The two-year investigation aims to achieve a higher sensibility towards socio-political conditions, interpersonal and intrapersonal connections, and the act of becoming fearless while remaining soft and permeable. The work is a container, encyclopedia, or archive for the excavation of ancient therapies, the queering of contemporary ones, a re-appropriating, a remixing, and a reformulating of therapies in order to care, to share, to disconnect. This expansive investigation includes intimate artist-to-artist overnight sessions in the Botanic Garden VU Amsterdam, a Useless Artist Disease , meditations for Wolfgang Schäuble, the master key to De Appel Arts Centre, a hacked heart-break, and a personal narrative about a journey into the world of healing.
CHRYPTOCHROMATIC JETLAG
#artist-curator-collaborator
go to project site
Press Release:
Intimate artist overnight sessions explore the urgency of a Botanical Garden for a city.
Artist Vera Hofmann hosts five 1x1 overnight sessions with five international artists in the Hortus Botanicus VU Amsterdam. In her project titled “Chryptochromatic Jetlag” Vera Hofmann invites another artist each time to spend a full night with her in the botanical garden. The two artists will lock themselves in the Hortus after having been handed out the access all areas key. The project is an intimate experimental procedure, a 12 hour immersion into this mystical man-made natural environment. The unusual nightly set-up enhances the issues the artists would like to address, that of agency, cohabitation, migration, intimacy, connectivity, spirituality, detachment and the urge for trouble-making.
Taking on an artist-curator position, Vera Hofmann selected five very different artists to collaboratively explore diverse angles of communication, meaning and aesthetic conception. The artists will talk to psychoactive plants, build a musical instrument, explore stages of violence and unification and much more. Each night is documented in various media as video, text, performance, music and photography and will be made accessible to the public after the sessions.
With these overnight interventions the project aims to investigate the future role of natural environments like that of a Botanical Garden for people living in cities. Finding other meanings through artistic action can open up new possibilities to inform the ongoing discourse of city-planners, botanists, scientists, businesses and the general audience.
The night sessions will take place in May and June of 2015.
Initiator:
Vera Hofmann, visual arts, DE, verahofmann.de
The collaborating artists are:
Josefin Arnell, time-based media, SE, josefinarnell.se
Elisa Batti, music and composition, IT, elisabatti.com
Ruchama Noorda, visual arts & performance, NL, ruchama.com
Sabine Schründer, photography, DE, sabine-schruender.de
Cathalijne Smulders, visual arts & performance, NL, cathalijnesmulders.blogspot.de
Ongoing insight to the project, photos, texts and profiles of the involved artists can be found here:
chryptochromaticjetlag.tumblr.com/
Ruins of a testing site, broken neon lamps in rows, electricity posts, overgrown in-ground buckets turn the place into a mine field.My body between the bamboos Across the little canal forklifts driving pallets around in twilight, industry halls and orange spotlights.My knees, everything is moving fucking trembling The noises of the life-saving vents and heaters from the Botanic Garden fade out, suburbia sweeps in.I put on some filthy clothes from the gardener, my bare feet in sweaty black rubber boots, the electric feeling of a polyester sweater. I don’t like the island, but I have to follow. It’s too frightening to be alone. Wilderness begins where the city rises.This has nothing to do with nature.
It is a garden, I should not expect transcendence.I am restless Arrowshaped manifestations of human superiority.my head is pounding The carelessness of the creator.I am afraid She starts running. That helped her to get rid of the fear, she said afterwards.I run I hear her running towards me in the darkness. I get so afraid.We go back to the dark green plant room It is not the plants themselves that imply this fakeness and cruelty. It is the human interaction with it. It is how they are placed and how I behave amongst them.I feel alienated Even though I have read that they don’t like to be touched, that they might stop growing from touching them too much. But I don’t care because they are presented as if can touch them, use them.I lay down, wrapped in a blanket that is too rough. They are objectified, standing here in their pots, unable to dig their roots in the ground, unable to communicate with each other through their mycelia.We make a story about he fake tropical security lady Ungrounded like me.I feel separated from my words At some point of the night she says: I feel the same as if I would be in a shopping mall.
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