Worlding Podcast

“I invite you for an imaginary night walk in my neighbourhood. We could meet in front of the supermarket, here on my corner, next to the flickering street lamp. I would suggest around 11:00 PM, in the middle of the week - Wednesday. So dress warm and I bring some tea and blankets for us. I also kindly ask you to be silent and aware of your surroundings during the walk.”

Sandra Blatterer is a Berlin based visual artist and lighting designer. In this episode we explore her research into ‘Imaginary Spaces’ created especially in the context of installations and staged performances, but not only. Together we discuss strategies to become more sensitised to the agency of light, asking how it choreographs us?

Learn more at: http://renaeshadler.com/worlding/

Tsuki is a dancer and choreographer originally from Australia and now based in Berlin. She is working from a queer feminine perspective and in this episode we dive into her research around deconstructing conditioned ways of being and facilitating spaces of more-than human exchange. 

Recorded from a hotel room in Ipatinga (Brazil), ​​Tsuki unravels her personal story of feeling alien in her body and how she changed her name and identity to come closer to her truth. This transition was made in relation to the moon cycle, with ’Tsuki’ in Japanese meaning ‘moon’.

Tsuki now leads Full Moon Performance Rituals in Berlin and is focused on enabling spaces where the art, the community, and the survival can co-exist. 

Learn more at: http://renaeshadler.com/worlding/

Tzeshi Lei is a Berlin-based dance artist, born and raised in Taiwan, who in this episode shares her research into the complexity of language. Drawing on her personal experience of living and working between Mandarin - a dialect of Chinese, German and English, Tzeshi explores the dimensionality of language which she see’s as a ‘hyperobject’ that it is containing us, while at the same time we are containing the language.

In dialogue with her movement practice which is rooted in Qigong, Tai Chi and Butoh dance, Tzeshi has come to describe language as ‘embodied anatomy’, approaching language as a series of entangled layers, similar to the layers of the body - such as facia, muscles and bones. Tzeshi asks how we can expand the nuances of spaces in between words and information, and therefore expand the many means by which we articulate worlds.

Learn more at: http://renaeshadler.com/worlding/

Diego Agulló is an independent researcher and multifaceted artist, creating contexts that continue practicing and investigating the relation between body and the event. Inspired by the term ‘Dilettante’ which literally means to delight one's-self in doing an activity, Diego and Renae attempt to blur the perceived border between what is work and life.

From this guiding principle of pleasure, Diego discusses different practices in which you can create a constant awareness of what you do on a daily basis. He begins by acknowledging that the brain has, in certain cultures, become the dominant organ and in response looks to Qigong and Tai Chi as a means to train other organs and discover what they are capable of. He often trains together with a small wooden stick - a stick that at times even ‘worlds’ him in that subtle moment when one feels that their body is being moved by something else.

Learn more at: http://renaeshadler.com/worlding/

Julia Grillmayr is a cultural studies scholar, journalist and science communicator who spends most of her time in the muddy danubian wetlands. In this episode Julia shares her research into sewage sludge and experience visiting five waste-water treatment plants in Austria in the preparation for “Klärschlamm” (Sewage Sludge), an exhibition at WUK which she co-curated with Eva Seiler in 2020. 

For Julia, sewage sludge is an interesting opaque substance that is never pure but instead made up of many different sediments. It is disgusting and unsettling, watering down the boundaries of alive or dead, active or passive, technical or organic, subject or object. It can therefore act as a metaphor for how the human and non-human are entangled in naturecultures - a fusion of nature and culture that recognizes their inseparability in ecological relationships.

Sewage sludge becomes an accomplice in an attempt to conceive a “nonarrogant collaboration with all those in the muddle” (Haraway 2016).

Learn more at: http://renaeshadler.com/worlding/

Christina Gruber is an artist and freshwater ecologist, who works at the intersection of art and science. In this episode we focus on her work at the LIFE Sterlet project to repopulate sturgeon in the Danube. Christina shares how the sturgeon, a rare species of fish, got a bit lost in the muddy waters, or we got out of touch. Once an important figure, it’s no coincidence that especially in Austrian history (Christina’s homeland) and in the Folklore of communities nested along large rivers across the world the sturgeon often appears, and having once grown to around five meters in length, Christina has the theory that all the dragon stories are actually ancient sturgeon sightings.

Christina and Renae then discuss how the Worlding practice could bring us more in touch with sturgeons, one example being the use of technological listening devices that enable us to learn with and relate to them, finding out the many ways in which the sturgeons shape us. 

Learn more at: http://renaeshadler.com/worlding/

Samuel Hertz is a Berlin-based sound artist and researcher working at intersections of Earth-based sound, sonic sensualities, and climate change. This episode Samuel dives into complexity theory and shares listening practices that enable us to develop a more nuanced understanding of the sonic world. He proposes sound as a metaphor to reveal multiple layers of activity and bring us into a more nuanced understanding of what's happening around us.

Through the lens of complexity we discuss 'care' which Samuel critiques as generally being understood as something similar to stewardship that actually is considered an antiquated concept when dealing with critical ecosystems. He argues that from this perspective care can create power structures which lead humans to believe they are in charge and in a hierarchical position to care over something.

Instead, Samuel proposes caring-with and using complexity as a tool to develop an understanding of how changes within specific ecosystems affect other beings and other materials they are entangled with. 

Learn more at: http://renaeshadler.com/worlding/

How can you move, if you are separate pieces?

What needs to happen to initiate and enact a response, a movement?

What needs to be gathered?

Julia Metzger-Traber is a mother, dance artist and community process facilitator who is based in Virginia (USA) where she works and lives as part of a community project and farm called The Rhizome.

Julia reflects on the African American people who tended the lands that The Rhizome is built on, the people who were enslaved by the British and brought over against their will, the people who are now the deep listening stewards of the land. 

Julia and Renae discuss the messy and sometimes even delicious details of reparation work as well as the feminist ethic of ‘response-ability’ which is not so much about imparting duty or moral obligation as it is about cultivating the capacity for response. Response-ability as a relationship, a deep listening and coming into dialogue to be able to then move into response.

Learn more at: http://renaeshadler.com/worlding/

Dance artist Zwoisy Mears-Clarke shares how Worlding intersects with his artistic practice, from exploring our ancestral relation with plants to questioning our interconnection with technology and what that means for the communication of time, rest and activity.

The episode then dips into Zwoisy’s current research with the Herero and Nama people that live in Namibia, and are part of the Diaspora. Zwoisy talks about how speaking intimately to Indigenous people has shifted his understanding of his personal journey of immigration from Jamaica, to the United States and from the United States to Germany. 

Zwoisy and Renae discuss the relationship with the land that remains fundamental to the identity and way of life of many Indigenous people. Renae shares a memory with her ‘Aunty Peggy’ (Peggy Rockman Napaljarri), a Warlpiri-speaking indigenous artist from Lajamanu in Australia's Western Desert region, who told her at age five that “we are land and land is us”. The pair consider ways to practice this idea in our daily lives by asking - how can we dissolve the perceived border between land and the human body? 

Learn more at: http://renaeshadler.com/worlding/

Dance artist Jule Flierl questions how voicing, listening and breathing can be used to bring us into a sensual relationship with our past, present and future surroundings.

Jule shares, for example, how she worked with different temporalities in her solo dance piece “Störlaut” where she reinterpreted the sound dances of Valeska Gert, a German grotesque dancer of the 1920s, in order to create an articulation beyond today’s word capsules.

She then proposes a breathing score for listeners to embody her desire to bring breath, and physical practices more broadly, back into a realm where they become sensory tools, as opposed to their current association as simply a means to transmit the Coronavirus.

Learn more at: http://renaeshadler.com/worlding/