Category: WRITING
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…
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…
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…
Being an Account of Rain and the Various Ways to Capture it
Extract from the first printed title by ‘Tilting at Windmills Press‘, an underground publishing house that compiles and distributes anonymously authored pamphlets, each exploring a different encounter with weather in which things are not as they seem There is a little well at the back of the cottages, bound by…
Eating with Intent
Tessa Zettel [Published in Das 500, December 2011] In recent years, much of the work I’ve made in collaboration with Karl Khoe has been eaten. Not by us (the host rarely gets a chance), but by people who’ve been invited into an unusual space of exchange facilitated by the presence…
Michael Stevenson, MCA
Michael Stevenson Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia 6 April – 19 June, 2011 [Highly Commended for the 2011 Frieze Writer’s Prize] There is something serendipitous in Michael Stevenson’s twenty-year retrospective being the final exhibition at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art before it closes for long-awaited and controversial renovations. As the…
Remembering Ahead (Or How I Never Learnt to Play Bridge)
[First published as catalogue text in Kathryn Gray (ed.) Rules of Play, Tin Sheds Gallery, Sydney 2011] o o North: so spades is always the highest, isn’t it? South: no that’s only in the bidding West: you’ll learn by playing, you will. North: let’s just have a crack East: that’s…
Land-escapes: à propos of time, the city and its other
Tessa Zettel & Karl Khoe [First published in Zanny Begg & Lee Stickells (eds.), The Right to the City, 2011, Tin Sheds Gallery, Sydney University] At one end of a darkened room or corridor is a curious construction attached to the wall and spot lit. The object is the reverse…
Futuring Sydney Otherwise
(Par-re-buga or Pa-rai-bu-gah or Par-ri-beu-go – Tomorrow) 1 by Tessa Zettel & Karl Khoe [Essay originally commissioned for the NIEA hothouse and published in HotHouse Report to the City, 2010, (eds.) Jill Bennett and Felicity Fenner, NIEA, UNSW, Sydney; also an extension of a presentation delivered at the Hothouse Symposium, Sydney Opera House, on 27 July, 2010.]…