_Association for Contemporary Art X-OP_
• Risk Change / TOURING RESIDENCIES •

Association X-OP is pleased to announce the beginning of the Touring residencies program, which will take place from November 2019-March 2020. Through an open call the Risk Change jury selected a collaborative project by Un-war Space Lab with dr. Armina Pilav – architect, feminist, university researcher and lecturer, Karla Crnčević – film worker and Servet Cihangiroğlu – intermedia artist, entitled “no-connection:notes on transformation of violence” (working title) to be developed throughout the residency stays and presented in Maribor in March 2020.

The program RC Touring residencies consists of three residency stays (Rijeka/HR, Novi Sad/RS, Żejtun/MT) where the site specific in situ research will be carried out in collaboration with project’s partner institutions, other researchers, interdisciplinary artists, architects, curators and other professionals and lay audience whose situated knowledges can reciprocally help generating new (unruly) knowledges, learning, unlearning processes and understanding of particular research topics in relation to the conceptual frameworks of the Risk Change project. Within these frameworks, the project assumes a transdisciplinary and collaborative approach, using various artistic and academic methods combined with activist strategies.

“The aim of the “no-connection:notes on transformation of violence” (working title) project is to explore and document multiple narratives, social and political meetings, spaces of hospitality and non-hospitality of migrations that relates to Novi Sad, Rijeka and Zejtun’s urban, social context and beyond. The research process will be developed in form of site-specific meetings as a temporary and one-time collective creation of a “network of relations and multiple viewpoints” across different physical and virtual spaces as are parks, national and natural borders (rivers), streets, radio transmissions, video camera observations, sound recording, being together with the others in silence, skype calls, google translate conversations and other ephemeral spaces and media. With this research and ephemeral documenting process we are thinking about taking the necessary distance from the ethno-nationalist political systems, directly, through individual/group and at first glance small acts, but when performed collectively and repeated can make difference and fight the rising fascism in our own neighborhoods, city and finally on the larger scale within and out of the still fortress EUrope. We are recalling here the idea of Giorgio Agamben from the ‘Coming Community’ (1993) discussing the proximity of the bodies, their possible relationships, paraphrasing it, as the new and I would add different use of self and the space in which we are located, that goes beyond the rule of law and state-nation belonging.” (Armina Pilav, Karla Crnčević and Servet Cihangiroğlu)