Rhythm is that which exceeds a chronological telling—it is inherently gestural and ontologically disobedient.
Manifesta Journal's Online Residency will be used as a forum to publish ongoing research on The Museum of Rhythm. It is a collection of non-synchronous material, from artistic projects and scientific documents, to cultural histories that present associative readings of Modernity and its counterpoints.
Natasha Ginwala is a curator, researcher and writer based in the Netherlands and India. She is part of the artistic team of the 8th Berlin Biennale (2014). The Museum of Rhythm is realized as a segment of the Taipei Biennial 2012, Modern Monsters / Death and Life of Fiction.
This is a short memo for future "Shanshui" (Mountain & Water) , within the constant destruction and rebuilding of humanbeing's environment, where history layering upon itself, eventually so vague it could never again grow clear.
"Who, like water, can become calm after turbulence? And after that calm produce new life? "[Lao Tse: Chapter 15]
Hu Fang is a fiction writer and curator based in Guangzhou and Beijing. He is the co-founder and artistic director of Vitamin Creative Space (www.vitamincreativespace.com) in Guangzhou and The Pavilion in Beijing. His published novels include Garden of Mirrored Flowers, New Arcade, Shopping Utopia ect.
In 2012, a few weeks before Manifesta 9 will open, I have been asked to be a blogger for its journal, and I can’t help thinking that the European space towards which Manifesta started to address its cultural efforts, is now refolding itself onto new forms of nationalism, letting anti-European feelings grow and borders become stronger.
During my time as a blogger for Manifesta journal, I’d like to put together those analyses that consider the ongoing transformations, actual and media ones, currently occurring in that complex and unifying imagery that has been constructed around the continent since the end of the East-West dichotomy. Them being direct comments or interesting visual roundabouts on the socio-political life of Europe, I will try to embed in the storytelling of my blogging, unexpected perspectives and future scenarios from the “anno 2012”.
In this time span I will spend most of my time out of Europe, in the position of looking at it from distance, currently on a research trip in South Africa, where I've lived for the last two months. My posting activity will be unavoidably influenced by, and will also regard, the place where “national mood changes as the seasons change”, as Mandela said in 1994 in his inaugural speech to the new country.
Matteo Lucchetti (born 1984) is an art historian, independent curator and critic. Recently he has been curator in residency at Kadist Art Foundation, in Paris, where he curated “Enacting Populism in its Mediæscape” during the last two months of the French presidential election campaign. He is co-curator of the Visible award.
On the 24th and 25th of March 2011, spurred by the events in Tunisia and Egypt, a significantly large reform demonstration took place on a central roundabout of Amman, Jordan (Duwwar Al-Dakhliyeh, or Interior Circle). Those two days started with hope and solidarity, but ended in violence and caused abrupt changes to local protest movements and the rhetoric around them. Subsequently, the space was restructured, prompting several imaginative scenarios and a sly description on my part called "Monuments of Despair". This two-month blogging residency with the Manifesta Journal attempts to construct a loose narrative around the events of last year and their reflections today. It presents my relationship to the space and selects disparate modes of perceiving and analyzing it through text, images, physical movement and online investigations.
Toleen Touq is a independent cultural operator based in Amman, Jordan. Floating between art and social activism, her work includes (but isn't limited to) the creation of performance, storytelling and audio-visual programs.
Responding to the -online residency- invitation -as a blogger- at the Manifesta Journal website, Future Audience proposes a form of publication, which is familiar for most of us from lazy Sunday mornings. Aiming to extend that particular mood or state of mind for the whole week, Future Audience is interested in designing a test drive for a sort of feuilleton in order to experiment on alternative ways of art publishing. The blog as a digital form of the periodical is hosting an open source research process of critical thinking with the idea of developing reflexive curatorial tools. As the artistic director of Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, Adnan Yildiz searches for possibilities of transparency and self-reflexivity in relation to his investigation of artistic methodologies via his exhibition program.
