In particular we will read from Dylan Robinson’s “Hungry listening” which considers listening both from indigenous and settler colonial perspectives, George Lewis’s “improvised music after 1950: afrological and eurological perspectives” and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui “Ch’ixinakax utxiwa: A Reflection on the Practices and Discourses of Decolonization”. On the practical side we will host the Comunidad Sikuris Berlin Group (a andean communitarian music group based in Berlin) and engage in improvisation music practices also with the help of scores (for example by columbian composer Ana Maria Romano)
As always with Gather we want to work critically reflective, at least bilingual (German and English) depending on the participants. The seminar is open to people of all genders (!) and all fields of study.
Questions and registration: gather@udk-berlin.de

Limit of participants: 12

Dates:
October 23rd 17:00 to 20:00
November: 16th and 17th 11:00 to 17:00
January: 25th and 26th 11:00 to 17:00
January 29th 17:00 to 20:00 feedback/presentation possibility

The seminar will take place at the UdK in Berlin, the exact room will be specified in the beginning of the Wintersemester 2024/2025

We will explore binary logic circuits through a practical introduction to handmade electronics from feminist perspectives, to build our own DIY instruments. After one introduction meeting we will meet for two sessions to build electro-acoustic instruments with an introduction to electronic components, reading schematics, prototyping and soldering at Agente Costura Studio (Neukölln).

Part of the seminar is also a workshop led by Falyakon, a multi-instrumentalist and DJ based between Palestine and Berlin. Falyakon breaks the rules of mixing in multi-layered, genre-defying, erratic sets that express what being free truly means. She is controlling time and distorting structure by warping rhythms and morphing tones in a journey filled with distant memories, interruptions, and projections of what is to come. We will end the seminar with a session of artistic, theoretical or practical input from our time together.

We are open to participants from all disciplines and we will work together in German and/or English, depending on the group. If you have any concerns, needs or requests regarding accommodation and accessibility for participation, please feel free to email us in advance.

Wednesday, 5.6.2024, 6pm - 8pm, @ Udk, room tba
Building sessions: 2 Saturdays: 8.6. & 15.6.2024, 11am - 5pm, @ Agente Costura Studio (Neukölln)
Artist workshop: Wednesday, 12.6.2024, 5pm @ Agente Costura Studio (Neukölln)

Marieke Helmke (she/they) is an artist, musician, organizer and social worker currently based in Berlin. In her artistic work she is exploring queer perspectives on care work, listening and perceptions of the bodymind within
sound/music, collective projects, installations and painting. She studied Fine Arts at the UdK Berlin with a minor in Political Science at the FU Berlin after being active in environmental education. Since September 2020 she has been a coordinating member of gather (https://gather-berlin.de/en), a participatory project with a shared interest in art and music from intersectional perspectives and collective non-hierarchical learning. Some of the venues she performed at are ACUD and Prince Charles in Berlin, Titanic-galeria in Turku/Finland and Ground Floor Art Space in Vancouver/ Canada. Moreover she has shown her visual work in one solo and several group exhibitions in Vancouver and Berlin.

Lisa Simpson (she/they) is an artist, performer, craftivist, seamstress, teacher, instrument builder and noise enthusiast. Her performance project Agente Costura, led by a singing sewing machine, is a continuous building site for self playing, oscillating, blinking, touch sensitive, light sensitive, talking, soft, found, stitched, glitched, and hacked instruments, acting and reacting in an ever fluctuating state of chaos. Lisa has a Bachelor degree in Visual Arts from Universidade Tuiuti do Paraná, a Master of Applied Arts degree from Emily Carr University of Art and Design, and is a graduate of the Institute for Art in Context at Universität der Künste Berlin. She has performed extensively on an international level, including Goethe Institut Jakarta, Schneidertempel Istanbul, Akademie der Künste, HKW, The Vancouver Art Gallery, Museum der Fünf Kontinente Munich, the Bimhuis Amsterdam, Curitiba Fashion Week, among others. Lisa currently lives and works in Berlin, and is involved in a range of different projects in collaboration with artists, musicians, and interested audiences.

We identify body parts that are connected to university or school experiences and translate them into sound and text surfaces. Microphones, beats and effects equipment are available for this. Our improvisations focus on free experimentation beyond right and wrong.

Jakob* from the feminist collective gather:
performer, focus on body, voice, digital performance. Part of the band collective "Die Schlangenknaben" - classical music from a queerfeminist perspective.
gather is a participatory project with a shared intersectional interest in art/music and collective low-hierarchy learning.

The workshop is in German spoken language (bilingual friendly)
Room 6
Friday 09.02.2024
15.00-16.00 //17.00-18.00
Location: Medienhaus, UdK Berlin
Grunewaldstr. 2-5 // Room 6
please register and let us know your access needs:
unlearning@udk-berlin.de

17:00 - 20:00, meeting in room 210 on the second floor of the Medienhaus, Grunewaldstr. 2-5, 10823 Berlin.

At the beginning, they will talk about team teaching, which is an integral part of gather's open approach, and about the experience of working as a collective. The group will then offer three stations with different formats for exchange and reflection, which can be freely switched between. All the stations will provide impulses/questions about learning/acquiring knowledge in different ways.

One station is a sound/performance workshop where you can experiment with your own voice. The equipment will be provided.

The next station offers a quiet writing workshop with tables, chairs and a sofa. Here, participants can devote themselves to creative writing, write freely or deal with the questions raised in the discussion room and their own reflections.

The third station is a space for dialogue in a discussion in which three people talk to each other, but these three "discussion chairs" can be reoccupied (based on the fishbowl method) by anyone who wants to have a say at that particular moment.

Participants can engage with the experience of university learning and different approaches, reorient themselves and delve deeper into the topics.

You can switch freely between all three stations, or visit just one or two. Each station has its own room (two of them on the second floor, one on the ground floor; at the beginning we will all meet in room 210, where the discussion room will be afterwards).

The workshop will be held in German and/or English spoken language, with the possibility of whispered translations. Participants should carry out a corona self-test on the day of the workshop and stay away if they have cold symptoms.

All workshop rooms are wheelchair accessible. No previous knowledge is required. Writing materials can be brought along.

If you have any questions or needs, please get in touch, e.g. by email. We can, for example, send photos of the rooms or (after consultation) offer accompaniment during the workshop/specific availability.

Registration is requested at our email, but spontaneous participation is also possible.

In this seminar, we will discuss different practices of sound activism and sound in activism, bringing in both theory and practice with the aim of collectively developing an artistic intervention in public space. We will look into historic and recent examples of sonic activist interactions, underpinned by the concepts of sonic agency, sonic fiction and art for the not yet.

9th November, Kick-Off Meeting, 18-20 Uhr
18th & 19th November, Blockseminar, 11-18 Uhr
10th December, Blockseminar, 11-18 Uhr

A fourth date is TBC and will be clarified together with students on 9. November.

Room 310, UdK Berlin, Bundesallee 1-12, 10719

The seminar will take place in English and German, according to the needs of the participants.

Please register by sending us an email by November 7!

This seminar dealt with the history of radio as a public space for sound experiments and a direct form of social expression; especially with focus on marginalized groups. Which artists have composed for this medium in the past and what is the role of radio art/composition today?

Part of the seminar was also a workshop with radio producer and artist Kate Donovan on December 1st 2022. She presented her practice and work with different radio groups, such as the feminist Shortwave Collective, the garden radio project Datscha Radio and the artistic research project Radio Otherwise. Kate also led a practical session where participants built and experimented with their own mini-radio stations.

Through diverse formats and methods we created collective and artistic situations: Music and language improvisations, sound experiments, reading, discussing, walking, listening, singing karaoke, eating together, arriving together in a different place. Getting to know each other and creating consensual group dynamics played a particularly important role, because for us, a critical feminist practice always means organizing collectively and learning from each other. Our focused gathering allowed us to exchange and present our artistic practice, to network and to give ourselves new impulses for our own creation and reflection. The content of the seminar, such as texts and exercises, was shaped by each participant with their expertise and perspectives and it was open to people of all genders and all fields of study.

Supported by the Berlin Program for the Promotion of Equal Opportunities in Research and Teaching (BCP), the AG Frauenfördergelder of the UdK Berlin and by the Women's and Equal Opportunities Representative of the UdK Berlin

Each artist facilitated an online session including three parts: input (lecture, presentation about their work or research, reading and discussion of texts), listening (exploring and practicing different listening practices and critical listening), and improvisation/ collaboration (group exercises in sound and/or performance). This format allowed the guests to share their experiences, knowledge, skills and creativity from different angles. It also acknowledged the complexity of work which composers, performers and musicians do in their professional lives. Together we exchanged on interdisciplinary approaches to both theoretical and artistic knowledges and explored how they are interconnected.

15th May 2021 Marta Forsberg
https://martaforsberg.com/about/

22nd May 2021 Cedrik Fermont
http://syrphe.com/c-drik.html

12th June 2021 Mmakgosi Kgabi
https://www.mmakgosikgabi.com/

Due to pandemic circumstances, we stayed in Berlin and met online and at the University of the Arts Berlin. The activities of the week were offered and planned by all participants. For planning and self-organization we set up an online platform where we prepared, continuously updated and documented our time together. All participants could communicate there what they could offer: Materials (e.g. recording devices, books, ...), questions/wishes for working on a certain topic or offers for skill-sharing. In this way, a group process developed from the beginning, in which interested people participated and came together according to their interests, skills and capacities. We read together, improvised, discussed, did inspiration exercises and talked about the future of gather (formerly FEM*_MUSIC*_). In a research project we compiled 31 female composers born before 1900. Networking in the seminar also made an EP recording possible and we gained new members.

Preparation meeting: June 29, 2020, 6 p.m. (duration: 2 h), online
Seminar: September 21 - September 25, 2020, online and Berlin

• 21.10.
  Introduction and Conclusion from:
  Eckhardt, Julia und Leen De Graeve: The Second Sound – conversations
  on gender and Music, Gent 2017.
  Feminist Radio Day

• 28.10.
  Carson, Anne: »The Gender of Sound«, in: Glass, Irony and God, herg. von ders., New York 1995.

• 04.11.
  McMullen, Tracy: »Subject, Object, Improv. John Cage, Pauline Oliveros, and Eastern (Western) Philosophy in Music«, in: Critical Studies in Improvisation / Études critiques en Improvisation 6, 2 (2010).

• 11.11.
  Chapter 4 from:
  Ahmed, Sara: Living a Feminist Life, Durham/London 2017.

• 18.11.
  Fure, Ashley: »Reflections on Risk. Pigeonholes, Precarity, and the Zero-Sum Game of Time«, In: Darmstädter Beiträge zur Neuen Musik, Band 24, Mainz 2017.

• 25.11.
  Braidotti, Rosi: »Transformations«, in: Transpositions. Aesthetico- Epistemic Operators in Artistic Research, hrsg. von ders., Leuven 2018.
  Oliveros, Pauline: »And Don’t Call Them ›Lady‹ Composers«, in: The New York Times, 13. September 1970.

Since it was difficult for us to take the time for more complex and bulky texts on our own, we organized a reading seminar: "classics" and current texts of feminist music and art studies and feminist and gender theory from other disciplines and we put them in relation to works and projects from the field of new music, performance and sound art. We also considered how insights from the textual work could be fruitful for our own artistic practice.

In our FEM*_MUSIC*_ Book there is an overview of the texts we have read and discussed and those we would like to have read.

"We understand this model, similar to an architectural design, as a concept that points to the future and at the same time points to voids in the current concert canon just as it does in instrumental pedagogy and academic discussion around music, and the archiving of art and knowledge." (from the FEM*_MUSIC*_ publication)

This plan was implemented in October 2018 by Stellan Veloce, Rosanna Lovell, Evelyn Saylor, Lucien Danzeisen, Lea Aigner and Merle Krafeld, supported by Kirsten Reese, Marc Sabat and Irene Kletschke. Other many and very different plans for further interventions were unfortunately discarded because there was simply not enough capacity (which showed us that it is important to listen to ourselves and not implement everything even if the idea is good). The model was planned in several sessions under the direction of set designer Lea Aigner, who also built the concert hall afterwards- very detailed, lit in different colors and standing on a rotating presentation pedestal. The others worked together to curate concerts and write program booklets.

The concert hall model finally was part of the MEHRLICHT! Music Festival at the end of November 2018 at the UdK and the HfM Hanns Eisler and was also re-played beyond: At the beginning of 2019, it was part of the exhibition "Diva, Popstar, Stranger: Networkings in Female Music History" of the Q-Tutorial "Music and Gender" at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, organized by Elizaveta E. Willert, Klarissa Kuehnapfel, Laura de la Riva, Matthias Feldmann, Nathalie Isabel, Johanna Jahn, Pia Johanna Syrbe, Pia-Christin Wolff, Xiangwan Ma, and Zaher Alkaei.

How do we find what we are not looking for? Why is that interesting? What falls through the cracks? How can non-linguistic material or collections of material be archived and made accessible by artists with their very own systems? Are there other forms of ordering knowledge and material than chronological and alphabetical? Who creates the canon? Who preserves it and why? How can we deconstruct it? How can the legacy of women composers, musicians, and non-binary artists be discovered and made accessible? What other forms of discrimination exist in knowledge translation, who remains in the dark, what can we do about it? How do we find/create artistic forms of transmission of knowledge? How can we compose with the archive?

We discussed these questions in spring and summer 2018. The course was led by students and lecturers from the UdK and the HfM Hanns Eisler: Lucien Danzeisen, Irene Kletschke, Kirsten Reese, Marc Sabat, Evelyn Saylor and Stellan Veloce. Together we also visited the archive of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin and tried to understand Foucault's concept of archive. We engaged with artists who work with archival material or on the topic of archives and talked to Vienna-based composer and sound artist Elisabeth Schimana and composer Bill Dietz who were our guests.