The Museum of Stones was created as a reflection and speculative extension of the self-publishing practices that appeared during the protests in Belarus and continue today. As a hybrid infrastructure, such publications, also known as neighbourhood newspapers, are created through grassroots initiatives and distributed via digital platforms and streets. Everybody can download the issues from Telegram channels, print them out at home and put them in mailboxes, cafés or other public places. Protest neighbourhood newspapers create common solidarity structures that disseminate essential political information, in light of the majority of independent media in Belarus having been closed down and deemed ‘extremist’. By utilising political imagination, The Museum of Stones provides opportunities for more voices to be heard, creating alternative or additional ramifications in the existing infrastructure of neighbourhood newspapers. The newspaper issues are devoted to the possibilities of organising care infrastructures in a particular neighbourhood, with the practices of the ‘cybernetics of the poor’ serving as an antithesis to ‘high technology’ through multiple interviews with anarchists, representatives of the LGBTQ+ community and militants, among others. Telegram bot @stones_museum_bot

Infrastructure for transporting raw materials such as oil and gas can be as much a tool for building trade relations as for waging conflict – as became clear after Russia opened a new phase of its war against Ukraine in February 2022. Throughout a walk we will tour a section of the “Friendship” oil pipeline, running from Siberia to refineries in Płock, Poland and Schwedt, Germany. The structure emerges from under the ground at the point where it crosses the Narew River, between Zegrzyński Reservoir and Nowy Dwór Mazowiecki. This is where the strategic fuel pipeline – now dead, but until recently transporting crude oil from Russia to the European Union – materializes before our eyes and becomes vulnerable. Interestingly, the pipeline is also accompanied by a transcontinental fiber-optic cable transmitting vast amounts of data – sometimes referred to as “new oil.” The walk will be narrated with stories of the pipeline and its natureculture surroundings, accompanied by live and pre-recorded soundscapes.

A story of a friendship and its seemingly impossible passage between North Macedonia and Belarus, and everywhere else in between. What happens when the return home is a shared experience that remains only a reference for a future out of reach? How do systems of power impact a mundane daily life? Who gets access to the imagination? And how to live with a memory that becomes heavy overnight, without warning? Questions, rules, surveillance, control. Yet, there is so much to hope for.

Every Assembly is a flow of conversations and questions, occasionally interrupted by spontaneous contributions — a gesture, poem, moving practice, track, spell, score or anything else.

Every Assembly departs from a set of questions, images and keywords gathered at the textile collage, present in the space. One is welcome to propose their questions and spontaneous contributions in the course of the day, by stitching them to the textile, or during the assembly. One can also propose roles they would perform during the Assembly, from maintenance of the space-time to taking care of participants.

Each Assembly starts with contributions that feed to the flow of conversations. If there are no spontaneous contributions, the flow of conversation runs further to be interrupted in case spontaneous contributions appear.

Each spontaneous contribution has a limited time that depends on the duration of the Assembly and has to be negotiated among all the participants on the spot.

Since contemporary methods of imperial control and violence are concealed and embedded in vast infrastructural and logistical networks, they require new practices and tools to confront them. In this workshop, Mark Cinkevich will break down open-source intelligence (OSINT) tools and ways those techniques could inform artistic practice. This workshop elaborates on the unique method Mark Cinkevich developed together with Anna Engelhardt while working on the video work “Onset.”

The workshop will start from the conceptual overview, and followed by the introduction of the OSINT tools. At the end of the workshop, the audience will be invited to apply the new investigative method in practice. Attendees will be provided with the GPS coordinates of Russian infrastructures and will conduct their own investigation in a guided manner.

Important!

Technical information: Participants are asked to bring their laptop with pre-installed Google Earth Pro (a standalone desktop application).

We would like to make a performative exploration and street performance/ intervention, which exposes processes that are used in AI for instance Markov chains and random walks. Our performance is a grid mapping exercise, where participants are chosen to perform a set of tasks provided by the algorithm.

The intervention is based on the experience of AI tutoring in which you must imagine yourself as AI. Our prompts are: time, space, reasoning, probability distribution, computational ecology, state, transition. We connect it to the grid, walking, commons of fantasies and (the loss of) commons of imaginations to neo-capitalist structures. Whether decentering your decisions to computational processes can bring you joy or some other feelings.

Please take with you your smartphone.

Start from SDK Słonecznik.

The play is an impossible debate between Mykola Khvylovy (1893-1933), Mark Fisher (1968-2017), their friends and enemies about their versions of unrealized or delayed futures, West, and (trigger warning!) suicide, with episodes of role-playing discussion for the audience. The reading/role-play discussion will expose the contradictions of Western leftist melancholy in the face of new challenges to solidarity, which include reactivated non-Western imperialisms and historically disseminated resistance to them in the Westernmost East. In addition to mapping out multiple transtemporal polemics, it will attempt (with the help of participants) to invent a situational platform for an open, unfinished togetherness.

Around 1905, insurrectionist anarcho-communist movements became a major political force in Bialystok, serving as a prominent node in a regional and global network of revolutionary activity. These radical groups held regular Birża “worker exchanges”, where different political factions would come and discuss ideologies and revolutionary tactics, distribute literature, tell about worker struggles in the surrounding cities, shtetls, and villages, and organize public demonstrations, strikes, and acts of expropriation and overt violence against the ruling class, the police, and the Russian army. Anticipating the political occupation of public space today, the Birża was a kind of self-organized street parliament where everyone had the right to participate, vote, speak, and organize, serving as both a revolutionary school and a social club for diverse communities. This presentation will draw on the echoes of this volatile history and will reflect on the 2021 exhibition In the beginning was the deed! at Galeria Arsenał in Białystok (curated by Katarzyna Różniak and Post Brothers), which incorporated anarchist working methods and used contemporary art to bridge the past with current struggles, reintroducing this repressed legacy of workers rebellion to the local context. Exploring what this movement could mean for political, artistic, and intellectual life today, the presentation will also examine the radical potentials of ‘an-archival’ history telling.

This is an interactive event focused on reflexions and personal experiences. At this event we would like to engage the participants in taking a critical approach to the hailed solidarity and mutual aid practices developed by Belarusians in and after 2020 and look at how they react to the treatment of “other” migrants storming the Fortress Europe, as well as to other wars beyond the war in Ukraine. We will explore what the idea of the nation-state and the media and international organisations’ discourse have to do with our solidarity trends and try to understand if it’s possible to stop competing for attention of “the high and mighty” and gain strength and learn from others who are hurting.

Every Assembly is a flow of conversations and questions, occasionally interrupted by spontaneous contributions — a gesture, poem, moving practice, track, spell, score or anything else.

Every Assembly departs from a set of questions, images and keywords gathered at the textile collage, present in the space. One is welcome to propose their questions and spontaneous contributions in the course of the day, by stitching them to the textile, or during the assembly. One can also propose roles they would perform during the Assembly, from maintenance of the space-time to taking care of participants.

Each Assembly starts with contributions that feed to the flow of conversations. If there are no spontaneous contributions, the flow of conversation runs further to be interrupted in case spontaneous contributions appear.

Each spontaneous contribution has a limited time that depends on the duration of the Assembly and has to be negotiated among all the participants on the spot.

I’m interested in flying/not-flying – what is between moving and not moving? I’m curious about de-centring “the centre” through movement practices. I want to make kites with “no centre” to try this out. I have a loose idea of making a huge, weird kite and trying to fly it together. I would prepare the fabric/structural elements and we could sew/assemble it together, and then go to a park or open area to see if/how it flies.

Collective kite-making session in the morning. If you have lightweight scrap fabric for the kites, please, bring along.

Flying kites in the evening by the river.

Food and emotions are our everyday but are also deeply embedded in colonial practices and entanglements. Building on the idea of the mycelium — as a complexly interdependent network of communication, exchange, vulnerability, and losing ground beneath our feet, we offer a picnic/tea party to explore together the colonial machine of producing emotions, and feelings that are not neutral or personal but deeply political. Like food, feelings can reproduce ambivalent effects — being a practice of exclusion, oppression, and a means of solidarity and togetherness. We invite everyone to a picnic/tea party to think together about our connections and sharing.

In the design of this anonymous project, individual bags can be worn on the body like garments. Numerous bags come together to form walls, creating a garment that acts as a third skin, a tent, and a collective body space. The material and the numerous bag handles hint at their original purpose. When the small space of a travel bag expands to encompass many bodies, it becomes a space of action in both a physical and symbolic sense.

We reflect on how strangely intimate and yet open to distant worlds this space feels. Why does this shell enable such specialness? Is it the agreement to share a space for a certain time? In this space, people who do not know each other place hands on one another, forming and playing in a common area for a set period. Pockets are unraveled and sewn anew, revealing personal treasures of experiences and stories from their luggage. We find ourselves inside a pocket, opening our own. Stories told are carried on and projected onto the tent skin, allowing the voices of those who have moved on to be heard. In this social and experiential narrative space, even people who have never met physically come together. The projections on the semi-permeable membrane reveal something of the inner world to outsiders.

This project explores stories of migration, and notions of home, belonging, and otherness. For this iteration, we propose a performative reading, involving the sewing of the ‘carrier bag’ and using texts and theories by Ursula Le Guin as a starting point. Projections of stories and experiences collected during the public iterations of this project will also be included. The checkered bag, familiar in many parts of the world, particularly among marginalized and migrant groups, serves as a focal point. Together with the audience, we open the discussion to unpack our individual experiences with notions of home and belonging. https://www.instagram.com/designdesanonymen/

I’m interested in flying/not-flying – what is between moving and not moving? I’m curious about de-centring “the centre” through movement practices. I want to make kites with “no centre” to try this out. I have a loose idea of making a huge, weird kite and trying to fly it together. I would prepare the fabric/structural elements and we could sew/assemble it together, and then go to a park or open area to see if/how it flies.

Collective kite-making session in the morning. If you have lightweight scrap fabric for the kites, please, bring along.

Flying kites in the evening by the river.

To compensate for the enormous cognitive workload that capitalism and its accompanying imperialist wars impose, psychological bloggers often recommend outdoor recreation. In addition, the users of social networks send other people to “touch some grass” to overcome the delusion that comes with discussions on platforms filled with massive amounts of information. It is no coincidence that parks and gardens in cities are called recreational areas, which are supposed to recover workers after a hard week in the city or in the feed of Instagram. But doesn’t the recreation area then become a place of reproductive work for non-humans that delays the rest for all? If so, is it possible to turn the forced displacement of the workers to local recreation areas into voluntary participation in the recreational assemblies from which one can return to the city with a different sensitivity that will lay the foundation of the struggle for the emancipation of humans and non-humans from the outsourcing of recreation/reproduction? At the narada/meeting, we offer the participants and the environment to share the problems of the ghettoization of leisure and to look for ways of solidarity and cooperation in the situation of ontological differences between human and non-human languages.

The plan of the meeting will consist of conversations and several exercises that will help to distinguish the environment as a potential comrade and exchange with it the ways of escaping from the instrumentalizing framework for life and work.

In segregated societies, living in bubbles turns into a split experience. Insulation becomes a survival mechanism; creating spaces of self-affirmation against systemic erasures and maintaining pockets for sanity amongst eroding landscapes. They become “prefigurative platforms” to experiment with collective desires and political scenarios in nascent and loose forms, before solidify in the public sphere. Yet closed circles could end up in reproducing segragation too, where borders of self-care and care for others get either intensely blurred or violently polarized. Thinking of cultural infrastructures, what is to be learnt from working conditions which require limited visibility and scale? While often associated with precarity, practicing such limits could also be understood as strong ethical and political positions. They could introduce alternative value systems, in contrast to liberal notions of openness, transparency and myths of accessibility, which define leverage of cultural institutions in current times. This conversation will speculate over potential unfoldings caused by inward moves: acknowledgment of the already existing, relying on kinships and reformulating ones own relation with history. For instance, how trans-historical bonds, intergenerational time and memory turn into infrastructures? Respectively I reflect on how these have been formative for my curatorial practice, in terms of self organization, space making, and working with exhibitions as sensory technologies.

Every Assembly is a flow of conversations and questions, occasionally interrupted by spontaneous contributions — a gesture, poem, moving practice, track, spell, score or anything else.

Every Assembly departs from a set of questions, images and keywords gathered at the textile collage, present in the space. One is welcome to propose their questions and spontaneous contributions in the course of the day, by stitching them to the textile, or during the assembly. One can also propose roles they would perform during the Assembly, from maintenance of the space-time to taking care of participants.

Each Assembly starts with contributions that feed to the flow of conversations. If there are no spontaneous contributions, the flow of conversation runs further to be interrupted in case spontaneous contributions appear.

Each spontaneous contribution has a limited time that depends on the duration of the Assembly and has to be negotiated among all the participants on the spot.

Register to get the location and further info!

How does the city feel like when you recently moved here, especially if it is not easy to come back? What routes do you carve and weave in it? What places become familiar, where do you start to grow memories and new relationships and what places remind you of your hometown? What are those new mappings, crossroads and intersections?

For this year’s gathering we were asking ourselves a question of what voices we want to hear and that we would like not to lead a walk but to invite our friends who recently moved to Warsaw to become our local guides for an hour. We invited them to think of some places they have made connections with during their life here and to take us on an improvised intimate walking tour between them. We would like you to explore together with you and our friends how these new routes and places of our friends add to the fabric of the city and re-write and re-create it.

You don’t need to bring anything — just come. The walks will go in any weather and try to travel light.

Foot exploration of Warsaw’s Wola as an atlas of borders and their transgressions. Confinement meets Internationalism, from the past to the future.

gathering point:
⚡🍇 Bazar Olimpia 🍇⚡
Górczewska 56/60, 01-401

We meet at the entrance at 12.00 -> we split

We have 1 hour to find an artifact to buy inside (please take at least 10 PLN in cash)

After 1 hour we meet at the empty abandoned stadium, at the very centre of the bazaar.

We have a picnic there and discuss our artifacts and their possible histories from the point of view of the “anthropology of things”.

Note: we meet there close to 12.00 , bazar is slowly closing at that time. You still may buy fruit/antiques. You have to bring cash. 10 PLN should be completely enough to buy lots of stuff there. While we have a picnic all the vendors will be slowly packing up to leave.

Register to get the location and further info!

How does the city feel like when you recently moved here, especially if it is not easy to come back? What routes do you carve and weave in it? What places become familiar, where do you start to grow memories and new relationships and what places remind you of your hometown? What are those new mappings, crossroads and intersections?

For this year’s gathering we were asking ourselves a question of what voices we want to hear and that we would like not to lead a walk but to invite our friends who recently moved to Warsaw to become our local guides for an hour. We invited them to think of some places they have made connections with during their life here and to take us on an improvised intimate walking tour between them. We would like you to explore together with you and our friends how these new routes and places of our friends add to the fabric of the city and re-write and re-create it.

You don’t need to bring anything — just come. The walks will go in any weather and try to travel light.

I would like to offer sharing of my current research — the brief introduction will be followed by a movement practice incl. a reflection on a body mind experience. Departing from a personal crisis, I dived into a pool of questions regarding (any) future of artistic practices (coming from the context of Eastern European subjectivity) and a formation of community that can resist the polycrisis. These led me to investigate religious practices related to spirit possession, choreo-musical catharsis and female destinies. Following the ethnographic work of Ernesto De Martino and his reflection on apocalypse, I am experimenting with ways in which the self and the environment can be brought into a different kind of relation, one of porous intercommunication and transformation. I would like to share this in the form of a score aimed at “healing” — the word itself I would like to appropriate and contest at once, propose it as something structural, social and systemic rather than individual self-discovery — even if such self-interrogation is a step towards it. I would like to share and reflect collectively on certain aspects of working with spirit while bringing them back into a socialist context, looking at the construction of self and community, role of devotion and the transcendental in formation of resistance practices.

Resonating with the Polish word for ‘bonfire’ (‘ognisko — a place of/for fire’), the live format is a participatory listening experience in which the listeners become part of the work and the sound piece becomes the bonfire at the centre of the gathering. Combining field recordings, storytelling, speculative narratives, research, and music, this sound work reflects on the existing border fluidity of the Podlasie region (the region on the Polish side of the Białowieża Forest), developing images and imaginaries of a borderless future.

Orphids is stable music: circular, repetitive, everchanging and meant to induce various effects on the audience. It convokes visual images by using simple electronic pulsations and fragmented elements and connotations. The idea of shifting elements and connotations was our departure point. We aim to produce a sound that isn’t meant for a particular context.

Every Assembly is a flow of conversations and questions, occasionally interrupted by spontaneous contributions — a gesture, poem, moving practice, track, spell, score or anything else.

Every Assembly departs from a set of questions, images and keywords gathered at the textile collage, present in the space. One is welcome to propose their questions and spontaneous contributions in the course of the day, by stitching them to the textile, or during the assembly. One can also propose roles they would perform during the Assembly, from maintenance of the space-time to taking care of participants.

Each Assembly starts with contributions that feed to the flow of conversations. If there are no spontaneous contributions, the flow of conversation runs further to be interrupted in case spontaneous contributions appear.

Each spontaneous contribution has a limited time that depends on the duration of the Assembly and has to be negotiated among all the participants on the spot.