Uncertainty Seminars:

Open-weather
Satellite Séance
video (2021), 4 mins
        Satellite Séance is a new video work by Open-weather (Sophie Dyer and Sasha Engelmann). The film documents electromagnetic experiments performed by Sasha on 12th July 2019 at the GCHQ-operated 'listening station' in Bude, Cornwall, and the process of decoding images of weather systems via polar-orbiting NOAA satellites.

Shannon Mattern
How to Map Nothing
talk and q&a
        Two years ago—or, a century ago in phenomenological and political time—artist and writer Jenny Odell published a book about How to Do Nothing. She made the case for retreat or refusal as an act of resistance to capitalist productivity and laid out a plan for attending to the world’s sensory richness. Not even a year after the book’s release, retreat was imposed on the world in the form of social distancing and lockdowns. Maps and graphs showed stilled air traffic and transit systems, depressed economies, shuttered businesses and sheltering communities. Yet underlying these geographies of suspension were networks in furious motion, systems of social welfare and surveillance that have historically functioned off the map, either in informal economies or on proprietary dashboards. In this talk, Shannon Mattern draws from feminist geography, critical race studies, and critical disability studies to consider how we might map the flip side of a COVID-19 dashboard: what pulsing yet precarious systems make suspension possible for those who can afford to retreat?

Tabita Rezaire
Deep Down Tidal
video (2017), 19 minutes
        From Atlantis, to the ‘Middle passage’, or refugee seekers presently drowning in the Mediterranean, the ocean abyss carries lost histories and broken lineages while simultaneously providing the global infrastructure for our current telecommunications with 880,000 kilometers of fiber-optic cables. Beneath the waves, our wireless life is very bound up with physical wires—it's the virtual made physical. Among the submerged cities, drowned bodies and hidden histories, the ocean is home to a complex communications network. Could the violence of the Internet lie in its physical architecture? Deep Down Tidal enquires the intricate cosmological, spiritual, political and technological entangled narratives sprung from water as an interface to understand the legacies of colonialism. It underscores water as a conductive interface for communication.

Eline Benjaminsen & Elias Kimaiyo
Footprints in the Valley
presentation
        The project Footprints in the Valley observes the financialization of trees within the emissions market and its effects on nature and people, while tracing the imperialist legacies of conservation. In the global North, governments are sponsoring conservation of the forest: they hope that eventually it will be possible to extract so-called carbon credits in order to offset emissions. This process is predicated on the forceful evictions of the indigenous Sengwer people by the Kenyan government. Here, Benjaminsen and Kimaiyo will present their distant collaboration, weaving together some of the visual outcomes of their investigation into carbon offsetting.

Claudio Ritfeld
Identification Obligation pt 2
performance artwork
        Uncertainty Seminars: There, There commissioned the second instalment of an explorational journey by Claudio Ritfeld.
        Ritfeld nitpicks at notions of assumed cultural identity and his personal aesthetic preferences, combining this with color therapy in order to reclaim the color orange as he displaces its Dutch nationalistic connotation. Part of this work is a 30-minute soundscape recorded in Ritfeld's place of birth.

Natalia Sliwinska
Beyond Taxonomic Narratives (2021),
20:49 min
part of KABK: There, There video program
        In the fibre collection of Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden, there is a selection of Panama hats stored under the taxonomic name of the plant used to make it; Carludovica Palmata. Between 1913–1947, in a Braiding School based in Mariapatronaat Catholic institution in Paramaribo, a group of Surinamese single mothers used to make these Panama hats, but the story of the makers is not present. This work explores the decolonial rereading of archives currently taking place across Dutch institutions, and looks into ways of counter-archiving.
Natalia Sliwinska (PL, 1993) is a designer and researcher based in Rotterdam. Her work explores symbolism across infrastructural environments, through documentary-making, research, interviews, and writing. She studied Communication Design at The Glasgow School of Art (2018), followed by a Non-Linear Narrative postgraduate degree at The Royal Academy of Art, The Hague (2021).

Sophie Czich
Where the Facade Bends (2021), 06:47min
part of KABK: There, There video program
        Architectural renders are highly realistic representations of places that don't exist yet. These images stand halfway between an imaginary world and a future that will physically materialise. This video plays with these 'neither real nor imaginary’ places. With collaged fragments of renders, the video reassembles a new space, a stage for a journey through the backsides, absurdities and ruptures of such smooth surfaces.
        Sophie Czich (FR, 1993) is a visual artist, designer and researcher. Her interest revolves around the dynamics which shape cities and everyday lives, in particular the impact of neoliberal economics on places and daily rhythms. She specifically focuses on the societal narrative of «the good life», on how it is told and designed. She graduated from the MA Non Linear Narrative in 2021.

Cristina Lavosi
And it looks to me like the end of an era (2020), 11:06 min
part of KABK: There, There video program
        And it looks to me like the end of an era is a visual narration and an intimate account of the past, present, and future of the Binckhorst, an industrial district in southeast The Hague. The work starts out from a research on archival materials that hover around three main temporary settlements in the Binckhorst, pertaining to different periods of time until the present days: a Roma caravan camp, an asylum seeker center, and a status holders’ temporary housing. A wooden wagon wheel, unearthed by the archaeologists in the Binckhorst, is at once the starting point and the symbolic image that influences the entire work.
        Cristina Lavosi (IT, 1993) is a visual artist and practice-based researcher in The Hague. Her work moves in the intersections between visual arts and socio-political discourses. With a strong interest in investigative field research and re-enaction, she mainly works with video and installation. She graduated from the MA Non Linear Narrative in 2020.

Petra Eros
Terraforming (2020), 03:57 min
part of KABK: There, There video program
        Terraforming envisions what the surface of the Earth will look like in 2050, if we don’t learn from today’s problems. Two main concepts are being given shape visually: one is extractivism, a destructive process of extracting natural resources from the Earth to sell on the world market and Lovelock’s Gaia theory proposing a self-regulating, complex system of the Earth that helps to maintain and perpetuate the conditions for life on the planet. It tends to be a utopia, the only question is—utopia to whom?
        Petra Eros is engaged in discovering how, as a graphic designer, to be aware of the current affairs in the socio-political landscape of today and more importantly, how one can ask the difficult questions about these through both their artistic and professional practice. Petra graduated from the MA Non Linear Narrative in 2021.

Hattie Wade
Thy Cities Shall With Commerce Shine—Part I (2021), 09:03 min
part of KABK: There, There video program
        Heritage is a political resource that is used to create and define a national identity. As these narratives of heritage are almost exclusively based on the notion of a heroic past, structural forgetfulness is created through selective memory. This work is part of a four-part video series that addresses legislative injustice using one insurance marketplace—Lloyd’s of London—as a springboard.
        Hattie Wade is a research-based artist and designer between London and The Hague, who graduated from the MA Non Linear Narrative in 2020. She is interested in how past institutional violences are reproduced through legal and legislative frameworks, heritage protection, and the forms the dissemination of this information takes. She critically researches, dismantles, and rebuilds to make tangible that which is not, taking the form of digital, video and spatial work.

Vera Yijun Zhou, 周怡君
Bubble (2020), 12:56 min
part of KABK: There, There video program
        The rotation of hometown and outland is a recognition of the sense of belonging. Vera Yijun Zhou takes this purposeless, short-term migration as a common status of her life, putting herself and her own observations and thoughts into the narrative of travel. Travel is connected to a sense of personhood, to a weakness, dreams and illusions. Travel and its stories are imagined, they are just a fragile bubble.
        Vera Yijun Zhou, 周怡君, was born in China and is currently pursuing a Masters in Photography and Society at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague (KABK). She deconstructs and translates the concepts of negligence and invisibility that we take for granted in our daily encounters. Vera is an interdisciplinary art practitioner that works as a graphic designer, photo-book publisher, painter, photographer, producer, director, and occasionally participates in educational programs.