co-incidence festival

OUR 2020 SEASON

january 10—18, 2020, at Washington Street Art Center in Somerville, MA

We began thinking about this year’s festival with a gut question, an intuitive uneasiness: “So, what?” Followed by an implied: “So, what - now?”

We are all active, serious, intense, dedicated (and angry, frustrated, impatient) - of course. We create art. We write. We perform. We protest. We organize festivals, gatherings, concerts, meetings, events. But then what? Things aren’t necessarily getting better; they’re hardly getting different.

After the demonstrations/actualizations of our ideas have passed, what are the effects? What are the actual results of (these) political acts? Something does occur. Often quite beautiful, wonderful things. But how are we considering, critiquing, progressing-with, challenging, etc. what does happen? Is there a way that we can think of consequence as something that challenges objective-driven modes of being - the logic given to us by capital?

It is easy to point out what won’t work. We know what hasn’t worked. So what will?

We (aaron & luke) are interested in creating a space dedicated to the development of the creative and experimental movement of the human being. We want to discuss, learn, and discover with others how we might be able to think/act/compose towards/with/alongside possibilities that we can’t yet imagine - whatever the result may be. If we are able to find/create these cracks in our everyday logic, these possibilities, then how can we experience them more vividly? Can we condition them (ourselves perhaps) to see them more clearly, to realize their potential more readily?

With social and political theorist John Holloway, we will explore topics relating to these questions about the consequences of art, cracks (in capital), political movements, disruption, antipower, non-action, and others.

We invite those interested to join us in this attempt to think, act, do, critique, and be together.

applications due october 1st || results sent by october 9th

COLLABORATORS

Hosted by

Washington Street Gallery

Washington St. is home to 20 artists who work in a broad range of media. from sculpture to paper cutting, painting to book binding and everything in between - the collaborative houses a cornucopia of creatives from many different backgrounds. with its own photo lab, Washington St. also hosts photography members who share the darkroom and photo studio. additionally, Washington St. has served for many years as an experimental music venue, directed by composer/performers Michael Rosenstein, Jesse Collins, and Morgan Evans-Weiler.

pictures of the space.

In Partnership with

Non-Event

Non-Event is a Boston-based concert series devoted to the presentation of the finest in experimental, abstract, improvised, and new music from New England and around the world. founded in 2001, Non-Event has presented over 260 concerts in and around Boston in a wide variety of venues from coffee shops, galleries, and loft spaces to former movie palaces, university lecture halls, museums, night clubs, 19th-century ballrooms, a Victorian-era pumping station, and inside Boston's iconic City Hall. in addition to working with numerous venues and organizations over the past 15 years, Non-Event organizes a longstanding series of informal monthly coffee house concerts featuring local musicians and sound artists, held at Café Fixe in Brookline and made possible in part by the Brookline Commission for the Arts.

Resident Artist

John Holloway

John Holloway is a Professor of Sociology at the Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades in the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, Mexico. He has published widely on Marxist theory, on the Zapatista movement, and on the new forms of anti-capitalist struggle. His book Change the World Without taking Power (Pluto, London, 2002, new edition 2010) has been translated into eleven languages and has stirred an international debate. His recent book, Crack Capitalism (Pluto, 2010), takes the argument further by suggesting that the only way in which we can think of revolution today is as the creation, expansion, multiplication and confluence of cracks in capitalist domination.

GUEST ARTISTS

Robert Blatt

Robert Blatt (b. 1984 in Anaheim, CA) creates work rooted in explorations of expanded sonic situations through varying frames and gradations of environment, notation, object, performance, text and tone. The notion of a site-responsive practice and scores in their exhaustive sense make a regular appearance in his work, often dissolving aspects of language, location, material and presence as vehicles for an unspecified or autonomous encounter with the ambiguities of the work itself. His work has been presented in the context of performances, exhibitions, readings, publications and a variety of hard-to-pin-down occurrences and has been supported through a fellowship from Akademie Schloss Solitude (DE) and residencies from Initiative for Digital Exploration of Arts and Sciences (CA), Jack Straw Cultural Center (WA) and GEMAK (NL). He co-founded/directed the Miami-based Inlets Foundation for Experimental Practices and the international experimental music/performance art collective Acid Police Noise Ensemble.

Grace Carney

Grace Carney is figuring things out—in practical, material, and sonic worlds. She is an artist interested in performance, sound, queerness, power, and the spaces that can be created within these categories. A third generation Irish-Catholic Bostonian, she can currently be found in Hanover, New Hampshire working and performing with material objects while pursuing her Masters in Dartmouth’s Digital Musics program.

Joachim Eckl

Joachim Eckl was born and brought up in 1962 in Haslach, Austria. The relation to his country and culture as well as the local particularities became important for Eckl after he returned from studying in New York in 1989. His commitment and work is based on the conviction and knowledge that the achievements of the 20th century entailed progress but also an immoderate carelessness: for Eckl, the time has come to return something to the river and the region. After his studies of psychology in Austria and New York, Eckl has worked for over 20 years in various positions and roles in the art world. In parallel to the realization of over 100 of his own projects, he was part of the implementation of the large-scale projects of Tony Cragg, Jeff Koons, Christo & Jean Claude, and Klaus Rinke. Eckl currently works as a freelance artist under the label HEIM.ART® in “Der Station—Neufelden” and as part of international projects. Run by Eckl, “Die Station—Neufelden”, the former warehouse on the Große Mühl, has been used as an art space for over 10 years. In the years 2008—2009, he realized projects in Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany, Great Britain, Egypt, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

Douglas Farrand

Douglas Farrand is a NJ-based composer & musician working at the intersection of music, popular education, and place-based organizing. He is concerned with developing practices that invite us to explore our myriad processes of listening and embody a collective investigation of place, community, and personhood. He works as the Music City Co-Director with the University of Orange, a grassroots community organization and people’s urbanism school in Orange NJ, and as Director of Sonic Explorations, a youth music education program. He is a founding member of LCollective, a Brooklyn-based experimental music collective, alongside Teodora Stepancic, Assaf Gidron, Jesse Greenberg, and Matt Lau. He works closely with percussionists Ryan Packard and Christian Smith, filmmaker Evelyn Emile, poet & composer Porter James, and bassist Jeff Weston.

Cherlyn Hsing-Hsin Liu

Cherlyn Hsing-Hsin Liu is a Taiwanese born multidisciplinary artist. She comes from a background in literature and photography, and has developed her interests and practices in experimental arts, including 8mm/16mm/35mm film, mixed media, sound, audiovisual performance and installation. Exploring media languages and experimenting with materials and techniques, her works often are attempts to transcribe life events, self-reflection, and indexical experiences.

Michael Pisaro

Michael Pisaro (born 1961 in Buffalo, New York) is a guitarist and composer and a member of the Wandelweiser collective. While, like other members of Wandelweiser, Pisaro is known for pieces of long duration with periods of silence, in the past fifteen years his work has branched out in many directions, including work with field recording, electronics, improvisation and large ensembles of very different kinds of instrumental constitution. Pisaro has a long-standing collaboration with percussionist Greg Stuart, with over thirty collaborations (pieces and recordings) to date, including their 3-disc set, Continuum Unbound from 2014 and a new piece for amplified percussion and orchestra (to be premiered by the La Jolla Symphony in February, 2020). Recordings of his work have been released by Edition Wandelweiser Records, erstwhile records, New World Records, Hubro, Potlatch, another timbre, meena/ftarri, Senufo Editions, Intonema, winds measure, HEM Berlin and on Pisaro's own imprint, Gravity Wave. Pisaro teaches composition and experimental music the California Institute of the Arts.

Sarah Pitan

Hi, my name is Sarah. I make scores for things, mainly music. My practice used to be heavily influenced by contemporary philosophy, but it is now more influenced by my work in retail/customer service. I was born and raised just outside of Boston, and currently live in LA.

Morgan Schoonover

Morgan is an experimental artist based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. After studying studio art, training classically on the clarinet, and obtaining a Masters of Music in Leadership at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, Morgan has a unique blend of experiences and thinking that feed into her creative practice. Through audio-visual installation and interdisciplinary collaborations, her multi-sensory work often explores social connection through audience participation. She believes that sharing the creative process with others empowers a communal form of artistic ownership and challenges the notion of a singular artistic genius.

Ryan Seward

Ryan Seward is a percussionist and composer based in Loveland, Colorado. His practice is rooted in concerns for communitarian ritual, group dynamics, place identity, production of space, and composition, improvisation, and performance as sites of social and political praxis.

Manfred Werder

Composer and performer, is wandering through the abundance. His scores feature words and sentences found in poetry, philosophy and the world. Earlier works include stück 1998, a 4000 page score whose nonrecurring and intermittent performative realization has been ongoing since December 1997. Lives in situ.

the unlimited present agency

The unlimited present agency is an amorphous collective moved by thoughts, affects and beliefs. Its practice emerges from an engagement with notions of futurity, circulation and resistance. The agency is autonomous from the members and events that constitutes it, but for the time being, Elizabeth Roger and Grégoire Lamontagne are some of its more human faces.

(the) co-incidence festival