Maayan Sheleff and Sarah Spies (Eds.) (Un)Commoning Voices and (Non)Communal Bodies Maayan Sheleff and Sarah Spies (Eds.) (Un)Commoning Voices and (Non)Communal Bodies We would like to thank all the artists, speakers and writers who participated in the project (Un)Commoning Voices & (Non)Communal Bodies, or contributed to this book: Zbyneˇk Baladrán, Željka Blakši´c, Susanne Clausen, Susan Gibb, Marco Godoy, Chto Delat/Dmitry Vilensky, Noam Inbar and Nir Shauloff, Jamila Johnson-Small/Last Yearz Interesting Negro and Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome, Mikhail Karikis, Tali Keren, Florian Malzacher, Public Movement, Michal Oppenheim, Rory Pilgrim, Edgar Schmitz, Jonas Staal, Jack Tan, Nina Wakeford, and Katarina Zdjelar. The curatorial project (Un)Commoning Voices & (Non)Communal Bodies is part of the PhD in Practice of Maayan Sheleff and Sarah Spies. We would like to thank our primary supervisor Prof Dr Dorothee Richter, as well as Professor Susanne Clausen for their generous mentoring and support, and Ronald Kolb for his professional and kind management and care. The project unfolded in two iterations prior to this publication: Part #1: ZHdK, Tanzhaus-Zürich, 2 and 3 November 2018, Part #2: as part of Reading International, UK, in various spaces and locations around the city of Reading: OpenHand OpenSpace, St Laurence Church, Greenham Common Control Tower, and the University of Reading, 23 April – 2 June 2019. Reading International is supported using public funding by the National Lottery through the Arts Council of England’s Ambition for Excellence Programme, the University of Reading and Reading Borough Council. (Un)Commoning Voices & (Non)Communal Bodies in Reading International was supported by Artis exhibition grant. Maayan Sheleff and Sarah Spies (Eds.) (Un)Commoning Voices and (Non)Communal Bodies The PhD in Practice in Curating, a joint doctoral program of the University of Reading and the Zurich University of the Arts, is led by Prof Dr Dorothee Richter, and supported by swissuniversities. Published by ONCURATING.org Proofreading: Stephanie Carwin Set and design: Biotop 3000 Cover Photo: Rory Pilgrim, Software Garden (2018), installation view in (Un)Commoning Voices and (Non)Communal Bodies, exhibition at Open Hand Open Space, Reading International, UK, 2019 © 2021 ONCURATING.org, and the authors. The rights of this publication remain with the author. The publication is openly accessible on the website www.on-curating.org and can be downloaded and shared under the restriction of crediting the author and/or OnCurating.org. The Publisher is granted a non-exclusive right of use with respect to the online publication of the work without the obligation to make use of this right. The Author is entitled to make a PDF version of the work publicly accessible online via her personal website, an institutional server or a suitable subject-based repository once it has appeared in book form. This usage of rights is in compliance to the requirements by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF). ONCURATING.org Pfingstweidstraße 96, 8005 Zurich, Switzerland www.on-curating.org ONCURATING.org is an independent international journal. ISBN: 9798744646660 CONTENT LIST 2 Acknowledgment 4 Imprint 7 Editorial 13 The Voice and the Body in and as a Collective—Commoning and Refusal Maayan Sheleff 58 Unsafe Safety A Conversation Between Florian Malzacher, Jonas Staal, and Maayan Sheleff 81 Curatorial Coda: Postscript on the Assemblage of Voices and Bodies Sarah Spies 88 Practices, Doings, and Actions at If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution and in the Work of Myriam Lefkowitz and Snejanka Mihaylova Susan Gibb 93 Choreographic Composites, On Loan for Now and All Messed Up (London, July 2020) Edgar Schmitz 98 Reading International—Propositions for Developing a Collaborative Art Space in the Intersection Between Art School and Community Susanne Clausen 109 Contributor Biographies EDITORIAL 7 Editorial—(Un)Commoning Voices and (Non)Communal Bodies Maayan Sheleff and Sarah Spies This book is somewhat of a hybrid between a retrospective catalogue and fragments from academic research trajectories that corroborate discrete yet interconnected curatorial perspectives. The initial event series, under the composite title (Un)Commoning Voices and (Non)Communal Bodies, was a project co-curated by us for Reading International, UK (November 2018 -April 2019) that conjoined our research areas, creating various connec- tions between studies of the voice and theories of the body via the politics of performativity. The project was a series of workshops, performances, and an exhibition, interrogating the relationship between participatory artistic practices and protest through the performative scores of collect- ive bodies and voices. The interdisciplinary program was initially inspired by the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, established by open networks of women to protest nuclear weapons near Reading (1981- 2000). The subsequent conceptual underpinning of the series interrog- ated political and social engagement organised around a common “score” and equally, how a score emerges from bodies and voices in communion. These temporary assemblies all engaged different tactics of social and feminist practices and collective embodiment, thereby complicating a collateral understanding of power and agency by highlighting the dis-ease and reparation inherent in collective or communal modes of address and participation. The first phase of the programme started with a series of talks and work- shops in November 2018 led by curator Susan Gibb, curator and dramat- urge Florian Malzacher, artist Dmitry Vilensky/Chto Delat, and choreo- graphers and dancers Last Yearz Interesting Negro and Fernanda Muñoz- Newsome at the Zürich University of the Arts and Tanzhaus Zürich. The second phase took place within Reading International Festival (Reading, UK) between April and June 2019 and included works by Zbyneˇk Baladrán, Željka Blakši´c, Marco Godoy, Mikhail Karikis, Tali Keren, Rory Pilgrim, Jack Tan, and Katarina Zdjelar alongside a newly commissioned “Training” 8 EDITORIAL by Public Movement, workshops led by Noam Inbar, Nir Shauloff, and Michal Oppenheim, and a performance at the Greenham Common Con- trol Tower by Nina Wakeford. The third phase is this publication, which offers a retrospective rendition of the various projects and events, along- side an extended theoretical overview and affiliated critical and creative positions, affording another (re)framing that sanctions a different euphony of voices to address the semblances of cultural and artistic complexities in the aftermath of the viral pandemic. The COVID-19 pandemic struck while we were working on this publica- tion, and the response to it around the globe seemed to enhance and com- plicate many of the issues that we were addressing. Although the situation is rapidly changing, with some countries continuously moving in and out of quarantine, social distancing measures are still present, and the phys- ical collectivity of bodies seems distant. Mass surveillance further silences communities that were already marginalized, and increased border clos- ures in many locations add additional limitations to an already threatened freedom of movement. Far-reaching social protests have spread globally, demonstrating against governmental failures to deal with the crisis and the increasing violence that is inflicted upon vulnerable communities, among many other issues. As we are all attempting to comprehend the constantly changing reality, bodies and voices continue to infiltrate and shift borders, and new alliances are rising. As co-curators of the project (Un)Commoning Voices and (Non)Communal Bodies, we could not have imagined the multitude of meanings engendered by the title in the pre- sumed aftermath of this viral choreography—some related to the forced distancing of bodies and to the further silencing of voices, others to the simultaneous performative enactment of solidarity as a sensorial activist response. Some of the texts in this volume have therefore attempted to respond to this ongoing crisis by acknowledging the absence of the usual socialities and relationships between bodies and voices in the wider global context. We are ultimately interested in how the project series and publication can address this current viral interval from within the different choral dispositions and dispersions of voices and bodies, as the precari- ousness of embodiment—especially certain forms of embodiment—is yet again brought to the fore. Maayan Sheleff ’s “The Voice and the Body in and as a Collective—Com- moning and Refusal,” a chapter from her PhD research, offers a critical overview of the cultural and conceptual construction of commoning with- in socially engaged and participatory arts practice and situates (Un)Com- moning Voices and (Non)Communal Bodies within this context. Brandon LaBelle’s codex for the “mouth” as the political conduit of subjective embod- EDITORIAL 9 iment in Lexicon of the Mouth (2014) provides a prism from which Sheleff reads the various works in the exhibition. She also aligns Claire Bishop’s notion of conflictual participation as enabling the aesthetic and the polit- ical to coexist with Oliver Marchart’s notion of “Conflictual Aesthetics” as a curatorial and artistic practice in order to cultivate a permeable reading of Public Movement’s Emergency Routine (2019) and Tali Keren’s The Great Seal (2016). Finally, she discusses the role of the curator as an organiser and mediator via the motioning