Author: Tessa
documenta 14: Art, Athens, Austerity…
[Originally published in Runway: Conversations on May 15, 2017] _ In April of this year I found myself at the Athens opening of documenta 14, in terms of prestige and critical anticipation arguably the apex event of the global contemporary art world. I was with my friend Laura, an artist and cultural…
Market for Immaterial Value: Unmaking Debt and Other Fictions
[First published in 2016 in Runway Issue 30: ‘Ecologies’] Everything is jelly now Air, clouds, us The jelly is the material out of which the immaterial world is made and we are moving towards exhaustion[1. Notes by Nefeli Myrodia, edited by Valentina Karga, ‘The gigantic jellyblob: A participatory lecture-performance at Athens…
Collective objects of anxiety: Things encountered and enacted in Paris, Autumn 2015
[Originally published 2016 in un Magazine 10.1: ‘Co-Workers’] It’s early October and I’ve come to Bétonsalon Centre for Art and Research for the opening of Co-Workers: Beyond Disaster. Three months since arriving in Paris, disaster is already decidedly in the air. The United Nations COP21 climate change talks (expected by most to be…
Paris project
In the second half of 2015 I was a resident at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, beginning research for a new project, learning French and helping out at atelier d’architecture autogerée’s R-Urban community resilience project (currently facing down the bulldozers). Here’s the blog for that slowly percolating work, more coming…
Plan Bienen: Sharing (in) the more-than-human city
[Text by Tessa Zettel & Sumugan Sivanesan; originally published 2016 in A Peer Reviewed Journal About_Excessive Research, Vol. 5, Issue 1. DARC (Digital Aesthetics Research Centre), Aarhus University, Denmark, 2016.] o This text circulates in and around a series of honey trades, conducted by the authors as a form of artistic…
Disappearing Bees
Tessa Zettel & Sumugan Sivanesan [A version of this text was published in un Magazine 9.1, June 2015. It is part of an ongoing research project, Plan Bienen, begun by the authors at ZK/U – Zentrum für Kunst and Urbanistik, Berlin, in 2014.] At the annual beekeepers’ fair in Berlin’s Prinzessinnengarten, one Imkerin…
Plan Bienen in un 9.1
Plan Bienen, a project I’ve been developing since last year with Sumugan Sivanesan in Berlin, has led to a text co-written for the forthcoming edition of un Magazine 9.1 – for those of you South of the border it’s being launched in Melbourne on Thurs 11 June, 6pm at Gertrude Contemporary.
Making Time at Artspace
Last month the NSW Visual Arts Fellowship (Emerging) opened at Artspace. As a finalist in the show – which continues until 12 Dec – I’ve been presenting Making Time in various locations in Woolloomooloo, working with the Reg Murphy Activity Club in October, and this Sunday, with the Woolloomooloo Community Garden just around the corner.…
Autonomy/Autarky or ‘Are you sure that’s normal?
[Conversation & photo essay originally published 2013 in Runway Issue 23: ‘Prototype’] In August 2013 Tessa Zettel (TZ) and Sumugan Sivanesan (SS) spent a week in residence at the Summer School for Applied Autonomy, a project by Berlin-based Greek artist Valentina Karga. The Summer School is ‘a research initiative interested in…
Urban Incubator, Belgrade
As a visiting guest of ‘Belgrade – The Toolkit Project‘, part of the Goethe Institute’s Urban Incubator initiative, last week I gave a talk at Savamala’s KM8 about my recent work at Akrai residency in Sicily. The Toolkit Project is led by Marjetica Potrč and her students from the ‘Design…