A Conference of Birds

Performance, part of a walkshop during the GCDN annual convening at SNFCC, Athens, 21st & 22nd May 2024.

A sound performance that brought together the story of the ‘stagemaker bird’ and memories of the SNFCC stage. In between recorded and live tweets as well as concert material, the GCDN convening turned into ‘A Conference of Birds’.

Image Credit: Maria Maraki

Apply!

Talk, part of H(e)avens, 4day festival on the role of private institutions in the field of culture, Athens, 9th December 2023.

“Po po, this sounds really bad, doesn’t it?,” still from the talk.

Focusing on the format of applications for artistic programmes, donations or awards in the Greek visual arts scene, ‘Apply!’ examines how institutions are personified through their application’s content and how the submission process — from the beginning to the end — outlines a personal but highly political psychography of artists in Greece.

The presentation has been based on answers that formed a unique text to be performed. Answers given by Greek artists who filled a specific questionnaire revealed that when adressing an open call, many of them enter a harsh mood rollercoaster that transforms them into identity chameleons while entering into rough competitiveness rather than a down-to-earth creative proposition. ‘Narcisistic deliriums’, as DZ quoted, and ever-changing portfolio description are drafted sur-mesure to institutional demands. Strained, over-analysed and drained proposals to support future works are some of the desperate and uncreative ways to win their only existent source of living; private institutions.

Live Audience

Performance, part of the Joyful Militancy Live/ A PAT Live program in the Outraged by Pleasure exhibition curated by Nadja Argyropoulou, Athens, Nobel Building, 10th November 2023.

Watch after 23:02

Live Audience forms an interplay with the concepts of audition and its auditors. Based on material from recorded and written archives, it is a call to a multi-auditory process about the emotions and the repression of aural militant audiences.
Video fragment

Nicolas Vamvouklis in conversation with Chara Stergiou

Interview, published in Artworks Fellows Medium, July 2023.
Read here

Theory in the Remix

Seminars, part of Waste/d Pavilion 3, State of Concept, Athens, October- November 2022.

Theory in the Remix is a series of encounters performed as loose seminars. It is an invitation to collectively explore the felicitous conditions for ‘sonic modes of study’. The same-titled seminars are structured as four (4) two-hour workshops at State of Concept Athens, on the 20th and 27th of October and the 3rd and 10th of November, as part of the Waste/d Pavilion 3.

Participants are invited to depart from passive lecture formats and readapt the ideas of the seminar and the remix as prompts to ruse otherwise the intellectual and practical ways of a study group. In short, they are called to consider what has been epistemologically, theoretically or artistically deemed as ‘invalid’, ‘a-formal’ or ‘uncategorized’ through means of expanded post-production. In the in between of a conference room and a concert hall – where knowledge moves between sound and its descriptions – participants will collectively explore the limits of sampling and mixing otherwise, in order to compose or to perform a collective and uncommon remix.

We welcome participants interested in transdisciplinary theoretical approach, sound studies in artistic research and theory, popular culture, live experience, and the creation of hybrid artistic approaches based on research as well as the development of relevant methodologies, keen on participating in reading groups, curious about forms and communities of listening, theory otherwise, popular culture and storytelling.

Undercommonings in the Remix

Radio streaming, part of the Commonings edition of The New Alphabet School, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, 15-17th September 2022.

Collected recordings and discussions with Commonings contributors and participants will be streamed daily from HKW. Undercommoning in the Remix presents itself as an audio streaming that works through sampling, mixing and attentive listening. Thinking of sound as a social agitator and a subtle carrier of affect and knowledge, sampling here is employed as a practice of attuning to the unheard and producing what feels urgent to be uttered. At the same time, mixing and remixing aim to bring together whatever has been considered unfit or invalid due to a general demand for containment. Thus, how can one sonically ruse what seems unlikely, uncategorizable or inadequate in structures by inventing an uncommon remix? How can listening change one’s relationship to our most implicit “undercommons”?

During each streaming, Chara and guest speakers are invited to listen together to a 20minutes mix based on recordings from their previous day at HKW. Then, they discuss and think together starting from its setlist to the multiple subjects raised in and beyond it.

Chara Stergiou · Undercommonings in the Remix

A Carrier Bag Theory

Audio & theory handbook, part of the exhibition ‘the mouth fills with words’, Routes in Marpissa Festival, August 2022.

Chara Stergiou · Θεωρία Σακιδίου (Eng. A Carrier Bag Theory about Marpissa)

In her essay ‘Τhe Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’ Ursula K. Le Guin speaks of the novel as a carrier bag that holds words. Words that hold things together. As the artist points out, Le Guin withdraws into the imaginary fields of wild oats where stories are re-invented in unique ways by returning to the object that “brings the energy inside” that contains, that stores, that has been cancelled by dominant narratives as defective, weak, female. It returns to the vast imaginary bag that contains people and notheroes, away from the Story of the Ascent of Man the Hero and closer to collective and social experience, to another model of collection, a non-heroic schema that validates the language of different experiences, while opening the door to possibilities for new narratives.

In the audio docu-fiction and the same-titled handbook presented by Stergiou in the courtyard of Saint Paraskevi church, the wild oats of the prehistoric populations of Le Guin meet by association the weed of wild oats in the grain fields of Laou area in Marpissa. The text is adapted through various translations and is broken by the narratives of the women of Marpissa regarding the memories of the past where “katikia” as another huge carrier ofstories, tools, fruits and collective coexistence gives voice to new narratives. While “gathering seeds and telling stories” Ioanna, Marousso, Margarita, Charoula, Margarita, Ursula and Florence compose this audio docu-fiction, as a theory of one more carrier bag, accompanied by field recordings of grain and wild oats at the site of old ‘katikes’.

Practices of Attunement
at 1/2/8 Spot on Economies Research Forum

PACT Zollverein, Essen, 1-17 October 2021.

As Practices of Attunement, we joined Spot on Economies, a research forum that focuses on economies as crucial cross-roads between social, ecological, and political futures. Over the course of two weeks diverse research groups are invited to share and develop their ideas, questions, and proposals on the economy and alternative practices that open up new horizons of thought and agency together with scholars, artists, practitioners, and activists.

Practices of Attunement started from the idea of ‘institutional economies’ and continued thinking around the idea of the ‘economy of study’. Seeking to set the conditions for such an economy — which is not directed towards a final product but as a site of untested social, ecological, and political futures, their emerging fictions and fabulations that can only be imagined practically mostly through speculative means — the group brought to the table the big question of practices and relevant get-together experiments as major question for conversations that the future will bring.

Watch video here

Practices of Attunement - together//apart

“Traversing Topologies: Imagining worlds and knowledge with/through artistic research” conference organized by the Swiss Artistic Research Network, 25th September 2021.

As Practices of Attunement, we participated at SARN’s ‘Traversing Topologies’ conference thinking about/through topological closeness and nonorientable togetherness, distance/space not as a grid/separator but as generative sites of encounter—together//apart.

Femiskop EcoFeminist Festival

Mentor at the EcoFeminist Festival, organised by Femiskop & supported by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, July 2021.

Assisted a group of participants towards the conception and realisation of hybrid research-based artistic projects related to questions of gender, ecology and technology in the particular locality of Azerbaijan, Central Asia, Iran, Russia.

Listening to an Elusive Geography

DJ Lecture - Participation at the Mediterranea 19 Young Artists Biennale - School of Waters,
San Marino, 9th July, 2021.

^{Photo: Thomas Montalti}

The DJ's personal orbit through the musical universe connecting elements in certain order (Bourriaud), the struggles and discontent inscripted in the popular (Stuart Hall)--in our case popular music--the playlist and the reference-list interwoven together to compose this peculiar classroom community (bell hooks) of listening to what remains elusive. The DJ Lecture hopes it had generated this generous space for audibility to function through speaking of the sea from the mountains to the coast, starting from a local yet radiant tidal universe of the Mediterranean, the passively enjoyed dancefloors and resentment to the ways in which we could speak of those significant things while changing contexts, dealing with knowledge, working with theory, exploding the references, feeling the feeling.

Notes on Listening to an Elusive Geography written by Chara Stergiou.

Practices of Attunement - #Instituting

Workshops, part of HKW’s #Instituting: Public Programme – June 24-26 2021
with Stefano Harney, Fred Moten, ruangrupa and others.

As a member of Practices of Attunement, we run a series of online workshops as part of HKW’s New Alphabet School #Instituting public programme in June 2021.

The workshop acts as a proposition that takes ‘instituting’ as a nonfinite verb, a call to collective action: a never-ending form of speculation, adopting attentiveness, receptivity and movement as its constituent elements. Practices of Attunement seeks to extend Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s notion of ‘study’: an encounter “where you allow yourself to be possessed by others,” instituting a mode of counter-maintenance, generating and maintaining felicitous conditions for encounters. Over the past nine months, we have been meeting bi-weekly to undertake an ongoing process of study(ing) together. For New Alphabet School #Instituting, we invited participants to join us in extended sessions that focus on maintaining, triggering or establishing the conditions for study via remote(ly) collective practices of attunement occurring (a)synchronously across multiple sites. In the unfolding space of study – being together and apart – Practices of Attunement propose to encounter and attempt to attune to different, overlapping, inconsistent, unevenly distributed, (in)tangible and (un)bounded ecospheric entanglements.

The workshop took place across a two-week period, where participants meet online twice in preliminary sessions prior to the event on June 25. The purpose of part one was to think through conditions and practices for attunement. Based on the participants’ experiences, part two will discuss possibilities to institute counter-institutional modes of study.

Information about the program of #Instituting can be found here.

Listening to an Elusive Geography

DJ Lecture at Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center (SNFCC), Athens, 4th June 2021.

^{Liquid Juctions / Mediterranea 19 x ARTWORKS @ SNFCC, Photo: Pinelopi Gerasimou}
^*^{Performance adapted in Greek as part of the Mediterranea 19 Young Artists Biennale - School of Waters parallel program in Athens, supported by Artworks and its founding donor Stavros Niarchos Foundation.}

Technospatial Entanglements of Infrastructural Bio-/politics

Paper presentation at the symposium “Space Interweavings: Ethos-Social Practices- Architecture”, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, 21st May, 2021.

Watch the 10 min presentation after 8:04:56
Read the paper in greek.

The material and spatial expression of our latest technopolitics set anew the limits of our spatial terminology, typologies, and mostly our capability to trace such phenomena. Starting from infrastructure theory as formed in the architectural discipline and taking into account relevant theoretical approaches from disciplines still untouched by the architectural study, the text needs to trigger traditional notions of spatial issues towards a big unuttered discussion. Such an opening needs to declare that such a discourse involves a number of fields of theory, it requires to be interdisciplinary, has to re-examine the technological as evolutional obsession through searching for modalities in the technical, and above all, it seeks to shake the solid foundations of materialism in the field of architectural study within a complex political and cultural reality of the present.

This reflection needs to trigger and reset the notion of ‘study’ in the architectural discipline and its forms of ‘knowing the world’ as a process that challenges forcefully the never-ending battle of its own ‘sovereignties of knowledge’ (Moten&Harney 2013) in a complex reality, while forming a proposition of how to “undo the sovereign state of itself” (Harney 2020).

Liquid Junctions

Talk with Ella Finer and Angeliki Tzortzakaki
Part of Digital Swamp | Expanded Public Program for the Mediterranea 19 Young Artists Biennale - School of Waters, 19th May, 2021.

“Because, I have been thinking Chara of these two bodies in your work: the DJ and the lecturer…as two bodies intrinsically linked by their love of moving an audience between what we are hearing to what we are hearing about -- knowledge as always on the move between the sound and its description -- we are in the song and then in all the memories and imagined dimensions it calls forth, we are in the theoretical thick of a remix, we are in the space open long enough for us, the audience, to create some of the noise and some of the description of the noise ourselves.”

Ella Finer, extract from Notes in response to Chara Stergiou’s DJ Lecture, 2021.

Practices of Attunement

On-going

Practices of Attunement are a collective of artists and researchers, distributed across different geographic locations, who meet bi-weekly to practice attunement and study, across physical and digital space. Formed initially in response to Haus der Kulturen der Welt’s call for #Instituting in the context of The New Alphabet School, we explore and experiment with techniques of being in and of the world differently.

Practices of Attunement are: Aslı Uludağ, Chara Stergiou, [diffrakt | centre for theoretical periphery, Gala Rexer, Moritz Gansen, Sam Nightingale, Simon Fleury

See the first edition of PoA Press released bi-monthly, in attunement with the rhythm of the study group’s meetings. It includes patches from our collective practices, of thinking and being in the world together.

Subscribe or follow our website for news on workshops and events we will be hosting.

What is a DJ Lecture?: Uprooting sovereignties of knowledge through montaging songs

Short text at the Call&Response Section of Sonic Scope Journal: New Approaches to Audiovisual Culture, Peer reviewed academic journal, Department of Music at Goldsmiths, University of London, February 2021.
Read here.

“A song alone may tell a story, but playing with the setlist (in our case a sonic and a verbal one), selecting and montaging its order, a unique story of a speculative nature can emerge which, in the case of the DJ Lecture, can break the grounds of an “anhedonistic” academia. If a lecture is “a formal talk on a serious subject” then, let’s play with this formality and make our unsound stories “serious” and more “real.”undefined Or, even if a lecture is “an angry talk given to someone in order to criticise their behaviour,” then why not express collective and unacknowledged resentment and anger before it becomes grief?”

A Radial Drift

Audio Essay

Chara Stergiou · A Radial Drift

The audio essay attempts to showcase hidden connections between sonic and spatial thinking. Starting with an exploration of sound recordings of signals through the application ‘Architecture of Radio’ the ‘Radial Drift’ wonders: has our everyday urban environment become this atmospheric, signaling yet vibrant space of seemingly impalpable energetical formations? While remaining unsound, unseen and generally ungrasped, traditional spatial disciplines are still struggling to overcome a materiality based on the so-called ‘built statement’. At the same time fields such as media studies seem to investigate the consideration of relevant spatial formations as large media objects whose study of operationality can shift our gaze to look for different spatial materialities in familiar constellations. Stiffenings in the urban disciplines — which were always focused on a seeing-is believing culture — cannot deal with this ubiquitous singling space. At this point, the contribution of sonic materialism as acoustic resonance — with its intensity frequency ratios and vibrant affects — forms a common ground of interplay between the new urban millieu of infrastructural non-human yet human designed entities. Challenging anthropocentric views and imaginations related to the infrastructural dreams of a radiant urban epistemology, its relation to transmission cultures and our always radiophonic cities, the essay wants to showcase that there are certain coordinates related to qualitative aspects of the materialities and operations of sound that were always there and can offer fruitful reflections towards the revelation of a hidden spatial ontology that lays on different kinds of ethereal and abstract distribution — a modality of affect of our temporality — while tracing its roots in globalisation stories and modalities.

In need of an epistemological widening and in order to elaborate the sensorial difficulties that shape the current dynamics in existence of knowledge in many fields, the last part of the audio piece manages to form a critique towards the challenges of scholarship and discipline sovereignty that different sensoria claim, when it comes to this difficult task of knowing the world. In this exhaustive condition of realisms of dispersed corporation or scattered effects, even such crossbreedings seem as a positive stance to reach different political, cultural or cognitive unconsciousness.

Ocean As Archive

Zine Design & Text Contribution

This is a fanzine that grew out of discussions and field trips undertaken for The Ocean As Archive, a class led by Dr Ayesha Hameed as part of the MA Contemporary Art Theory programme at Goldsmiths, University of London (November 2018 – March 2019). This zine was published in conjunction with a performance night on May 2, 2019 at Tamesis Dock in London.

The Ocean As Archive class is:
Farah Al Sidiky, Zinzi Buchanan, Nina Ciemińska, Natasha Eves, Rae Jiang, Daniel Sean Kelly, Katya Krylova, Hannah Morris, Killian O’Dwyer, Imara Paterno Castello, Sasha Shestakova, Chara Stergiou, Berny Tan

© The Ocean As Archive class, 2018-19

Supported by the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London

more to be added soon

Chara Stergiou

Info Texts Activity DJ Lectures Instagram

DJ Lectures are sonic fictions articulated through the structure of a DJ set.