mare/FLUX INTERVENTIONS
Interdisciplinary walks, workshops, performances and temporary interventions in the public river space
FLUX – River interventions and explorations is a two-year project in which Lungomare will explore the riverscapes of Bolzano in collaboration with artists, architects, researchers, and city residents. Public formats throughout the year will reveal the undiscovered potential of the urban river landscape, with the aim of stimulating a joint production of desires.
During the FLUX project, Lungomare will be working with the undiscovered potential of the riverscapes through a cross-disciplinary and participatory approach including a public programme of workshops, conversations, walks, performances, and temporary interventions along the urban river-space. As an organisation, Lungomare initiates processes between interest groups, activities, spaces, users, and institutional planning, to stimulate the collective production of reflections and wishes through public debates and “action” in urban space. Through various projects and cultural practices, people and places will be connected, attention being drawn to social changes in this very specific urban space, with reference to the present as well to the larger historical context of the city.
During 2022 and 2023, Lungomare aspires to change the perception of the river landscape in Bolzano, reveal its potential and develop a variety of visions for its use. This multi-layered exploration process aims to catalyse diverse needs and ideas, that will then be translated into temporary interventions during the following year (2023) in order to create new temporary access points and community spaces along the rivers.
In 2022 Johanna Dehio + Johanna Padge, Futurefarmers, Herwig Turk and Sööt/Zeyringer will artistically examine and reinterpret the river space of Bolzano from different perspectives.
Johanna Dehio + Johanna Padge
FIUMICINA
An open kitchen by the river
FIUMICINA initiates as a first phase in July 2022 together with residents and experts along the riverbank of the Isarco, a three-day improvised kitchen as well as three workshops on the topics: Improvisation and construction, Spontaneous Herbs along the Riverside, Experimental cooking and baking.
Besides being a place of preparation, the kitchen is also a place of encounter and the cooking an occasion for exchange. FIUMICINA invites you to explore the urban natural space and, while preparing simple dishes, to discuss common potentials, needs and desires for a new public space by the river.
How do we experience public spaces and what role does the community play in this? How does our access to our urban environment change when we experience it sensually – smelling, touching and eating? What understanding of our relationship to nature does such an experience entail? And looking at it the other way round: what rights and perhaps also desires do the rivers themselves have? Are they a usable resource, an environment worth protecting, or even both? What is the connection between our physical and mental health to our environment and our interaction with it?
We translate the experiences and knowledge gained from the workshops into concepts and designs for a temporary or permanently installed kitchen that will be built on the city’s riverbanks in 2023.
Johanna Dehio is a german designer living and working in Berlin. With a background as product designer, she works in different constellations on applied research and design projects in social and cultural context. Based on a study of different aspects of improvisation which are consistently serving as an impulse and inspiration, her work is concerned with the substance of relationships between people and objects/space. Throughout different collaborative projects, she developed a metaphor of the kitchen as a reference for cultural processes, approaching contextual questions through exemplary practical or sensual experiences. Johanna Dehio is teaching at University of the Arts Berlin, Free University Bolzano and HfbK Hamburg and holding interdisciplinary workshops and lectures.
Johanna Padge studied design and art in Halle and Hamburg. She is a master carpenter and has worked in the crafts and in educational projects in France, Germany, Mali and Mozambique. As a designer she deals with the topics of participatory design, participation and urban planning. Her work takes shape in designed spaces, exhibitions, publications, archives, workshops and conversations. Her interest here is in both social and built architecture, which she understands as processual.
Herwig Turk
Space for rivers
The project Space for Rivers taking place in 2023 in the public space along the Talvera river, creates a place of knowledge and mediation about the river landscapes in Bolzano. A place where rivers are not only understood as flowing water that can be seen and heard in the riverbed within the banks, but where less obvious connections and relationships are made visible and tangible.
A river system is embedded in cycles that are connected to the groundwater below the riverbed, but also to the air currents and humidity that are still active up to 20 meters above the water. The interaction of the river with the bordering areas, the plants, the sand and gravel banks as well as the dead wood is essential for a functioning river system, which can hardly be found in the Alpine region today.
Bolzano, too, has largely lost contact with its three rivers and underground streams, as space distribution issues have led to enclosures, regulations and diversions, and only now is the resource of water perceived as a limited “commodity”.
Space for Rivers thus becomes an embassy and advocacy for water systems, reminding us of the importance of (wild) rivers and their added value for ecological cycles, but also for humans. Through river walking tours with experts and the artist, the participants’ readability and perception of the river system is expanded and new relationships to the rivers are weaved.
Herwig Turk lives and works in Vienna and Lisbon. His projects create intersections between art, technology and science. From 2010 to 2013 he was “Artist in Residence” at the IMM (Instituto da Medicina Molecular), Lisbon. From 2003 to 2009, Turk collaborated with Paulo Pereira, head of the ophthalmology department at IBILI (Institute for Biomedical Imaging and Life Sciences, Coimbra). In recent years, his work has been shown at the MMKK Museum Moderner Kunst Kärnten in Klagenfurt, the MAK Museum für angewandte Kunst in Vienna, the Seoul Museum of Art in South Korea, the Neues Museum Weserburg in Bremen, the TESLA Labor für Medienkunst in Berlin, the Galerie Georg Kargl in Vienna and the Transmediale in Berlin, among others. Since 2014 he has been teaching as a senior artist in the Social Design Department at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna.
Sööt/Zeyringer
Semiotics of the Riverside
a performance by Sööt/Zeyringer (Vienna/Bucharest)
with Santija Bieza, Merve Bektas, Valerio B. Moser, Prisca Prugger, Oscar Mauricio Rueda Gonzalez
The live performance took place on 10.06.2022.
Semiotics of the Riverside is a performance by Sööt/Zeyringer (Vienna/Bucharest), which the artist duo developed together with a group of city residents at the riverside of the city of Bolzano.
When public spaces are lived in, we experience a multitude of emotions that influence our behaviour and often trigger contradictory feelings such as community, belonging, power, fear and insecurity. The performance “Semiotics of Riverside” takes as its starting point the fear that many people experience when moving along the urban river space. Especially women and city dwellers from marginalised groups are exposed to harassment, verbal and physical violence in this space. Referring to the work “Semiotics of the Kitchen” by Martha Rosler, Sööt/Zeyringer developed in a collaborative process a series of movements, word fragments and actions that change the perception of the riverbanks in order to symbolically and actively empower those people who are exposed to harassment and experiences of violence.
The performance was premiered on the 10th of June 2022 at three different locations between 9 pm and midnight along the riverside of Bolzano.
Under the name Sööt/Zeyringer, artists Tiina Sööt and Dorothea Zeyringer operate at the interface between visual arts, dance, and theatre. Their performances address personal and sociologically relevant issues in ways that are both poetic and humorous. In their most recent works, they explored female anger and documented the forgotten history of female slapstick comedians.
Tiina Sööt works in Bucharest, Vienna and Tallinn. She received her master’s degree in Performative Arts at Estonian Academy of Arts and studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Besides the work of Sööt/Zeyringer she isdeveloping a documentary performance practice together with dramaturg Aet Kuusik, focusing on feminism, gender and sexuality.
Dorothea Zeyringer lives and works in Vienna. She completed her studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and studied at the HZT Berlin. She received a danceWEB scholarship from ImPulsTanz in 2017, as well as a BKA scholarship and the ArtStart-Studio scholarship in 2018. She worked as an artistic assistance for Michikazu Matsune and taught at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna on performance and research. As part of Sööt/Zeyringer her artistic practice oscillates between visual arts, choreography and language.
Future Farmers
A Meander
A Meander is a multi-year project by the artist collective Futurefarmers, with the aim of creating a permanent artistic installation along the two rivers Talvera and Isarco in Bolzano. “A Meander” puts people in new relationships with the diverse phenomena of the flowing water we call “river”: Stories, imaginations, ebb and flow, shorelines, fictions, sedimentations, life forms, fossils, seeds and the potential of its power. Drawing on the human (and very local) history of extracting kinetic energy from moving bodies of water, the past is reconsidered through artistic investigation and action. Sound becomes a unifying element and an impulse to reflect on how we live together with the “river” (and all its inhabitants) – how we have shaped it and, more importantly, how it has shaped and continuously shapes us.
Act 1: A meander with River Friends
In May 2022 Futurefarmers explore different places along the rivers in Bolzano and transform them into an open sound space. In this first act, the artists move up and down the river with a few requisites and a small group of “river friends” – local sound artists, musicians and people working with electric circuits. Futurefarmers build a series of small, mobile water wheels enabling the contact with the river; one is a large backpack with piano strings on its back and another is a long wheelbarrow with a gramophone. Each ” requisite” is animated by the flow of the river, creating a score for the scenographies encountered along the riverbank. Provisional in design but charismatic as an image, these “relational objects” attract curious passing-by and open a space of questioning and shared dialogue. Ideas emerge about the power of the river, its ecosystem, its history and a shared interest in using sound as a medium to enhance engagement with the river and the city’s inhabitants.
Act 2: (Com)positions with the river
In the second act of A Meander, Futurefarmers delve into the transformative power of sound to make visible the dense interconnections of the river. They invite a group of sound artists to explore the river as an interface between humans, water and the environment: Passers-by, birdsong, trains, life in the water and the unexpected. The second act is a 2-day program consisting of concerts, performances, workshops, sculptures and experiencing the sunrise together – actions that overlap and merge into each other. They invite to enter a sensitive, auditory dialogue with the river to revitalise our relationship with it and the city it nourishes. A brunch on Saturday morning, invites to reflect upon future scenarios for the rivers in the city of Bolzano.
Futurefarmers is an international group of artists, architects, anthropologists and farmers with a common interest in creating frameworks of participation that recalibrate our cultural compass. They work in contexts where intricate social structures are intertwined with city infrastructure and the complexities of collective memories embedded in (and around) a site. Through processes of participatory research, critical reflection and sustained public programming, hidden potentials held within these scenographies can emerge. The process of negotiation between diverse groups of people and across cultures is seminal in grounding this work and the communities that co-create them. Futurefarmers often creates relational sculptures that provide playful entry points and “tools” for participants to gain insight into deeper fields of inquiry – not only to imagine, but to participate in and initiate change in the places we live. These “tools” or sculptural props form a visual and material language that connects to a very immaterial, relational practice.
Year
2021 – ongoing
