SAVVY in 2019: The first 10 years

The excitement of a new year at its beginning: new plans and ideas spread out on the table. This new year—2019—is especially exciting for us since, at its end, SAVVY will celebrate its 10th anniversary!

10 years of making a place, for us and all who want to feel at home in it. 10 years of building a home in which we dream, toil, support, fight, cook, laugh, fail, start again, think, talk, dance, cry and comfort.

And truth be told, 10 years of surviving—surviving in the fast-paced Berlin art scene, surviving without structural funding, often even without project funding, surviving in houses without heating and other basic infrastructure, surviving amidst the frightening climate of yet another shift to the right in which the presumably unsayable and undoable have shown their hateful faces in our lives and news, surviving in a society that makes conversations possible in which we are still being told to finally “get over” the histories of colonialism, slavery and racism as if their long shadows are no longer cast into our now.

10 years of surviving also thanks to the support of friendships and generosity—in mind, workforce, warmth, creativity, material and financial contributions by artists and thinkers, volunteers and other collaborators, by partners and funding institutions. We give thanks! 

How are we going to celebrate these 10 years? Of course with more work and the densest programme in our history so far:

Overview 2019

Umbrella project 2019–2020
THE INVENTION OF SCIENCE
Among the plethora of projects, series and events, SAVVY Contemporary’s programme in 2019 and 2020 is devoted to the exploration of the sciences, questioning the presumed universality and neutrality of the scientific canon and challenging scholarly disciplines that have rarely been analysed from the perspective of the continuum that are coloniality and partriarchy in order to gain an understanding of our current environment (both literally and as a metaphor) that may lead to new forms of living together.

THE INVENTION OF SCIENCE is an effort to do an autopsy of science and lay bare its implications on and entanglements with the colonial enterprise as well as capitalist economic structures. It unfolds in the form of a research, discursive and exhibition programme in multiple chapters. The project is an attempt at investigating and demonstrating how modern science has served as a vehicle for the promotion of Western knowledge and its superiority, while constructing the inferiority of non-Western knowledges and peoples through racial schemes from Anthropology and Ethnography through Biology and Psychiatry to Neurosciene or Computation.

More on its chapters—SHADOW CIRCUS, SOIL IS AN INSCRIBED BODY, THE LONG TERM YOU CANNOT AFFORD and ULTRASANITY—can be found below as well as further information on the overall project here on our website.

In 2020 the project will be continued with the fifth chapter (A BRIEF HISTORY FROM ANTHROPOMETRY TO BIOMETRY) and the sixth chapter (REPETITION WITH REVISION: ON FRACTAL GEOMETRY, TEXTILES AND REDACTING COMPUTATION).

Calendar 2019

January–November 2019
SPINNING TRIANGLES.
IGNITION OF A SCHOOL OF DESIGN
On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Bauhaus, SPINNING TRIANGLES seeks to challenge and act against the neocolonial power structures inherent in design practices, theory and teaching. It takes up the founding moment of the Bauhaus and starts from its reality as a school of design to reverse and reshape it, by creating a new school that will emerge through a process between Dessau, Kinshasa, Berlin and Hong Kong.

January 2019
ECOLOGIES OF DARKNESS.
BUILDING GROUNDS ON SHIFTING SANDS
After one year of exercises on the transmission of feminist practices and the making of new alliances and politics, we collect answers, intuitions, demands and more questions in an exhibition, a public programme as well as a series of readings and performances. 

February–March 2019
SHADOW CIRCUS
An exhibition in the framework of Forum Expanded at Berlinale
The exhibition by Ritu Sarin & Tenzing Sonam revisits an overlooked chapter in Tibet’s history: the armed struggle for freedom and its entanglement in global geopolitics through the CIA. Raised questions will touch upon collective intelligence, surveillance, decolonization and the post-Cold War world.

SHADOW CIRCUS is the first chapter of our long-term investigation THE INVENTION OF SCIENCE.

March–April 2019
A UTOPIAN STAGE
An exhibition in the framework of Maerzmusik–Festival für Zeitfragen
The project takes the Festival of Arts, Shiraz Persepolis (1967–77) as a point of departure to revisit its radical aspiration and to reconstruct a complex space of international modernity in the immediate post-colonial period.

May 2019–January 2020
ULTRASANITY.
ON MADNESS, SANITATION, ANTIPSYCHIATRY AND RESISTANCE
This research, performance and exhibition project will take up the challenge of exploring contemporary forms of cross- and trans-cultural psychoanalysis and psychiatry beyond a Western rationalization, but situated within the context of colonial subjugation, racialisation, patriarchal oppression and objectification. With chapters at the Venice Biennale (May 2019), Gnaoua Festival in Essaouira (June 2019) and at SAVVY in Berlin (December 2019–January 2020).

ULTRASANITY is the second chapter of our long-term investigation THE INVENTION OF SCIENCE.

August–October 2019
SOIL IS AN INSCRIBED BODY.
ON SOVEREIGNTY, AGROPOETICS AND STRUGGLES FOR LIBERATIONS
A project examining both the anti-colonial struggles of the past and the current land conflicts across the world resisting the invasiveness of neo-agro-colonialism and the extractivist logic behind the drive to turn “nature” into a resource. We will reflect on forms of self-determination and autonomy performed by local communities as a rejection of the capitalist and colonial model of agriculture, and engage in a critical analysis of certain techno-scientific epistemologies and biopolitical practices. How could entangled anti-colonial and environmental alliances nurture each other? 

SOIL IS AN INSCRIBED BODY is the third chapter of our long-term investigation THE INVENTION OF SCIENCE.

October–December 2019
THE LONG TERM YOU CANNOT AFFORD.
ON THE DISTRIBUTION OF THE TOXIC
This research exhibition and discursive program looks into the contemporary politics of toxic (waste) trades and their economies, within the context of the racial Capitalocene. As Françoise Vergès writes “a connection (…) between the Western conception of nature as ‘cheap’ and the global organization of a ‘cheap,’ racialized, disposable workforce” and the unequal and deeply racialized distribution of environmental catastrophes. With it we engage in an effort to expand the notion of what the toxic is conceived and perceived as, beyond the scientific paradigm, instead entering into a different epistemological realm that has to do with a multitude of systems of belief, perception and knowledge production.

THE LONG TERM YOU CANNOT AFFORD is the fourth chapter of our long-term investigation THE INVENTION OF SCIENCE.

December 2019
SAVVYBRATIONS.
THE FIRST 10 YEARS
Work hard, play hard—December will be the month to reflect back on the past 10 years of SAVVY and to look boldly into the future, with plenty old and new friends and ongoing good vibes in our hearts and feet. You will also be able to show your love at a fundraising auction for SAVVY with artworks by friends and supporters. 
 

Throughout the year

UNTRAINING THE EAR
Listening sessions
After a year filled with listening sessions attempting to untrain our ears by involving musicians sound practitioners and experts from diverse genres and disciplines, we are looking forward to developing further alternative ways to listen to music and sound. 

Archive Außer Sich
SAVVY Contemporary is part of Archive Außer Sich, a project by Arsenal–Institute for Film and Video Art in cooperation with Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW). Together, we explore the vulnerability and the fragility of archives, focusing primarily on further developing the infrastructure of some of existing archive projects.

SAVVY.doc
SAVVY.doc accommodates a variety of texts and publications, from literature to artists portfolios, which includes rare cultural and political publications from around the world, especially philosophies from the non-West. We are currently working on a new digital infrastructure.

Colonial Neighbours
The Colonial Neighbours archive which hosts objects, anecdotes and traces of German colonial histories is working on new collaborations with educational institutions and informal groups and new artists commissions.

RESIDING IN THE BORDERLANDS
Monthly film series
A new film series with Berlin as point of departure for explorations on nationality, residency, and belonging from a diasporic perspective. 12 guests from Berlin, each from a different diasporic community and with occupations close to or far from the cultural landscape, will be invited to examine the shifting realities entailed in living together.

TELLING TREES
Let us taste from life. By telling trees. Let us build a life. Telling trees. From our ancestors. To our contemporaries. Planting seeds. Building soils. For the ones. Yet to come. Telling Trees is a series of informal gatherings, irregular encounters around and among “sources of knowledge,” being scholars of the living who are rooted in African cultures.

To introduce this year’s programme to you in more detail, we cordially invite you to join us for a presentation of the 2019 programme.
January 24, 2019, 2pm 
Kindly register at: anna.jaeger@savvy-contemporary.com

We wish you a SAVVY, inspired, open, surprising, warm and safe 2019! 

With thanks to our 2019 funders – German Federal Cultural Foundation, Hauptstadtkulturfond, Berlin Senate, Foundation for the Arts Initiative, Goethe Institut, Creative Europe Programme of the European Union, Auswärtiges Amt, and many others who have supported us financially or in kind in the past 10 years