Edition 2023
Tender Absence is a residency program for 13 artists from around the world. They worked together for one week in an immersive digital space, exploring how to produce beyond streams and Zoom meetings and how to convey local realities globally without exploiting them. The outcomes of their collaboration will be shared in a 24-hour public digital showcase.
Digital Showcase
Hub @ Schwankhalle Bremen:
Some talks will take place at HUB @Schwankhalle Bremen.
Meet the team, enjoy food together, watch the event livestream.
Bring your headphones and mobile device or laptop!
Accessibility and Language
The whole program will be in English. To take part you ideally
need a laptop and some headphones, but smartphone or tablet
also works.
If you have technical problems, find a member that has “💚TEAM💚” written after their name or contact: alexander@peira.space
Program - 18TH March
(timezone CET)
Gather Town “Forum”
& live at Hub @Schwankhalle
Opening
Introduction, presentation of the program and the artists (30 Min)
Gather Town “Forum”
Tender Walks
A live-talkshow with 2 of our artists, Cocompi (Peru) and Sandra Suubi (Uganda), that are walking in their neighborhood and talk about their collborative work. (30 Min)
Gather Town “Vishal”
Performance by Vishal Kumaraswamy
Interactive performance for up to 5 people (15 Min each). Limited accessibility: If you want to make sure to get a seat, book at:
make a reservation
Gather Town “Forum”
Guided tour
We will explain a bit about the project background, present the projects in the exhibition and show you some hidden rooms. (20 min)
Gather Town “Forum”
Lecture by Bani Brusadin
Curator, educator and researcher Bani Brusadin (The Influencers festival, Transmediale 2023) will discuss the politics of technology, digital cultures, and the utopias and dystopias of a networked planet, with a special focus on the limitations and possibilities of art and creative research. (45 min)
Gather Town “Forum”
& live at Hub @Schwankhalle
Lecture performance by Farzad Golghasemi & Gabriela Valdespino: as everything repeats and doubles itself, the ground moves under the feet
Companies in the digital industry exploit local resources to feed their maps and establish local dependencies and use of local resources. In return, the collected data narrates our cities. A feedback loop, where “local” and “global” shape our physical and digital spaces. “Endless Twist” is a guided 3D walk through urban fragments and personal memories, presenting a critical perspective on the agency of humans and non-humans in architecture and planning. ( 20 minutes)
Web Version: https://endlesstwist.xyz/ (Duration: ca. 20 minutes)
Gather Town “Archive”
& live at Hub @Schwankhalle
Live DJ Set by Jere Ikongio
Participant of the residence, Jere will bring some Nigerian electronical music to dance all connected, everybody in their own dance floor
24h exhibition
Exhibition of the projects from the residency. You can access them individually or in guided tours (see program above).
Gather Town “Exhibition - Parizads Room”
film by Parizad D.
An experimental film created in a virtual world investigating themes of isolation, the relationship between human emotion and artificial intelligence and movement through digital space.
Mozilla Hubs
Virtual installation + video art by Cocompi and Sandra Suubi
Interactive online sculpture exploring several themes around social justice, how Africa is being used as an anthropological site, the contemporary and historical narratives of dumping sites through a critical lense on the institution of marriage.
Gather Town “Exhibition – Tantdile Room”
Installation, augmented reality and sound art by Tantdile Experimenta Lab – Hyperfiction Story “Into the Wild. v2”
Setting off in a series of inquisitive
journeys into the self, a dinner gathering spiral
Into an existential debate within each of the people
seated at the table. Following a surreal and nonlinear landscape,
the state of a country, self imagination and rites are brought into an
unconscious laboratory. At each turn, delving deeper into each of the characters
as they plan to defend or make a comment for their own perspective or notion.
Meet the artists
hacer sitio corp
Venezuela, Iran & Germany
» experimental artist, performer, curator
hacer sitio corp (in Spanish “to make place” + corporeal) is a group of international artists based in Bremen working at the intersection of research, performance, media art, design, and architecture. Gabriela Valdespino is an interdisciplinary artist working in the fields of photography, moving images, sound, and performance. Farzad Golghasemi is an intermedia artist who studied and practiced architecture.
Maria Patsyuk
France & Russia
» multidisciplinary anti-war
Maria Patsyuk is a multidisciplinary anti-war artist from Moscow. Due to political reasons provisionally based in Europe.Her artistic practice includes holding complex interrelations, breaking away from ideologies and manifests, sprouting through in-betweens, fluid contract, distance and boundaries.She critically reflects on the interrelation of people, institutions, and non-humans both in physical and digital spaces.
Cocompi
Peru
» multidisciplinary artist
Cocompi integrates collaborative art-making processes with music composition, audio/visual design, and the application of new technologies. They are engaging with interdisciplinary teams in both time-based media and performing arts. They resonate with the remediation of analog & digital inputs as a (re)search for collective sensibilities in the arts, merging computer-assisted composition with new media archives that involve cultural exchange –and conspiracy– with local individuals and underrepresented communities.
Camila Galaz
Camila Galaz is a Chilean-Australian artist, writer, and researcher based in New York. Working in video, drawing, text, performance, and across digital platforms, her research-based projects look to understand intimate connections to history and collective memory.
Jafar Hejazi
Belgium
» experimental artist, performance, curator
Jafar Hejazi is a digital performance artist who uses various media technologies to create engaging projects. He tells stories through the internet, social media, chatbots, and VR/AR while trying to question concepts like (dis)embodiment in the digital world.
Sandra Suubi
Uganda
» socially conscious visual activist
Sandra Suubi (born Kampala, Uganda), is a socially conscious visual activist, whose multimedia physical and sonic sculptural works are a response to her observation/ study/ experience of popular visual culture and social practices, especially in her country Uganda. Suubi broaches issues that deal as much with industrialization, single use plastic, climate change, commodity, exploitation, as with the transformative effects of the accumulation of mass produced goods, material culture and women’s lived experiences.
Shin Hara
Working with video combined with installation, photography, web, text, and VR environment, Hara Shin experiments to subvert and dismantle the hierarchies between technology, nature, and mankind. Through pseudo-archives consisting of fragmented images and nonlinear narratives, she reconstructs the processes and contexts of appropriation, transition, and integration revealed in structural relationships between what is natural and artificial, or human-nonhuman.
Jere Ikongio
Nigeria & Germany
» VR Artist
Jere is an artist creating new media, performative, and immersive art projects. Based in Lagos, He is interested in infrastructure, (hyper)identity and archiving using performance, web, design, photography, video, 3D, Animation and XR.
Anne Fehres & Luke Conroy
Tasmania
» multidisciplinary artist duo
Anne Fehres and Luke Conroy are a multidisciplinary artist duo based in Tasmania, Australia. Their work engages with socio-cultural topics in playful ways, utilizing humor and irony as tools for critical reflection and expression. They use a variety of mediums such as photography, performance, digital-art, video, sound, VR, textile, text, and installation. Their background in documentary film, audio-visual design, sociology, visual-art, and education informs their interest in socio-cultural topics. They are currently focused on continuing their place-based community practice within virtual spaces.
Vishal Kumaraswamy
Vishal Kumaraswamy is an artist and filmmaker based in Bangalore, India. Vishal’s practice is concerned with examining our techno-social condition of living at the intersection of caste and technology and his works often span text, video, sound, performance and creative programming both online and offline.
Parizad D
India
» multidisciplinary artist
Parizad D is a multidisciplinary artist from Mumbai, India. She started her career working as a commercial photographer, specializing in advertising, fashion and music. Over the years, she has also developed a strong artistic practice by experimenting with various alternative mediums such as filmmaking, video art, analogue printing processes, the written word and more. She has actively been pursuing work of a more interdisciplinary nature, such as creating and performing live visuals for various artists.
Meet the speaker
Bani Brusadin
Bani Brusadin is a curator, educator and researcher. In 2022 he worked as member of the curatorial team for transmediale 2023. Earlier the same year he curated the 6th DONE conference Violence and Cuteness (Foto Colectania Foundation, Barcelona). In the past he founded and co-curated The Influencers, a festival about experimental art, design and activist practices in the networked society (Centre of Contemporary Culture of Barcelona, 2004 - 2019). Between 2018 and 2021 Bani directed Freeport, an independent study program for a world of humans, non-humans and machines, and was part of the curatorial team of Matadero Madrid’s Tentacular festival. He holds a PhD in Advanced Artistic Practices and teaches about technology, society and digital cultures at Elisava Design University and University of Barcelona, as well as in master degrees in Curatorship and Digital Art (Esdi) and Data & Design (Elisava). He is the author of the essay The Fog of Systems, published by Aksioma Institute for Contemporary Art Ljubljana (2021).
Meet the mentors
Gloria Schulz
Gloria Schulz prefers to navigate through gray windows, designing virtual worlds and hybrid spaces for a transgenerational audience. Gloria sees themselves as a digital artist and founded the Studio for Infinite Possibilities, which aims to collaboratively find artistically and design-oriented, technically sophisticated solutions for socially relevant projects. Gloria is best suited to advise on topics such as: technology with a focus on video technology, VR and AR technology, Arduino, programming - with a focus on Unity, Unreal Engine, Creative Coding (vvvv, cables.gl, web AR), and Mozilla Hubs, Blender - modeling, texturing, UV unwrapping, shading, and rigging.
Arne Vogelgesang
Germany
» new media artist
With the label internil, and under his own name, Arne Vogelgesang has been devising theatre & performance projects since 2005. He has been especially interested in online forms of radical political subjectivation and in their media-technological contexts. Arne also makes videos, gives talks & workshops on his research topics and occasionally writes texts. He is currently doing artistic research on virtual embodiment.
Sarah Fartuun Heinze
Germany
» multidisciplinary artist
Sarah Fartuun Heinze is a Black(-gender-)Queer*Feminist, artist, author and arts educator. Sarah &//& Fartuun is multiverse(neurodiverse)traversing and astethetically researching theater, games, music and empowerment & part of the initiative "Creative Gaming" and "Neue Deutsche Medienmacher*innen".
One favorite (digital) game : 'Zelda: Ocarina of Time'. Perhaps because music is the key to most quests – like it is most of the time, even beyond screens and (theater) stages.
Jan Possmann
Germany
» dramaturg, producer and curator
Jan-Philipp Possmann studied Theater- and Political-Sciences at Freie Universität Berlin. As a dramaturg, producer and curator he has worked with numerous international artists and developed and curated various programs for theaters and museums in Frankfurt, Stuttgart and Mannheim. From 2017 to 2022 he was artistic and managing director of zeitraumexit and Wunder der Prärie-Festival in Mannheim.
Aïsha Konaté
Germany
» performance artist, facilitator
Aïsha Konaté is A mulitidisciplinary Performance artist And facilitator based in Leipzig. She loves to grow In collective creative processes with People And is mostly organised in intersectional Contexts. In her art she is interested in collective healing and the expression and research for the ambivalent, the weird, the unseen and the invisible.
Meet the designers of the digital venues
Dagmar Schürrer
Austria, Germany
» 3D-artist
Dagmar Schürrer is a Berlin-based Austrian new media artist who creates intricate video sound montages using digitally generated objects, animations, text, and sound. Her work has been exhibited internationally and screened at numerous festivals. She is currently a project assistant at the research group INKA and a board member of the Berlin media art association.
Judith Weber
Judith Weber works as illustrator and graphic designer. Judith studied education, sinology and visual communication. Judith is part of the collective "Reiberei", which focuses on design and art in the context of social issues and utopias. In their design practice Judith works with the principles of accessibility, critical diversity literacy, criticism of capitalism and representation.
