Archives
and
Memory

In the context of an author reading followed by a discussion on the book an alle orte, die hinter uns liegen by Sinthujan Varatharajah, we will take a closer look at some of the thematic aspects that are linked to the questions on archives, agency and postcolonialism of the Peer to Peer weekend at the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum and the KHM. an alle orte, die hinter uns liegen deals with the question of how colonialism has inscribed itself in our presences and in our everyday life. How do imperialist aspirations continue to affect the realities of our lives today - and how do they influence asylum issues and human relations with environments? Sinthujan Varatharajah points out: Our so-called colonial past has become so omnipresent we mostly don't even notice it anymore.

Moderation by Havîn Al-Sîndy

The exhibition concerns itself with how colonial archives and collections can be critically accessed and reflected upon. The artists offer methodological and thematic points of access to collections, archives and databases of colonial heritage. They tell the stories of the human beings and cultures that produced the holdings of the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum.

Further information at: rautenstrauch-joest-museum.de

Participants of the Edit-a-Thon are invited to edit the database of the museum, in which all objects are stored, and to thus contribute to the promotion of polyphony. The RJM and the KHM team and a temporary library are at their disposal and ready to provide assistance. You can also bring your own books and documents with you to enrich the Edit-a-Thon and feed the database with valuable information. Let us find gaps together and think about alternative forms for the production of knowledge!

The Edit-a-thon will be accompanied by artist and curator Fatima Khan.

Registration at: rjm-veranstaltungen@stadt-koeln.de

Welcome and lecture performance by donna Kukama.

Henriette Gunkel and Nashilongweshipwe Mushaandja will have a conversation around their previous work together and the trajectories they have been on in relation to recent interventions of memory work between Germany and Namibia. They will re-visit and unpack various artistic-activist-academic methods and strategies of gathering scattered archives and memories. Beginning with the trans-national research project titled, Gathering: Towards a Transdisciplinary Approach to Spaces, Traces, and Practices of Memorialisation in Namibia and Germany, they aim to address the different histories, memories and material “remains” that bind these places together. They argue that through performing gathering, “memory work” could contribute to a dynamic and healing memory culture. The queer method of Archival F(r)ictions will be experimented with to think through recent archival interventions aimed towards return and restitution. 

In order to do so, Henriette Gunkel and Nashilongweshipwe Mushaandja will bring different objects – a text, an image or audio piece – that will act as portals between the different times and spaces and which allow to open up to an improvised and performative conversation which will then extend to Agustina Andreoletti and Sam Hopkins, who will join them both for a panel discussion afterwards.

YAYA is not a who
YAYA is not a what
YAYA is a need, for you and me. 

YAYA is a crew, a platform that offers space and a voice for club and pop culture. YAYA is a space of solidarity with a focus on BIPOC femmes. YAYA are musical companions of the P2P Month of Media Art in September. We will listen to the sounds of this interesting formation at all four locations.

Line-Up
Gîn Bali
Perfomances by Essi & Mel Juana

The participating artists provide insights into the newly opened exhibition Leaky Archive(s) and the processes of origin behind them. A course that links narratives/ counter-narratives and memory work with the possibilities and problems of accessibility, preservation and participation.

Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum's new exhibition concerns itself with how colonial archives and collections can be critically accessed and reflected upon. The artists offer methodological and thematic points of access to collections, archives and databases of colonial heritage. They tell the stories of the human beings and cultures that produced the holdings of the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum.

 The collections of the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum (RJM) encompass around 65,000 objects and 100,000 historical photographs – most of which are currently not being exhibited and are stored in depots. On the second P2P weekend, we invite you to take a look behind the scenes of the RJM depot with curators Tensae Wale Desta and Agustina Andreoletti and discover objects that can only be understood in connection with colonialism and its legacies. Without the display cases and the lighting of the museum, other stories can be experienced, told and shared.

Registration at: rjm-veranstaltungen@stadt-koeln.de

The director Mirjam Schmuck and the curators Zuzanna Berendt and Anna Majewska provide insights into their collaboration in the context of the digital KASSIA conference & the KASSIA archive. The techniques and practices of feminist work methods and narrations that originated in the framework of the archive, among other sources, should be formulated, evaluated and discussed in the open space. What might they look like: a toolbox for future feminist practices?

Registration at: info@medienwerk-nrw.de

Wouter de Romph, Mirjam Schmuck, Agustina Andreoletti, Sam Hopkins and Kiran Kumār

The participants present their own practices from the different projects in conversation. In the process, artistic research meets performative practice and new developments in the institutional context. Where are there intersections between the attempt to find traces of the counterculture of the last century in collections and to translate and make fleeting practices and implicit knowledge accessible? In what kind of relationship does this exist with institutions, for which the problematic act of collecting was a founding moment, and which are now thinking about allowing polyphony and incorporating artistic methodologies of research?

Moderation by Christian Sievers

Mirjam Schmuck, director of kainkollektiv, takes a transmedia walk through the KASSIA archive and presents the interdisciplinary project. How does the possibility of a (queer-) feminist empowerment space originate in the digital space? Where do artistic, activist and technological narrations intersect? And what can that be: the digital resurrection of a 1,300-year-old Byzantine convent in the 21st century?

Kassia is a kind of early feminist and cosmopolitan role model. Her work was taken by kainkollektiv and various artists, scholars and institutions from Germany, Poland and Turkey as the starting point for a multi-dimensional and multidimensional project consisting of the KASSIA opera performance and the (digital) KASSIA conference. Finally, the KASSIA online exhibition/archive is now being created, which will make these project parts visible in a bundled form and link them interactively.

Interdisciplinary artist Kiran Kumār & software engineer Matthias Härtig will share ideas and outcomes of their hybrid computational-choreographic approach to digitally visualise the dancing body. At the perspectival scale of ‘somatics of digitality’, their work dialogues with the yogic-tantrik conception of a 'subtle body', a site of energetic entanglement between human embodiment & planetary environment, making sketches for an eco-spiritual digitality.

Affordable, practical and with DIY character: the audio cassette was the ideal medium for various groups of up-and-coming artists. It offered anyone of only modest means the possibility to play, record and distribute music as they wished.

In the context of the The Cassette Underground project, the musicologist Wouter de Romph examined the alternative circulation networks and the sales structures of cassettes in NRW. Cem Kaya, documentary filmmaker and director, occupies himself intensively with the popular culture of the Turkish diaspora, in which cassettes played a decisive role – a theme that also fascinates the Osdorp Tapes duo, which lives in Amsterdam and Brussels.

During this listening session in the context of the Cologne P2P weekend, we will listen to the sounds of the cassettes and the discussions of the guests, thus learning more about the multifaceted cassette culture.