November 19-21 2021
at feldfünf e.V.
Fromet-und-Moses-Mendelssohn-Platz 7-8
10969 Berlin
and online
A few nights in a friend’s apartment, a Zoom support group, a Telegram chat that shares free hormones: these are the bogs of queer commons some of us rely on. In an upside down hyper-capitalist world, COVEN BERLIN welcomes you to bogside down part 1: a weekend of discussion and workshops looking at the alternative structures that support us when the outside world can’t or refuses to.
Departing from the bog as an alternative ecosystem to the forest and the field, which factor into capitalist extractivist logics more clearly, COVEN BERLIN offers a moment of preservation to examine our alternative structures–well worn and brand new alike. Who tends to these spaces? How do we grow and protect them, even while they might still be interwoven with hegemonic structures of power? What void do they fill, how are they radical, and how do they still help us get through the day?
For bogside down part 1 we are collaborating with Irish-Singaporean artist and writer Jennifer Mehigan, the Belarussian artists and activists collective CHASCHA, and the Berlin-based Feminist Healthcare Research Group. Together with them, we will summon the almost-forgotten gravestones of lesbian artists in Ireland’s bogs, learn about the BOGNA the healing retreat in Belarus, and engage with alternative radical therapy practices. And once again, we ask you to join us, deep down in the muck.
Access Information:
The venue is ground floor with wheelchair accessible spaces, including gender-neutral toilets. The space is such that there are big windows that open to a large public outdoor area, so the indoor spaces are well ventilated. Chairs with backs as well as yoga mats are available. If you have needs that we can help accommodate to ensure your participation in this event, please send us an email to: covenberlin@gmail.com.
All in-person events will be 2G+ COVID rules, so vaccinated or recovered. We will also ask you to write your contact details for contact tracing. Additionally, all events will ask for a same-day Antigen test (self-test or from a testing center) for all participants. Please wear your mask inside.
The venue is 400 meters from the U6 Bahnhof Kochstr./Checkpoint Charlie. There is an elevator from the U6 platform to the sidewalk. There are many deep curb drops and there are cobblestones on the sidewalks on the way to the venue, so they are not smooth.
We have money and energy set aside for your access needs: please email us with any additional access needs at covenberlin@gmail.com.
Each day has its own access details which you can read below in the program.
PROGRAM
FRIDAY
19.11. Screening with Jennifer Mehigan, 18:30-19:30, EN
Jennifer Mehigan will introduce her work with the example of two of her films: Honeysuckle Joyride (12’) is a video essay considering the themes of decay, queer kinship and the Irish landscape through a post-humanist lens. Buried in the bogs of Connemara and Belfast’s Divis and Black Mountain, Mehigan considers the terrain of hyper-real CG, the slow death of Instagram, and Irish gardening histories through the intimate materialities of queer life and death. A Paradise Out Of A Common Field (5’, in collaboration with Bassam Al-Sabah) is a short animated film that explores the iconography of the zombie, with dream world visions of feral horses and writhing flower avatars, while the audio transports you through the history of the Irish boggy graveyard and its relationship to trauma.
19.11. Discussion: How can we hold multiple truths at once?, 20:00-21:30, EN
Ana Loktionova from the CHASCHA collective in Belarus and Inga Zimprich from the Feminist Healthcare Research Group will join Jennifer Mehigan to present their work and discuss alternative support systems, framed by the metaphor of the bog and moderated by COVEN BERLIN.
ACCESS INFO:
This event is 2G+, that means we will check at the door if you are vaccinated or recovered. Additionally, you must take a COVID test within 24 hours of attending. You can do this at a test centre or with a self test. Please do this beforehand if you can, if you can’t, we will have self-tests available for you to do at the event in a separate room. Please arrive half an hour early if you plan on using one of our self tests <3.
There is no registration, but the maximum capacity of the space is 30 people. We don’t expect so many people, so please don’t worry about being turned away :-).
The talk will be available livestreamed on Zoom with auto-generated English captions. Here is the link to the Zoom room.
Please read the main access info for the space at the top of this page as well for more information.
SATURDAY
Ana Loktionova and Katya Zhynhiarouskaya from CHASCHA will host a day with COVEN BERLIN on activism, care, and survival. CHASCHA is a collective of artists and activists in Belarus formed during the political uprising in August 2020. CHASCHA has been hosting self-care rituals with a focus on embodied practices such as breathwork in a rural bog at a residency called BOGNA, aimed at healing trauma for those who have experienced police violence during the revolution.
20.11. Workshop: Practical body and voice exercises for survival, 15:00-17:00, EN
Katya from CHASCHA will offer soft and attentive work with body and voice, attunement in rhythm and sound, improvisation and exploration of natural musicality. At actions and marches, we become one powerful and loud body, we risk our freedom and life, which is why we get used to being overly toned, overstrained and closed. We propose to become one soft and fluid body, sound, and breath. Survival is often associated with capture/grabbing, expansion, force and power, while CHASCHA’s approach is aimed at cooperation and co-regulation in the group.
ACCESS INFO:
Spots are limited to 25 people. Please register by sending an email to: covenberlin@gmail.com
This event is 2G+, that means we will check at the door if you are vaccinated or recovered. Additionally, you must take a COVID test within 24 hours of attending. You can do this at a test centre or with a self test. Please do this beforehand if you can, if you can’t, we will have self-tests available for you to do at the event in a separate room. Please arrive half an hour early if you plan on using one of our self tests <3.
You may be asked to be close to or touch other participants, to do vocal exercises, and to sing, none of which you have to do. There will be a five minute break. No special experience or previous skills are needed for this workshop.
Please read the main access info for the space at the top of this page as well for more information.
20.11. Artist/activists talk: Do less: artistic/activist practices of self-care and feminist support in the middle of the swamp, 18:30-20:00, EN + RU
Ana Loktionova will introduce the artistic/activist group CHASCHA. Afterwards there will be a discussion including virtual CHASCHA members, and a space for co-creation of self-care practices.
“To survive we need self-care as well as the active support of others. Being able to change with circumstances is the essence of survival. During the surviving in Belarus after August 2020, together with a group of a(r)ctivists, we created a vital system, a network, a mycelium called Чаще быть в Чаще/ CHASCHA.”
ACCESS INFO
This event is 2G+, that means we will check at the door if you are vaccinated or recovered. Additionally, you must take a COVID test within 24 hours of attending. You can do this at a test centre or with a self test. Please do this beforehand if you can, if you can’t, we will have self-tests available for you to do at the event in a separate room. Please arrive half an hour early if you plan on using one of our self tests <3.
There is no registration, but the maximum capacity of the space is 30 people. We don’t expect so many people, so please don’t worry about being turned away :-).
The talk will be available livestreamed on Zoom with auto-generated English captions. Here is the link to the Zoom room.
If you would like to sit next to someone, who can give you brief summaries about the talk in Russian, we can organize that :-). Please let us know.
Please read the main access info for the space at the top of this page as well for more information.
SUNDAY
21.11. Workshop: The rejection-competition antidote for art and cultural workers/activists with Feminist Healthcare Research Group, 11:00-14:00, EN + DE
Working in the art field can blur boundaries and exhaust your capacity for personal relationships. We often doubt our self-worth as we’re continuously struggling to get by. We can’t tell where work relationships end and friendships begin. We’re uneasy around each other because we constantly compete with people we love and would rather learn from. And we’re worn out from the repetitive emotional labor that countless rejections demand from us.
Feminist Healthcare Research Group (represented by Inga Zimprich) invites art and cultural workers to engage in the swampy mess of our emotions. To create our own personal antidotes to competition and rejection, we’ll work with various techniques such as bragging, envy, and appreciation.
ACCESS INFO:
Spots are limited to 14 people. Please register by sending an email to: covenberlin@gmail.com
This event is 2G+, that means we will check at the door if you are vaccinated or recovered. We will also ask you to write your contact details for contact tracing. Additionally, we will ask you to take a test (an antigen self-test/schnelltest) upon entering the space. We will provide these self tests for free for you, and it will be the first thing you are asked to do when entering the space.
If you would like to sit next to someone, who can give you brief summaries about the talk in German, we can organize that :-). Please let us know.
Please read the main access info for the space at the top of this page as well for more information.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Ana Loktionova is a curator, organiser, and ar(c)tivist based in Minsk who is interested in locally focused, accessible and inclusive approaches to spaces that can resist the neoliberal growth-driven structures they find themselves in. Her attention currently spikes for explorations of spaces, self-care and horizontal communication. She is a cofounder of the queer feminist film festival DOTYK and ran the gallery canteena.xyz.
Jennifer Mehigan is an artist and writer based in Belfast. Her current research focuses on suppressed Irish lesbian historical figures and their graves as horticultural sites, uncovering queer strategies for surviving our crisis of climate and kinship through anti-colonial lenses. She is a founding member of the artist-run cafe Fruit Shop and a small part of the 343, a DIY queer studio and event space in Belfast, where she manages the emergency aid fund.
Inga Zimprich is a white able-bodied cis-person, an artist, deaf-blind assistant and mother. She initiated Feminist Health Care Research Group in 2015 and co-founded Sickness Affinity Group. As an artistic research project, the Feminist Health Care Research Group creates installations, workshops, and zines, in which they aim to create space to share vulnerability, to acknowledge and respond to issues of accessibility and other needs, and to interrogate the internalized, ableist paradigms that determine our understanding of productivity in the art field. In their events and workshops FHCRG focus on self-organized and communal support structures and care practices, aiming to build an accessible resource of methods and tools. FHCRG currently consists of the artist, body worker, and mother Julia Bonn and Inga Zimprich. Their work is dedicated to generating artistic and self-empowering, emancipatory approaches to healthcare.
Katya Zhynhiarouskaya is an artist, musician, singer and teacher based in Minsk and Berlin. Katya’s work starts from the idea of a “sounding body” in movement and action. Katya is trained in choral conducting and opera singing, somatic disciplines, and contemporary dance.
This event is a part of COVEN’s YEAR OF THE BOG. Its remnants will be up shortly on our CYBERBOG.
This event series is supported by the Hauptstadtkulturfonds.
