Concrete & the Immaterial Symposium II

INFRASTRUCTURE STUDIES - MATERIAL CULTURES - POLITICAL ECONOMY

In extended conversation with the research-led art exhibition Concrete and the Immaterial, this second and final symposium includes contributions by Stephanie Pau, Sofian Kourkzi and Lina Ivanova.

Open to be weathered, changed and eventually and decomposed — Stephanie Pau
Art research

In a short talk followed by Q&A, Steph shares a body of installation works created in a post-industrial landscapes that are open to be weathered, changed and decomposed. Holding a questioning space for practices of care and belonging in a more-than-human world in urban settings.

Improvised Explosive Device (IED) — Sofian Kourkzi
Videogame

For this work, consumer information technology is commodity that finally speaks for itself. In its hands the brand, exists no longer virtually as in commodity fetishism, but is reinforced time and time again through its directing and instructing of the user. This Nintendo DSi is one of many information (entertainment) machines abandoned by their creators to the secondary market or landfill, and so its voice is at least muted. When it is hacked, when the guardrails of firmware are stripped away, can this commodity be turned into pure material? When the direct impact of the production of integrated circuits is global scale horror, and the collective consciousness is captured by info-machines, one of the few ways out might be a social- ecological, materialist computing. This game is both an exploration of these themes and an enactment of the principles described.

St Clement of Ohrid — Lina Ivanova
Experimental projection

Lina will present an installation combining projected archival film with sculptural casts, exploring memory, learning and performativity. Using found 16mm film and 35mm slides of disused educational material recovered from an abandoned school in Bulgaria, Lina will experiment with analogue projections alongside cement casts made from the same materials.

Live Drawing — Ralph Berryman

Ralph Berryman's live, durational sketches will echo and respond in real time to the speakers and the visual works presented, acting as a visual translation or parallel track to the conversation. The shifting charcoal forms-accumulating, dispersing, collapsing- seek to embody the exhibition's exploration of material instability, emotional residue, and the porousness of structure.