Konstanze Spät

Konstanze Spät is an artist, photographer, and filmmaker. She develops spaces, situations, and scenarios in which to deal with themes from the contexts of body and power politics. This usually occurs in the form of complex, sensual, three-dimensional installations, which lure viewers out of their distanced roles and turn them into an active part of an ephemeral biotope.

Besides her artistic work, she also works on various collective curatorial projects, such as The City and the City (Cologne, 2017), ZEFAK (Bremen, 2018) All of a Jitter (Tokyo, upcoming).

In the project Scenes of Oszillation she examines different restrictive and subversive possibilities offered by migration and integration.

Projekt

SCENES OF OSCILLATION

ALL LIVE-ONLINE-PROGRAM CAN BE FOUND HERE.
Check out the calender here.

In the cause of silence, each of us draws the face of her own fear –
fear of contempt, of censure, or some judgement, or recognition,
of challenge, of annihilation.
But of all, i think, we fear the visibility without which we cannot truly live.

Audre Lorde: Scratching the Surface – Some Notes on Barriers to Women and Loving, Sister Outsider, Crossing Press, 1984

OSCILLATION
Latin_ to swing, to rock back and forth, to vacillate

A state of constant balance.

Photo_ Konstanze Spät

QUESTIONS

How are experiences of migration, wandering, persecution, and deportation inscribed in our bodies? And how are they passed down to the next generation, which has been protected from these experiences?
At what points can we sense them and rescue them from their invisibility?

PROLOQUE_ ABSORBED, INTEGRATED, STANDING OUT

As the offspring of so called “Spätaussiedler” (ethic German resettlers), as a white person with “migrantion background”, as a migrant child, I am the product of my parents’ and grandparents’ efforts to integrate. An image of colonial and hegemonial identity models.
I do not have an accent when I speak German and, as expected, I followed a classic academic path. Neither my ID card nor my birth certificate make any reference to different ancestry. Even my physical appearance would not disturb even the dumbest of Nazi’s mad Aryan fantasies.

We integrate quietly, fueled by shame and fear. Sometimes via particular decisions, sometimes unwittingly.
During the process of integration, dependent relationships are created: if you don’t try to be the way I am, you’re out. You’re not allowed to play with us. It is out of the question to work it out mutually, together. Can integration be interpreted as the opposite of cooperation?

ON SITE

Scenes of Oscillation is a sound piece, exploring the experiences as well as the legacy of migration and integration through sound and story telling. 
These things are (re)constructed, critically examined, and reworked acoustically and through language.

In the workroom at thealit there will be more research and experimentation.
Speaking, telling, reciting and listening with and to the stories are supposed to help them come alive, to expand and explode history at the same time, so that a more pluralistic canon can be created.

Stay tuned on the usual channels. (like fkl_thealit)

LIVE PROGRAM

06.01.2021 - 20 Uhr
FIRST PREVIEW: SOUND PIECE “SCENES OF OSCILLATION”

On Wednesday we are invited to listen to Konstanze Spät's live interaction with sounds from thealit's Arbeitszimmer on a sound piece of SCENES OF OSCILLATION, adressing a zone that oscillates between seemingly tangible verbal communication and not so tangible affect. Here, content relies on sound: „The scenery of sound is built up through different universes of language (Russian, German, English) and those bodily entities, with whom I interact through my project (styrofoam, adhesive tape, glass, seeds and stems of fruits),” Konstanze Spät notes.

Now, listen carefully! to the textual parts too. Much of this has been written since December, during Konstanze Spät's studio grant.

Tune in here -> https://www.mixcloud.com/live/kxtanz/

Another part of the SCENES OF OSCILLATION programme will be live online conversations in English with artists/authors/activists, which will then be broadcast one after the other as podcasts. Konstanze Spät has invited jee chan, Alexandra Tatar and Aizda Arystanbek for Online Conversations to create dialogical connections between the different practices that deal with the experience of migration.

07.01.2021 - 20 Uhr
ONLINE CONVERSATION WITH JEE CHAN
body-knowledges, diaspora and the invisible

Konstanze Spät talks with jee chan, an artist, dancer and choreographer from Singapore/Berlin. jee chan's approach aims at "that which is always already there (big and true, just beneath the surface)" in sedimented histories of (post)colonial power. Experiences of flight and forced displacements inscribed in diasporic bodies are central, as lived through by jee chan's grandmother who had been fleeing from the japanese invasion to Singapore. jee chan uses public interventions, video installations, noise-concerts, sculptures, photography, texts, performances and more.

Website Jee Chan: www.zuntukyun.comhttp://www.zuntukyun.com

13.01.2021 - 20 Uhr
ONLINE CONVERSATION WITH ALEXNADRA TATAR
a conversation on scenes of o - autotopography, the migrant body and memory

Website Alexandrea Tatar: www.alexandratatar.at

Konstanze Spät gets in conversation with Alexandra Tatar. (We heard about her already in some newsletters, as Alexandra Tatar too is granted in thealit's COAPPARATION program.) This artist from Romania, living and working in Vienna, is interested in processes of „becoming” of human and nonhuman subjects, like Romanian 'guest workers' generated by treaties between the Socialist Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany in the 70s. Can personal stories and narratives of migration further structural insights?.

14.01.2021 - 20 Uhr
ONLINE CONVERSATION WITH AIZADA ARYSTANBEK
colonial heritage of the russian empire, decolonialisation and solidarity

Aizda Arystanbek is guest at Konstanze Spät's podcast of dialogues. Aizda Arystanbek works on gender-based violence and nationalism and for a decolonization of academia: in short for overthrowing patriarchal structures. She explains: „Borat profits from Kazakhstan's name, we don't.” Obviously the intersectional feminist from Kazakhstan doesn't belong to those appreciating the satire of "Borat" films by Sacha Baron Cohen as antipatriarchal unmasking of the USA – as it depends on how you do it. How to oppose the everyday violence of nonrepresentation, of symbolic erasure? "As a feminist scholar I do want to have my own country, my own ground in the ever-expanding sea of feminist thought."

Website Aizda Arystanbek: https://arystanbekaizada.com

15.01.2021 - 20 Uhr
Live SOUND PERFROMANCE
“SCENES OF OSCILLATION”

Konstanze Spät repeats the starting point of her audio program for all those who want more and again and all of it: again she presents a live performance of her SCENES OF OSCILLATION, closing her time at thealit's Arbeitszimmer.

All the Live Events will be tuned in here -> https://www.mixcloud.com/live/kxtanz/