel is another post-internet artist who plays with pop culture through techniques like digital hacking and reconfiguration. Arcangel employs bot performances and machine learning tools, such as in 2021 when his solo exhibition Century 21 in New York featured Let’s Play: Hollywood, a type of deep-Q machine learning supercomputing system capable of playing any open-ended RPG game in real-time.

Ph. courtesy Marisa Olson, Amalia Ulman, Jon Rafman, Cory Arcangel

What is post-internet art?
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What is post-internet art?
What is post-internet art?
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On the set of Asteroid City, Wes Anderson’s new movie

On the set of Asteroid City, Wes Anderson’s new movie

Giorgia Massari · 2 days ago · Art

Props from Asteroid City, the new film directed by Wes Anderson, will be featured in an exhibition curated and presented by 180 Studios and Universal Pictures from June 17 in London. The film is set in a fictional American desert town during the 1950s and features a stellar cast, from Scarlett Johansson to Tom Hanks, Jason Schwartzman to Margot Robbie and many others. But, sure to steal everyone’s thunder is the alien, who appears for a few minutes but will leave everyone speechless.

The exhibit anticipates the dreamlike atmosphere and retro aesthetic of Anderson’s new film, exploring the props and costumes we can already glimpse from watching the trailer. A jetpack, a ray gun, a meteorite, a telescope, as well as colorful posters and much more. Visitors will even be able to dine inside the diner, faithfully recreated like the one in the film. The exhibition will be a true immersive experience in Asteroid City, amid the music and colors of the movie, which will accompany visitors as they await its theatrical release, scheduled for June 23, 2023. From the trailer clips, one can already sense the richness of the details and the meticulous care Anderson has toward the set. The colors and cinematography are also remarkable, almost succeeding in drawing attention away from the plot and focusing instead on the harmonious beauty of the shots. Indeed, the pastel palette, from blues to desert beiges, creates an almost dreamlike, at times metaphysical, setting that allows the viewer to relax.

Asteroid City Wes Anderson | Collater.al
Asteroid City Wes Anderson  | Collater.al
Asteroid City Wes Anderson  | Collater.al
Asteroid City Wes Anderson | Collater.al
Asteroid City Wes Anderson  | Collater.al

In short, Wes Anderson’s touch is clearly discernible. His manic use of symmetry and refined framing enhance what is a set bordering on the surreal. Indeed, it is not the real American desert, but the Spanish landscape. The director preferred to recreate the setting outside Madrid, first also evaluating the Cinecittà studios.
So all we have to do is wait and, in the meantime, discover a few frames and catch a glimpse of the objects that will soon be featured in the London exhibition, open until July 8 and bookable here.

Asteroid City Wes Anderson | Collater.al
Asteroid City Wes Anderson | Collater.al
Asteroid City Wes Anderson | Collater.al
Asteroid City Wes Anderson | Collater.al
Asteroid City Wes Anderson | Collater.al
Asteroid City Wes Anderson | Collater.al
On the set of Asteroid City, Wes Anderson’s new movie
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On the set of Asteroid City, Wes Anderson’s new movie
On the set of Asteroid City, Wes Anderson’s new movie
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Glen Martin Taylor and his reconstructed ceramics

Glen Martin Taylor and his reconstructed ceramics

Giulia Guido · 2 days ago · Art

Among the most famous and fascinating artistic techniques, the ancient Japanese art of Kintsugi undoubtedly stands out. It is a practice born from the idea of transforming an imperfection, a damage or a wound into something even more beautiful and perfect. Basically, this technique consists in repairing ceramic objects, even those of daily use such as cups and plates, using gold or cast silver to weld the shards. The final result gives the object a unique look and, what is no small thing, a much higher value than the original. It is precisely from the art of Kintsugi that the artist Glen Martin Taylor was inspired for his works. 

Like Japanese, Glen Martin Taylor repairs ceramics of all kinds, some made by him and others bought but replacing precious metal with everyday objects, from twine threads to metal elements. 

If in Kintsugi’s art the only important part is that of repair, for the artist the act of reassembling objects is as important as that of destroying them. Through these two phases, the artist frees his emotions and confronts them by creating objects that will eventually have lost their primary purpose, but not their importance. 

Discover all the works by Glen Martin Taylor on his Instagram profile

Glen Martin Taylor and his reconstructed ceramics
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Glen Martin Taylor and his reconstructed ceramics
Glen Martin Taylor and his reconstructed ceramics
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Alexis Ralaivao zooms in on the human body

Alexis Ralaivao zooms in on the human body

Giorgia Massari · 19 hours ago · Art

With a photographic cut and a very close gaze, French painter Alexis Ralaivao (1991) is able to cancel the distances between the subjects of his oil paintings and the viewers. Bodily details become the protagonists of his huge canvases. An ear, a hand holding a fork, a pendant swinging above a cleavage, a naked belly. Ultra-zooming bodies almost seem to come out of the canvas, becoming tangible and real. They can be brushed against, sniffed, sensed. The viewer is involuntarily led to establish an intimate connection with the subject, though not seeing his or her face. Simple, everyday gestures lead the viewer on an empathetic journey, allowing him or her to get closer. And here the Dutch figurative painting from which the artist draws inspiration becomes “accessible.” No longer something to be frightened by, almost overwhelmed by, but a moment to relax, to surrender to delicacy.

Alexis Ralaivao translates the everyday and the simplicity of gestures into eternal moments, suspended in time. Calm and lightness are evoked by pastel hues and delicate shades, enclosing the canvases in a dreamlike dimension. The choice of mixed-ethnicity subjects, being himself part of that community, and the photographic cut borrowed mostly from social media, allow Alexis to take a contemporary look at what is one of the most traditional and ancient techniques, the figurative. The boundaries between the traditional and the contemporary are broken, “In classical portraiture there is a distance between the audience and the person represented. I want to erase this distance,” Ralaivao declares.

Thus ephemeral and simple moments, which in the world of social media would disappear after a few hours, become crystallized forever in a dimension that is not meant to be magical or surreal, but rather tends toward inclusion and the breaking down of boundaries.

Alexis Ralaivao | Collater.al
Alexis Ralaivao | Collater.al
Alexis Ralaivao | Collater.al
Alexis Ralaivao | Collater.al

Courtesy Alexis Ralaivao

Alexis Ralaivao zooms in on the human body
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Alexis Ralaivao zooms in on the human body
Alexis Ralaivao zooms in on the human body
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