In the midst of a prolonged pandemic, an accelerated post-natural reality and present Ukrainian war. With the global focus on climate and reduction of CO2 emissions, we have to come up with new sources that can power the needs behind our contemporary lifestyle habits, optimizing energy consumption both in the arts and in society.
Artist Isabel Burr Raty currently researches inner body technologies that can generate sustainable power, to give access to free energy so that the human and the more than human bodies can shapeshift and charge. In particular she is developing her latest Speculative Fabulation project about an off-the-grid trans-material village that centers around a power plant. This power plant is a green generator that converts sexual energy, or what Kung Fu fighters call primordial force, into electricity and produces molecules that offer trans-dimensional travels.
This three day theoretical and practical workshop proposes a laboratory playground, where Isabel invites participants to learn the techniques of and engage with a series of body and earthy electrical experiments, as well as to contribute to the research of the Power Plant project.
During the workshop Isabel will share the philosophical grounds and current status of the Power Plant Project. At the same time, she will teach basic Chi Kung practices that aim at increasing the bio-electrical current levels of the body, as well as promoting body homeostasis. Where we will measure our grounding and voltage levels before and after each practice, in order to collect data. On the other hand, we will construct analogue electro circuits, with mostly recycled materials, that use still-water, salt, earth, mud and our human bodies primordial force to generate enough voltage that can turn on at least a light bulb.
With this workshop program Isabel intends to create conditions to collectively reflect on what it means to de-center the role of the human within a sustainable energy system, as well as to think on what is Power. Can we perhaps understand power as a source that never gets lost going from one source to another? Or as a source that can transmute living matter into more living matter?
Apply: platformacipke@gmail.com
About the author:
Isabel Burr Raty (BE/CL) is an artist, teacher, sporadic curator and sexual Kung Fu coach. With an activist background as a filmmaker working with the Rapa Nui and the Mapuche people in Chile, her artistic research is based in ecological, queer, post-human and de-colonial perspectives, where the sources of inspiration range from Indigenous knowledge to techno-scientific ideas of matter and bodies. For the past years her experiments have focused on creating conditions for embodied Sci-Fiction, where the role of the human is queered in commodification processes, opening discussions about “value understandings”, such as the Beauty Kit Farm. In 2018 Amsterdam Arts Fund partnered her to Waag and Mediamatic. She lectures on New and Post Media Arts at ERG (BE), is a research member in nadine arts laboratory and in the EU project Staying in Touch, curatorial practices of the Future. Currently she is part of the co-curatorial assemblage in Topos4 wpZimmer Antwerp and Brussels.
[ČIPke] programme is supported by Municipality of Ljubljana – Department for Culture and Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia.
Čipke 