season3

Dora Đurkesac is an author in the fields of design, contemporary dance and new media. She graduated Industrial design and New media art in Zagreb, Croatia. During Conversas Đurkesac will share “Missing Artists”, a project/series of virtual exhibitions which could be seen only in specific physical locations. The project offers alternative cultural content inside and around art institutions, but also in public city spaces making it more democratic and approachable. In that way, we are overcoming physical and institutional barriers between art content and audience. The projects is in its research phase and waits for its development and travels. Developed in a collaboration with Karla Paliska and Luka Santrić.

picture credits: Luke Marshall Johnson

Laura Sobral is a brazilian urbanist and activist. Since 2007, Laura has been researching and organizing urban interventions and temporary architecture projects in public spaces with the intent of fostering active citizenship by linking culture and city. She is a co-founder of The City Needs You Institute, that improves public spaces by social practices.

Lives and works between Tehran and Berlin. So far he has written for various Iranian and English art magazines while he has been the editor of one of the renowned art publications in Tehran. In 2015, he founded the gallery called Emkan which quickly became one of the most interesting places for contemporary art in Tehran. Having a critical approach toward Iranian art history, Emkan tries to highlight a group of contemporary artists in Iran that have been partly neglected and at the same time presents and promotes younger artists who are preceding the same route. The space tries to provide a dynamic and live ground wherein a dialogue among the artists could happen through their works, collaboration, writings etc. Behzad is curating exhibitions in Emkan and elsewhere and brings international cooperation to Tehran.

Drummer Aine Fujioka, (as the name in Japanese means "love sound = music",) started her musical path in her early age. Since she moved out her hometown Hiroshima at age of 15, she studied and built her career in Osaka, Boston, New York then landed in Berlin in 2015. To help understanding mind and body as a musician, she learned Reiki, IH and Yoga. Now it's time for her to combine all experiences into a theory and share her way to overcome Fear.

Joe will talk about Earthships and the knowledge he gained joining the Earthship Academy in Tao, New Mexico.
The Earthship archicture concept began to take shape in the 1970s.
The architect Michael Reynolds wanted to create a home that would do three things: first, it would utilize sustainable architecture, and material indigenous to the local area or recycled materials wherever possible; second, the homes would rely on natural energy sources and be independent from the "grid"; thirdly, it would be feasible for a person with no specialized construction skills to build. Eventually, Reynolds's vision was transformed into the common U-shaped earth-filled tire homes seen today.

Keith Feyan is a writer and artist from the Californian suburbs of 1980s.
He has an MFA from The New School in New York, and is the author of an unpublished manuscript about expat soul-searching. He currently resides in Berlin and runs the online magazine Hello from Elsewhere, which focuses on existential travel experiences.

Jimmi Cording studied Biology in Cologne. Then he prepared his dissertation
at the Institute for molecular Pharmacology in Berlin.
His work was focussed on aspects of the Blood Brain Barrier. His talk at conversas will give an overview about historical and pharmacological
aspects of this barrier.

Adrien Missika (1981, Paris) lives and works in Berlin. Through a wide array of mediums, which range from photography and video, to sculpture and installations, Adrien Missika records various places around the world. Like an anachronic traveling painter, Missika blurs the line between documentation and fiction. He defies and plays with the populist imagery rooted in our collective memory and, with a humoristic turn, opens up new readings. His experimental approach to photography and video, maybe his most recurring mediums, results in the nomadic documentation of non-places, unstable landscapes, ruins or biotopes that evoke a strange futuristic nostalgia. Even the very passing of time becomes a formal technique, used by the artist to expand perception. Through his installations and sculptures, Missika evokes in the spectator visualizations and atmospheres that with their narratives, invert clichés and hierarchies of representations.

Yung-shan Tsou is a Berlin based Taiwanese artist whose work involves handwriting and bookmaking as conceptual expressions. She considers perceptual differences between reading words and viewing pictures. Her current work, Our Gaze, is to discover how reading changes in the contemporary context.

Based in Berlin, American artist Elizabeth McTernan performs research over land and sea, processing it through actions, installation, drawing, printmaking, text, and artist’s books. She exhibits internationally and has been invited as an artist-in-residence at numerous reputable institutions across Europe and the US. During Conversas McTernan will share 'Seeing Things' an interdisciplinary research project conducted in the Arctic during the summer solstice. The phrase “seeing things” is about literal physical observation, while it is also about seeing what is not really there, the hallucination of objective representation – like our eyes tricking us when we try to see in the dark. The point of departure for the current research is human observation and the subjective act of counting – in all its inherent imperfection and error – as forming the empirical basis for all so-called “objective” knowledge and data collection.

Dave Ball is a Berlin-based artist and PhD researcher from the UK. Using “tactical absurdity” as his methodology, a recent solo show in Wales saw him climbing a mountain without looking at it; and his ongoing project, A to Z, attempts to visualise every word in the dictionary in alphabetical order.

Jenny Fadranski is a researcher, singer/songwriter and voice coach. Finding her voice still is a beautifully messy and complex road. In her voice coaching she develops an approach to get access to mind and body through singing, which in turn changes the voice. Her own music is inspired by the search for a radically present voice.

...THE SEARCH CONTINUES AND NEVER STOP.
Keep your eyes peeled, at intersections, playgrounds, in hallways, clubs, cafés, copy shops, at the university, in subway and suburban train stations, at tram stops and just everywhere Berlin communicates with us.
NOTES OF BERLIN posts DAILY a selection of the best finds.

Jenni is a freelance journalist and has been based in Berlin for almost 11 years now. After collecting loads of stories from friends - funny ones, frustrating ones, impertinent ones, offending ones - and after several own online- and offline-dates she was kind of sobered and asked herself: Is there love in Berlin?

Maria I.J. Reich is an improvising musician and researcher based in Berlin. She will present one of her favorite topics at Conversas: the role of improvisation in music. Reich will present how the role of improvisation has changed over the centuries and talk about philosophical and practical approaches to improvisation.

Carsten Rabe (*1975) is a fine-art photographer. He exhibited his photographs in solo and group shows. In his art-works he uses documentary photography to explore the beauty of the ordinary and the present. His motives reflect on our everyday actions and examine people in their living environments.

In a permanently changing world our existing reflexes to focus on "knowledge" and "Skills" help us only in the short term. That is why so many people are not satisfied in their job. We believe that we need to focus more on affinity (want to do) instead of the what can you do. We have implemented the affinity model successfully in a large company (440 people) and in different start- and scale-ups and we like to get your feedback"

Berlin resident Diego Moreno, a native of Monterrey, Mexico, was intrigued and indeed fascinated by the longstanding tradition of distilling handcrafted mezcal. Thus he traveled to Oaxaca in 2013. His task was to find a superior agave-based spirit. His extensive search ended when he encountered the López Sosa family. Almost immediately both knew they would love teaming up for a new project.

Katarina works at Ableton, Berlin’s music software company, on an initiative to bring more women into music production. It’s been a couple of years now since the beginning of the project, this talk is about the journey and the current status of gender diversity in music industry. Gender diversity is a hot topic at the moment in many industries and art forms. In music, gender imbalance is especially obvious when it comes to production and sound engineering roles. Awareness of the issue has been raised, but is the shift towards 50:50 split actually happening and how? What are the consequences of these efforts? What is right or wrong in the current approach?

Kristof Geilenkotten

Stephan Mörsch is a visual artist, building models of real existing architecture on a scale of 1:10. While searching for buildings worth copying on real journeys or forays through the WWW, he repeatedly encounters models of real architecture that appear in religious and political contexts and are used in processions and demonstrations. He will show a selection of this search from the Middle East and Europe over the last 2000 years.

There are many ways in which we humans have evolved to adorn our bodies and present ourselves. What about that invisible force called scent? During this conversation Scent Club invites you to dive into the olfactory realm, that which transforms our experience of life even without we noticing it.

Plotting the Path is the launching event for the books produced by George Anghelescu, Adrian Preda, Lea Rasovszky and Ștefan Ungureanu. The project revolves around the direct connection of the artist books with a series of works which have become intimately iconic to them and their development.

Ioana Marinescu and Ștefan Ungureanu

It is difficult to believe that anybody could be protected against HIV with just taking a pill per day. But it is not science fiction, PrEP is an extended reality in countries like EEUU or Canada. What is PrEP, who can take it and whether it is healthy are the questions that first come to anybody’s mind when the topic is brought to the table.

Hanna Mattes is a visual artist working mainly in experimental, analog photography. She builds installations, performs in her photos, makes collages and paints on her negatives. Her new project “The Solar System” looks at mythologies as being somebody’s truth. She photographed the solar eclipse in the US and a mountain range in Chile, which is tightly related to the indigenous mythology and wrote texts explaining her own personal mythology which relates metaphorically to the solar system.

Isi studied comparative religious studies, a well kept secret at times. Not aware of how this would forever change her party conversations into hour long confessions by strangers. Everyone wants a confirmation about the validity of their personal world view.

The story of textile is the story of civilization. Textile is also the perfect symbol for an understanding of Space and Time in the life a people, and their relationships with cultures and societies beyond their own. I wish to share certain examples of textile that have been produced in the same way for over thousands of years, and demonstrate their significance to the human experience within and without India.

Reality is a construction made by the senses, experiences and circumstances. How can we understand each other using references that are not absolute. Is subtle ambiguity another obstacle to communication? Or is the lack of possible objectivity a tool to make us more aware of each other? Joana Lucas is a portuguese visual artist living in Berlin since 2005. She focuses her practice on the discovery of images which are on borderline situations.

What in ourself is a projection and what happens when we are oblivious to these projections? What happens when we incorporate ourselves into that which is foreign, handling it as something that is exposed or rejected? Projections are not fake, the prism exists, through which we see the ambitions, opinions, longings and experiences, the constitution of our world outlook. Variously shaped, polyvalent, always in a different light, in evolution, in change. (POPOVA / POLYLUX Collection). Julia Tietze is a cultural scientist and a fashion designer. She creates her own designs under her brand POPOVA.