“Archipelagic Rehearsals”, Katja Aglert (artist and Seedbox co-director).

Coined by poet, philosopher and thinker Édouard Glissant, the term archipelagic thinking is described as, “la pensée de l’essai”, which could be translated as “attemptive thinking”. A principal question Katja Aglert’s work is, how can we use language and at the same time escape reconstructing the order we attempt to transcend? In her artistic responses to this, Katja explores diverse hybrid formats, such as lecture performance, using methods of what she calls rehearsals, implying that something is repeated, yet constantly transforming and in becoming. In this research, Katja strives toward the processual and durational transformation rather than the ’representative’ outcome claiming a final ’truth’ or ’result’. This is tied to her research situated in feminist environmental humanities, and the “more-than-human” discourse, that embraces a displacement of the centralities of the human (Braidotti 2018). Katja’s interests in performance and expanded awareness of the performativity of all matter have emerged as a consequence of her long-term exploration of possibilities for art to materialise ideas beyond the static concept of a world categorically divided by pre-existing boundaries. Here, focus is rather on the non-centred, archipelagic, ongoing relations of interconnectivity, as opposed to separations such as the nature–culture divide. The seminar will experimentally perform and exemplify some of the methods and projects related to the above.
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