When The Sea Looks Back. A Serpent’s Tale

About

Imagination. Speculation, Dissolution of Space and Time

With contributions by Anti*Preuss, Bryndis Björnsdottír, Cooltūristės, Ieva Epnere, Daniel Falb, Sonja Gerdes, Ulrike Gerhardt, Golden Diskó Ship, Caspar Heinemann, Almagul Menlibayeva, Sondra Perry, Ashkan Sepahvand, Virgilijus Šonta, Jessica Lauren Elizabeth Taylor, The Many Headed Hydra, Elsa Westreicher. Curated by Emma Haugh and Suza Husse. 

WHEN THE SEA LOOKS BACK (A Serpent’s Tale) is a polyphonic oracle that engages the sea as a mirror and the serpent as a trickster to weave tales from the crossings of landscape and body, technology and power. Looking back with the sea, The Many Headed Hydra fabulates a connection between the desert landscapes of South and North, of the parched Aral Sea and the Curonian ‘dead’ dunes that reaches across the aftershocks of an ecological modernity formed by colonial land use. Through practices from the fields of visual arts, performance, writing, music and philosophy, the oracles in WHEN THE SEA LOOKS BACK tell of diaspora and border cultures in deep time ecologies and of post-imperial interspecies transformations. Following serpentine markings of future, past and present coastlines by way of imagination, memory, oral and visual modes of transmission, WHEN THE SEA LOOKS BACK approaches the waters as historical topographies and political collectivities. 

The first iteration of this interdisciplinary project took place across three months at Nida Art Colony on the Curonian Spit this summer. Comprising collaboration with invited artists and co-researchers in residence and the entanglement of performance/publishing and exhibition making WHEN THE SEA LOOKS BACK Part 1 was a site specific wild practice that culminated in an installed exhibition and a series of commissioned performances, readings and text based response. The exhibition, evocations and radio magazine (Part 2) at District include new commissions and contributions and opens with the launch of Hydra Magazine #02, an affair in fragments and sound assembled around an experimental radio magazine on cassette tape developed in response to the project by Golden Disko Ship. The radio magazine that was first broadcasted with Neringa FM radio from Nida Art Colony and will be performed as a live concert by Golden Disko Ship for the opening at District.

The Many Headed Hydra is a shape-shifting collective interested in myths and practices of queer ecologies that emerge from bodies of water. 

When The Sea Looks Back. A Serpent’s Tale is a project by Nida Art Colony of Vilnius Academy of Arts and District Berlin. Supported by the Lithuanian Council for Culture & the Lithuanian Ministry of Culture, Goethe Institute Lithuania, the Arts Council of Ireland and the Nordic-Baltic Mobility Programme.

More information: http://www.district-berlin.com/detail_full.php?categorie_id=19&article_id=296&lang=en&img_id=0