We don't want to be stars (but parts of constellations)

Zondag 1 juni

We don't want to be stars
(but parts of constellations)

Movie Night

As part of the program “We don’t want to be stars (but parts of constellations)” Suns and Stars and Cavia join in an equivocal translational movie night, presenting short movies not as a plurality of perspectives, but as a multiplicity of worlds, “to communicate by differences, instead of presuming a univocality”. The night shall be filled with murmurings of restless bodies, earth’s growls, and sonic textures.

The program begins at 17:00 with:

Reading Group

Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's The Relative Native: Essays on Indigenous Conceptual Worlds, reading parts of the chapters OF PIGS AND BODIES and BODIES AND SOULS.

“To translate is to situate oneself in the space of the equivocation and to dwell there … it is to communicate by differences, instead of silencing the Other by presuming a univocality—the essential similarity—between what the Other and We are saying.” (fragment of The Relative Native: Essays on Indigenous Conceptual Worlds, page 63)

If you would like to receive the texts to be read in advance, please send an email to info@sunsandstars.nl, Yet you are very welcome to join the reading group and meet the writing of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro for the first time.

Archipelago of Earthen Bones — To Bunya

Tracing a path along the remnants of the ancient Gondwana landmass in the central eastern ranges of Australia, the film Archipelago of Earthen Bones — To Bunya animates “alternative cartographies of time” in which we become part of moments of a living planet – engulfed by the orange fiery tides of volcanic flares of the Hunga-Tonga-Hunga-Ha'apai eruption – sometimes in its armpits, sometimes on its crest, sometimes stretched out, laying on the beach, as time folds in on itself.

We acknowledge the Turrbal, Yuggera, Jinibara, Gubbi Gubbi, Wakka Wakka, Jarowair, Barrumgum, Quandamooka and Butchulla Peoples as the Traditional Custodians of the lands where Archipelago of Earthen Bones — To Bunya was filmed. We pay our respects to Elders past, present and emerging.

Malena Szlam is an artist and filmmaker born and raised in Chile to Argentinian parents, and who now lives in Montréal/Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang. Attentive to how geopolitics are intertwined with natural phenomena—from moon’s orbital phases to the sweeping high-plateau of central Andes—her films, installations, and photographs explore embodied perception and the affective dimensions of analogue film processes. Her recent projects focus on geology, earth sciences, and volcanology. She has collaborated with composers and scientists, including Lawrence English, Clive Oppenheimer, and Susannah Buchan to create soundscapes that emanate from deep within the earth’s crust, the ocean, and the atmosphere.

Lawrence English is an Australian artist, composer, and curator based in Brisbane. Working across an array of aesthetic investigations, English’s work explores the politics of perception and prompts questions of field, agency, and memory. English utilises a variety of approaches including visceral live performance and site-specific installation to create work that invites audiences to consider their relationship to listening, place and embodiment. As a curator, English has been actively involved in the development and increased recognition of sound as an art form within Australia, through his record label and multi- arts organization Room40.

Hành Trình Của Một Cục đất
(Journey Of A Piece Of Soil)

Trương Công Tùng | 2013 | Vietnam | HD | 33’ | no dialogue

The reverberations of an alarming summon stir a journey through ancestral lands and fallen/fairy tale cities, with indistinct traces of life and death – a ghost, a ghost, a ghost. A ghost wanders from East to West, from South to North. A ghost is howling. Carried between elsewhere or elsewhen, an unearthed piece of soil is engaged in a ritualized relationship with its carrier, a bond that unfolds intricate equivocal relationality because it is an object that inhabits multiplicity. Hành Trình Của Một Cục đất is a present day non-focal narrative of a wandering, a Journey of a Piece of Soil disclosing “something nonevident about the world”, hinting at “a plane of immanence filled with intensities”.

“My sincere thanks to the peoples, the soils, the rocks, the trees, the insects, the souls that worked with me in this film.” (Hành Trình Của Một Cục đất)

Trương Công Tùng grew up in Dak Lak, Vietnam's Central Highlands, among diverse ethnic communities. His works, amalgamating multiple fields of research, reflect personal contemplations on the cultural and geopolitical shifts pushed by modernization through the evolving ecology, beliefs, and mythology of Vietnam. Trương is a member of Art Labor (formed in 2012), a collective that bridges visual art and social/life sciences to develop alternative, informal knowledge through artistic and cultural activities in diverse public situations and locations.

Suns and Stars are a nomadic art space and a platform for relational art practices and open-ended research. By nourishing non-prescriptive, process-based and cross-disciplinary alliances, we act as a temporary community in which artists and audiences codetermine which track Suns and Stars are heading for. Suns and Stars depart from “a notion of the common that focuses not on identity but on the shared resources and tactics of collective labour.” We seek to elucidate processes within artistic practices, and how these practices can become social spaces where alternative potentialities can be conceived and shaped.

The program “We don’t want to be stars (but parts of constellations)” (2023-2026) departs from the concept of being-in-common, in which the common is a process of becoming-in-common. Together with Eesti Kaasaegse Kunsti Muuseum and Faculty of things that can’t be learned, we develop(ed) communal and relational artistic program which takes place in Skopje, Amsterdam, and Tallinn.

Zondag 1 juni