An online symposium collectively curated by the Transart MFA class of 2020
In Staying with the Trouble, Donna Harraway describes sympoiesis as "a simple word; it means “making-with.” Nothing makes itself; nothing is really autopoietic or self-organizing...Sympoiesis is a word proper to complex, dynamic, responsive, situated, historical systems. It is a word for worlding-with, in company. Sympoiesis enfolds autopoiesis and generatively unfurls and extends it."

Rising above the tide, our final class of MFA students have eschewed the traditional MFA summer residency in favour of collectively curating a symposium entitled SYMPOIESIS .

In Staying with the Trouble, Donna Harraway describes Sympoiesis as “a simple word; it means “making-with.” Nothing makes itself; nothing is really autopoietic or self-organizing…Sympoiesis is a word proper to complex, dynamic, responsive, situated, historical systems. It is a word for worlding-with, in company.”

INHABITING PRACTICE: SPEAKING FROM WHERE YOU ARE

The 2020 winter residency in Mexico City will focus on articulating where your practice and research live in relation to a larger field. Where does your work speak from? How do you inhabit your practice and how does this translate into the presentation of your work?

The 2019 Transart Summer Residency is nomadic. We will think, make and explore with Uferstudios, K.Verlag press, Spike Berlin and Field Kitchen Academy. We will visit studios, pavillions, floating universities and independent spaces. There will be workshops, roving sessions, conceptual dinners, performances, discussion groups, an art grant clinic, movement sessions and dérives.

THE EXPANDED BODY

The Transart Institute 2019 winter residency will think, discuss and practice the artist as an expanded body. From the corporeality of our practices, to the bodies of knowledge we encounter and produce through our research, to the private and public space we engage with our work, the expanded body asks us to stretch ourselves outwards to think, act and reflect collaboratively. Our group of MFA artists each have a relationship to this theme. They are by turns, expanding their bodies through dance or performance practices, extending the body through materials or technology, exploring the spaces between bodies via portraiture and experimenting with expanded bodies of knowledge. In each of these practices, Transart’s artists are exploring forms for expanding their various bodies, outwards into the world; connecting and exchanging, co-constructing new spaces and publics where their practices can be in vital and critical relation to the world.

Transart Summer Residency 2018 will take place in Berlin at Uferstudios and include workshops, a movement series, guest reviews, speakers. The program will culminate with a self-curated MFA exhibition, performance and dialog series at FLUTGRABEN E.V. entitled Co-al-ism, “Rapid change creates an instinctive need for us to put up walls – walls of separation between us and others, walls between our internal and external selves, walls between nations. The artists of Co-a-lism are motivated to go beyond walls and borders, both external and internal, to explore intersections and overlaps- coalescence- believing in the on-going importance of human connection across boundaries. Co-a-lism presents ten artists from seven countries, ... to merge divergent viewpoints, materials, and backgrounds. The exhibition challenges the artists' ability to resolve individual artistic explorations while at the same time seeks to offer moments of coalescence.”

Statement: The planet seems to grow as we become entangled with each other and so too our understanding of limits, boundaries, borders and edges. They emerge in various ways and mean different things for each of us. We want to open up a discussion, hear your opinions and find how they might overlap, exclude, include, intersect and mingle. This symposium is an invitation to re-configure, re-draw, re-imagine, re-think and re-discover the ways in which we consider limits and boundaries, to disentangle rigid borders and challenge assumptions and to consider: What if our boundaries have been misplaced? How do we ground them? How do we respond to them? How do we share the planet? Can we nest instead of settle?

Winter residency 2018 will take place in Mexico City, hosted by SOMA , with studio to Torschlusspanik, Obrero Centro, walk/talks to Tlatelolco and Plaza de Tres Cuturas, a Casa Maauad exhibition, artist talks, cooking classes and studio workshops, culminating in the symposium, exhibitions and performances "On limits, borders, edges and boundaries":

Come explore the notion of "documentation"; examine what it means to exist in a holding pattern; embrace the philosophy of letting go; find the internal connections between research, creation and displacement; find the meaning of voice in your own path as an artist; explore the fictocritical and the experimental ways of writing; examine the disruption of grammar; develop your artistic research as an international phenomenon; or use pleasure as a subversive action. 

The 2016 Summer Residency took place in conjunction with the Transart Triennale. This summer in Berlin, explore art after the anthropocene, make a film in three days, discuss smuggling as a curatorial practice and resistance as an artistic one. Weave the written word into your artistic practice and create new projects for futuring polypodies. Find your voice, your body and your words in an intensive think tank style space of experimentation and exchange. Take a drive into the world of the flaneur and (re)learn the art of getting lost. Join an excursion to the Berlin Biennale with curators and critics, practice tools of engaging conflict and collaborate on explorations of chance and control.