The projects described here are an articulation of my believe that ultimately thought and musical practice is a social phenomena. And by this virtue can involve a more broader reaching scope of temporality, collectivety, undoing and desired impact. These projects are processual, never to be finished and therefore their representation here incomplete.
Center for Stray Thought
2024 - ongoing
would-wind is a collective of two friends who became friends during the 2024 Sonic Acts Biennial. Otis Haize Thomet is a composer and improviser, who puts things side by side. Jenna Peng is a writer and not a writer. Discomposing, she is often beside herself. They more or less catch the other’s drift.
Center for Stray Thought, is a working draft, a drafty workspace for a book that could be written. It is an extra-literary installation comprised of writing (full and half sentences, guided prompts, turns of phrase, words, punctuation, subtitles drawn from our email and voice note correspondences) de-re-contextualized as confetti hanging suspended from the ceiling. Backing the installation is an intermittent soundtrack of voices that echo, warp, stray, wander, in their reaching for and from being written. The writing is word-dense, thought-dense, sound-dense, paper-dense in some areas and dispersed, drafty in others. Participants can move through the space as they wish: reading, reading aloud, conversing, not conversing, listening to conversation, a conversational hum, a background hum in and out of conversation, catching some drift, drifting, not reading, sounding and not sounding. The Center is a laboratory for thought experiments. How do we gather thoughts, gather around thoughts, how do we/they gather and stray? Can we collectively improvise with thought the way we do with sound? Can we feel, get a feel for another’s humming thought? How can this uhm hum, which we approximate in dialogical attunement as /mhmm/, be in conversation? The words really matter and the words don’t matter. We want the capacity to be there where another strays.
At points activating space through “reading.” These readings can take multiple forms. Aregular series of walk-throughs or drop-in rehearsals in which a regular series of walk-throughs or drop-in rehearsals in which would-wind improvisationally reads and works out the book that could be written. A walking workshop or working walkshop, in which participants are guided through a series of exercises for wandering (uhm-ing) and humming, are invited to take their thoughts for a walk. The project would culminate in a hybrid performance consisting of live reading and recordings. Recordings of voices wandering, human and other humming. Recording not as a listening too but a listening through. The Fragmented and proliferated nature of recording a space where sound can be still and we motion through. Sound as a principle of vibrational mattering. Giving bodies to sound and bodies transducing thought.
Center for Stray Thought takes up from Whirlwind, a sonic collaboration on voice notes over voice notes, in response to the 2024 Sonic Acts festival. Whirlwind asks, after da Silva and Neuman’s Soot Breath // Corpus Infinitum, how can one be a body but also an echo? Through our correspondence and collaboration, sonic entanglements and thinking tangents, embodied echoes and echoing bodies, we have found ourselves beside the question. We are interested in furthering our paraontological play through this residency. Center for Stray Thought aims to offset the strains of Western knowledge production through straying, through the stray thought as entangled drift. We are interested in how sound and thought, beside each other, beside themselves, provide a means and mode for st(r)aying in relation.
Thank you for the Reminder
2023- ongoing
Thank you for the Reminder is a loose group of people who gather around the shared believe in the potential of collective creativity to set in motion change. A desire rooted in the mutual wish to imagine alternatives to counteract tendencies and believes that we all sooner or later surrender capitalism as Mark Fisher writes in Capitalist realism: is there no alternative? on behalf of his analytical observation of the economical crisis of 2008: “Watching Children of Men, we are inevitably reminded of the phrase attributed to Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek, that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. That slogan captures precisely what I mean by 'capitalist realism': the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.” (Capitalist realism: is there no alternative?, Mark Fisher, 2009, O books, UK) We believe that since 2008 some changes are palpable. Not that those surrendering tendencies don’t exist anymore, but due to an accumulation of crises all over the world there is nowadays an increasing collective awareness for the necessity of finding alternative solutions. Anton Jäger describes this so well in his book Hyperpolitik: we have to regain collective agency through a strong organization of the more and more present politicization in the society. Coming from the arts as well as the field of philosophy, we want to link this just mentioned awareness to transdisciplinarity: As queer folks, the term 'nature' or what is to be 'natural' has since our very young age been questioned, consciously or unconsciously by our simple existence. Hence, the question 'How will our understanding of nature change?' will lead to existential and ontological thinking that is aiming to articulate an inclusive state of being which desires to go beyond understanding of categories, static identities and individualistic and disciplined practices. We want to spend time together not only to get to know each other better by exchanging ideas and inspirations but also to engage in a process to form a collective whose essence will find itself in a transdisciplinary approach.
References from literature, philosophy, queer theory, etc. are juxtaposed while live composed music floods the space somehow soft and deep. The surrounding sound (landscape) enables and canalizes appropriately the attention for texts to be read an ongoing theatrical drama, uncanny and calming equally. The atmosphere, between sleepy and awake, like an in between where one seeks true motivation to action within the day. Here we want to hold on and integrate the Tenets of the Nap Ministry written by Tricia Hersey in her book Rest is resistance: “1. Rest is a form of resistance because it disrupts and pushes back against capitalism and white supremacy. 2. Our bodies are a site of liberation. 3. Naps provide a portal to imagine, invent, and heal. 4. Our DreamSpace has been stolen and we want it back. We will reclaim it via rest.” (Rest is resistance, Tricia Hersey, 2022, Aster, Hachette, UK) Alongside this pausing and resting moment, we are inspired by the arpentage working class collective readings which are understood as emancipatory learnings and tools. We remember telling each other that this intimate time felt like “hors champs” or in other words behind the scenes. This off the stage artists and thinkers (etc.) allow themselves to unionize and understand the future they are creating in the present.
Current members of Thank you for the Reminder
Claudia Barth, artist (Zurich, CH)
Clara de Asís, composer, producer and artist (Rotterdam, NL)
Nina Emge, artist (Zurich, CH)
Vanessà Heer, artist (Zurich, CH)
Anton M. O. Hug, philosopher (Paris, FR)
margaretha jüngling, artist-chef (Zurich, CH)
Ari Kurki, philosopher (Berlin, DE)
Tristan Amor Rabit, artist (Zurich, CH)
Victoria Soufflet, artist (Paris, FR)
Alice M. Speller, artist (Zurich, CH, London, GB)
Otis Thomet, composer, improviser and researcher (The Hague, NL)
Flavia Trachsler, artist (Zurich, CH)
Clara de Asís, composer, producer and artist (Rotterdam, NL)
Nina Emge, artist (Zurich, CH)
Vanessà Heer, artist (Zurich, CH)
Anton M. O. Hug, philosopher (Paris, FR)
margaretha jüngling, artist-chef (Zurich, CH)
Ari Kurki, philosopher (Berlin, DE)
Tristan Amor Rabit, artist (Zurich, CH)
Victoria Soufflet, artist (Paris, FR)
Alice M. Speller, artist (Zurich, CH, London, GB)
Otis Thomet, composer, improviser and researcher (The Hague, NL)
Flavia Trachsler, artist (Zurich, CH)