Lecture and Sound Performance by Janine Eisenächer
Tuesday, November 27 / 19:00
In her new research performance-series Doing sounds with things, Janine Eisenächer explores the possibilities of co-existence and co-creation, of being-with and inter-being with objects and materials through sound and touch. She understands the present materials not as functional objects but as things and matter we live-with, that have their own agency and presence, their specific material qualities, stories and resistances. In Doing sounds with things #1, Eisenächer engages in real encounters, in a care-taking and maybe even conflicting co-llaboration and community-building by carrying out matter-based, sonic-spatial practices with them. In experimentally and playfully creating acoustic „string figures“, with reference to Donna J. Haraway’s book Staying with the Trouble, Eisenächer underlines the generally multi- and inter-sensual and -sensory process of human (inter-)action and perception, including one’s desires and imaginations, and particularly highlights the relevance of sonic-tactile and listening practices, experiences and knowledge in art and everyday life for our world-making and our inter-being and being-with the world.
Parts of this lecture and sound performance have been developed together with cultural scientist Michael A. Conrad (University of Zurich) and were presented in the joint lecture Hearing co-existence: On the spatiality of sound and acoustic desires in objective encounters at the conference Sounding out the Space in Dublin, 2017.
Janine Eisenächer is a performance artist, curator, researcher and writer, based in Berlin. She creates solo and group performances on the subjects of work and collaboration, including related topics such as gender, identity, (post-)colonialism, care and solidarity. Within her performance practice she often works with objects and materials (things), with which she creates sonic spaces through body-generated and material-based sounds, discussing the inter-relations between performer and non-human agents as well as how we perceive and relate to the things that surround us and that we live-with. She presented her works in various Performance Art festivals and events across Europe, in Northern America and Aotearoa New Zealand. In addition to her performance practice, Eisenächer is a part of the artistic-curatorial group Inverse Institution that develops collective practices of institutional critique, and of the political research-group wwwz (wie wollen wir zusammenarbeiten? – how do we want to work together?) with which she researches forms of collaboration in freelance cultural production. She is a board member of the self-organized art space Flutgraben e.V. in Berlin. Eisenächer holds a Magistra Artium degree in Theatre Studies and Comparative Literature (Free University of Berlin) and wrote her thesis on material-based sounds in Performance Art. She currently researches on Performance Art-related sonic and action-based knowledge(s).
