SOPHIE SEITA ࿓𓆰༄ ARTIST TALK + WORKSHOP

࿓𓆰༄ 𝓐𝓻𝓽𝓲𝓼𝓽 𝓽𝓪𝓵𝓴
‘𝓶𝓪𝓴𝓲𝓷𝓰 𝓭𝓮𝓷𝓽𝓼, 𝓶𝓪𝓴𝓲𝓷𝓰 𝓹𝓵𝓲𝓪𝓫𝓵𝓮 / 𝓬𝓻𝓸𝓼𝓼𝓲𝓷𝓰𝓼'
April 16, 2025, 4pm, Kafkárna (Buštěhradská 2, Praha 6)

 

In this artist talk, Visiting Artist and Researcher Sophie Seita will speak about her wide-ranging practice; in particular her performances, lecture performances, collaborative projects, and research around queer ecology, more-than-human collaborations, forgotten feminist histories, experimental pedagogy, and somatic practice. The talk will feature past, present, and possible members of a secret society dedicated to gardening, gossip, and lesbian companionship; it will also encounter ears of corn as an invitation to rethink reproduction and kinship and to see biology as malleable; it will finger or throw some imaginary rocks to ask poetic, geophilosophical and geo-political questions about time, embedded histories, and intimacy; and the talk will also get messy with compost as material and metaphor for intergenerational queer learning and cross-species collaboration—with an eye to how these materials, languages, and practices might pivot our understanding of eco-literacy, a new project the artist is currently developing with Youngsook Choi.

 

࿓𓆰༄ 𝓦𝓸𝓻𝓴𝓼𝓱𝓸𝓹
‘𝓹𝓵𝓪𝓷𝓽-𝓵𝓲𝓴𝓮, 𝔀𝓪𝓿𝓮-𝓵𝓲𝓴𝓮, 𝓻𝓸𝓬𝓴-𝓵𝓲𝓴𝓮: 𝓼𝓸𝓶𝓮
𝓶𝓮𝓼𝓼𝔂 𝓹𝓻𝓸𝓹𝓸𝓼𝓪𝓵𝓼 𝓯𝓸𝓻 𝓱. 𝓪𝓷𝓭𝓼-𝓸𝓷 𝓵𝓲𝓼𝓽𝓮𝓷𝓲𝓷𝓰‘
April 17, 2025, 10am–1pm, Kafkárna (Buštěhradská 2, Praha 6)

! registration required – please fill the form: https://1url.cz/FJL5z

 

How do we listen with our hands? Do our feet have ears or lungs? Can a leaf or stalk or pebble become an extension of our body? This workshop aspires to test out some poetic and performative propositions in situ on the grounds of Kafkarna, responding to its specific spatial, temporal, emotional weather. We will follow some simple listening prompts and performance scores as forms of attunement to our own bodies, each other, and the environment we find ourselves in, and we will then develop our own. We will perform ‘thinking-in-movement’ (Maxine Sheets-Johnstone); we will gather materials and consider gathering a form of collective authorship (as Mindy Seu proposes), and we will develop a new lexicon for the landscapes (both inside and outside) thus gathered. The workshop will draw on insights from sensory ethnography, queer studies, disability studies, and performance studies, emphasising touch, play, curiosity, not-knowing, and situated knowledge.

 

࿓𓆰༄  𝓢𝓸𝓹𝓱𝓲𝓮 𝓢𝓮𝓲𝓽𝓪 / 𝓑𝓲𝓸

 

For about a decade, Sophie Seita has worked with language as a sensuous, sculptural, and sonic material, translated and moulded into live performances, performative objects, publications, sound pieces, drawings, and textiles. Choreographed by language, her work often explores the sensorial pleasure of wild forms, new forms of embodiment, queer grammars of relationality, and the operations of power that reside within the materials and mediums we work with. Based in London, she often works internationally and collaboratively, most recently in the form of an alternative learning gathering on regenerating our agreement with water in Xochimilco, Mexico City, hosted by Ruta del Castor, with her queer-feminist project The Hildegard von Bingen Society for Gardening Companions, rooted in speculative approaches to archiving and community-oriented knowledge-sharing around ecology. She teaches in the Art Department at Goldsmiths, University of London, and recently held residencies at Akademie der Künste (Berlin), Studio Voltaire (London), and Brown University (Providence, Rhode Island).

 

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