Breaking the Spell: Agata Siniarska/Ivana Müller

The festival ticket (4 x Breaking the Spell July 14-17 for 20 Euro)

Museum of the Anthropocene. Lecture Performance by Agata Siniarska

The extinction of species, their collective death is an entangled mass grave transformed in time, an event without a monument, without memory or social awareness. The lack of memory of dying individual species of flora and fauna is an archive of silent stories, unnoticed traces, voiceless. Human nature is an interspecies relationship which makes extinction a co-extinction, our process of dying-with. How, then to build our common future, how to write a common story, not of the world but in the world? Our future cannot forget the past. When we tell stories of the past, what past do we tell? What is to be lost, retained, preserved, remembered?

Agata Siniarska works in the field of expanded choreography. In her practice she situates herself between how we think about the world and how we move in it - between somatic and environmental landscapes, between human and non-human bodies. Beyond institutional support, the main structure in which Agata most readily situates her work are non-institutional relationships as sites for practicing thinking together. These include: Partners in Craft created together with Julia Rodriguez and Zeina Hanna and QUEST together with Eva Meyer-Keller, Katrin Hahner and William Wheeler. Agata’s present research explores the idea of an Anthropocene museum, in particular its ghosts and monsters.

Notes by Ivana Müller.

The concept of Notes is inspired by the 19th century practice of ‘marginalia’, which cultivated a gesture of “personalizing” a book before offering it to a friend or a lover by writing notes in the margin. In the frame of Breaking the Spell choreographer Ivana Müller invites four artists to select a book and annotate it one after the other. In the process, four perspectives complement and overwrite each other to form a collective trace. For Breaking the Spell in Munich, Samara Hersch, Giorgia Ohnessian Nardin, Antonia Sagh and Swoosh Lieu selected the book Spells: 21st Century Occult Poetry, edited by Rebecca Tamás and Sarah Shin, and annotated it with personal notes, embroidery and other additions. Since April 2022, the book has travelled from Paris to Ireland, from Ireland to Italy, from Italy to Turkey - bearing the traces of its readers and its journeys - and is now coming to Munich. From 14 - 17 July, the book with the original annotations of the artists will be made accessible in a small installation in the Therese-Giehse-Halle and invites you to new personal encounters in a cosy environment: alone or in a small group, you can leaf through it, read it (aloud) and look at it.

The Installation open daily from 19h30. On Thursday, 17 July, as part of the evening programme of Breaking the Spell, there will be a talk with Ivana Müller and the participating artists about the project and the process (moderated by Marta Keil and Olivia Ebert).