9 - 10 September 2023
11am - 4pm (plus a small dinner on Saturday)
Lake Studios Berlin (Scharnweberstraße 27, 12587 Berlin)

Feral Encounters is a cross-disciplinary community-building weekend exploring dance and performance art practices devoted to sensorial approaches to other-than-human persons¹. Lake Studios Berlin will host the encounter, providing a framework for collective speculation. We wish to share knowledge, experiences, and life-affirming practices with fellow artists, choreographers, dancers, activists, journalists, critics, and scientists in the field.

Camila Nobrega, Jared Gradinger, Promona Sengupta, Roni Katz, Siegmar Zacharias, Yuni Chung (Chōri Dance Collective) and Catalina Fernández & Alex Viteri Arturo (Violeta) will share provocations, inviting us to delve into specific aspects of the overarching theme. The full schedule and artists' bios will follow soon.

We welcome students from various disciplines to join the conversations and practices. Please fill in the Open Call before August 31st so we can plan for your visit.

Feral Encounters is organized by Alex Viteri Arturo and Shuntaro Yoshida (MaCA), BAS-associated artists. Thanks to the support of Lake Studios Berlin, invited artists, friends, and lovers. Get in contact at mappedtotheclosestaddress_ @gmail.com.

Feral Encounters is part of the BAS colloquium series gardens & plots: Sites of Interconnected Research, which brings together four artistic research projects at the UdK Berlin that evolve from (urban) gardens and plots as sites of research and collaboration with both plants and humans.

¹ "We hold that what is currently being destroyed is also other-than-human persons because what extractivist and environmentalist practices enact as nature may be, also, other than such. This is one of the things we (the editors) have learned from a mountain in the Andes of Peru that is also a being and from forest animals in Paraguay that are also spirit masters of their world." Cadena, Marisol de la, and Mario Blaser. A World of Many Worlds. Edited by Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018. Partly available online

Camila Nobrega is a transmedia journalist and academic researcher, working for more than years in the intertwined lenses of social-environmental conflicts and feminist perspectives. Initiator of Beyond the Green project (beyondthegreen.media) and fellow at the Greenweb Foundation with the project Feminist Architectures of Investigations on Megaprojects.

Captain Pro / Promona Sengupta is an artist, academic, activist, and curator. She recently completed her PhD at the International Research Center: Interweaving Performance Cultures at the Freie Universität Berlin. Her creative practice engages with decolonial speculative imagination as a means for radical politics. She co-created and co-flies the deep space exploration vehicle -- FLINTAQ+ Spaceship Beben, as its serving Captain and chef. She co-curates Radio Kal, as a part of the transoceanic longform artistic project kal and was the resident artist at District Berlin in 2020. In her activist work, she fights for dignity alongside her comrades in queer, feminist, antifascist, and BIPOC community spaces. Captain Pro is currently on shore leave in Berlin. https://www.bakonline.org/person/promona-sengupta/

Catalina Fernandez is a light and sound designer for theater, dance, and performances. She works as a technical director in several productions and assists choreographers, filmmakers, and multidisciplinary artists. These days, Alex Viteri works mostly at the threshold of the visual arts and performance. She is part of an ever-growing group of artists interested in considering sites, ecosystems, and other-than-human subjects as collaborators. Under their Duo-name Violeta, Catalina and Alex visit the worlds of various feminist science fiction novels and reflect on current forms of government by analyzing the storytelling insights of Abya Yala’s female activists. They imagine the soundscape of a future in which these discourses become reality. They were once hosted at Lake Studios: https://lakestudiosberlin.blog/2021/03/16/alex-viteri-aturo-catalina-fernandez-%c2%b7-mar-apr-2021/.

Jared Gradinger is dedicated to long-term relationships of land care, Nature intelligence, community, body and art while working with the expanded notion of garden. They offer an elemental/body meditation and invite an intimate sharing of childhood gardens memories for our feral weekend. https://www.jaredgradinger.com/

Roni Katz’s choreographic work engages with the erotic, questions power, and moves through ecological forms. While consistently embodying personal-political matters, these elements shapeshift between formats of cabaret, film, performance, conversation and participation. Both collectively and solo, the work is driven by the necessity and desire to be in community, with and in relation to other human and other-than-human collaborators. The practice, slow and steady, brings into play exposure, subjectivities, sensuality, intimacy and pleasure. 

Shuntaro Yoshida is a dancer, choreographer, and researcher of contemporary dance and performance. He conducts practice-based research on dance in areas such as participatory choreographic practices, AI choreography, and other species’ choreography. Shuntaro is a member of the dance collective Mapped to the Closest Address, Chōri Dance(調理/조리) collective and is currently a JSPS Post-doctoral Research Fellow at Faculty of Sport Sciences at Waseda University. Since 2022, he has served as co-editor at the Tokyo Academic Review of Books. https://shuntaroyoshida14.wixsite.com/shun

Siegmar Zacharias is a performance artist and trained death doula. At the intersection of art, radical pedagogy, and activism. Her performances develop immersive installations, discursive encounters, and address the ethical dynamics of transformation in ecologies of artistic and social practice through a queer feminist lens. She collaborates with humans and uncontrollable entities such as smoke, slime, saliva, the human nervous system, and grief. She is a founding member of the social body apothecary proposing regeneration of the social body by restoring the personal body, valuing the knowledges and resources stored in our bodies and lands. Making medicine together as a decolonial practice of resistance against structural violence. www.siegmarzacharias.comhttps://instagram.com/socialbodyapothecary?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==

Yuni (Hoa Yun) Chung is a berlin-based artist, works with object, drawing, performance, video, sound and text. In her practice, she uses metaphors to create a space in which multiple media and different social contexts are interwoven, revealing the structural violence without replicating it. Since 2022, she has co-founded Chōri (調理/조리) Collective and explores how our body harmonizes as a part of food with our own flavors and opens the possibility of transcending our current situation, such as neoliberalism, globalization, or colonial histories. http://yunichung.comhttp://chori-dance-collective.jimdosite.com

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