Not Quite King, Not Quite Fish
held at SODAS 2123, Vilnius, Lithuania
2023.11.08 — 2023.11.11
Photos by Martyna Kairaitytė
The symposium Not Quite King, Not Quite Fish was a three-day international event for practitioners of fine arts, cinema, dance, architecture and design. Hosted by current doctoral candidates of the Vilnius Art Academy and the Lithuanian Music and Theatre Academy, the event employed the disciplinary diversity of practice-based artistic research. In this broad field, the real and fictive expectations of art making and research collide and fold into each other. With contributors from all over the world, the three-day program explored durational and performative forms of presentation and collective experimentation as research.
Presenters included: Dr. Audronė Žukauskaitė, Paulina Pukytė, Ben Spatz, Yen Chun Lin, Joseph Gold Hendel, Nina Liebenberg, Dániel Máté, Ulvi Haagensen, Dr. Maren Witte, Hannah Foley, Dr Madeleine Trigg, Fadwa Bouziane, Alessio Alonne and Sei Iturriaga Sauco, Kateřina Olivová, Janina Hoth, Darren O’Brien, Jürgen Buchinger, Caitlin Magda Shepherd, Katharina Swoboda, Eglė Grėbliauskaitė, Ruth Anderwald + Leonhard Grond and Leo Hosp, Coby-Rae Crosbie, Elise Adamsrød, George Finley Ramsey, Maija Demitere, Jasper Llewellyn and Daniel S. Evans, Polina Golovátina-Mora, Lydia Debeer, Arnas Anskaitis, Pedro Florencio, Aistė Ambrazevičiūtė.
Initially the program, curated by doctoral students, included four thematic streams. The Architecture, Art, Bureaucracy cluster treated bureaucracy as a space of intervention. Flying Potatoes sought to refuse commodification. Microscopic Gestures explored the critical potential of cinema when performed with the ongoing vitality of the process itself. Empathy and Ecology examined ideas of co-worlding and tacitly shared artworks that collaboratively emerged with(in) ecological systems. The event was designed to facilitate the conversation between practitioners, practices, approaches and beliefs about disciplinarity, research and the promise of communicating artworks as epistemic things.
Organisers of the symposium Jan Glöckner, Gabriele Gervickaite, Sophie Durand, Povilas Marozas, Migle Krizinauskaite-Bernotiene, Greta Grineviciute, Rasa Janciauskaite, and Miklós Ambrózy began to refer affectionately to the symposium as beast, however with time they came to see this beast as a single “epistemic” event that was negotiated materially over several months.
Seven core questions framed the symposium and anchored the discussion throughout the event.
These questions were:
What atmosphere do you do research/art in?
How can we capture, express and be present with the ebb and flow of experimentation?
How might we dismantle hierarchies of authorship, participation and experiencing?
How do you share your practice?
How do you end?
How do you trace knowledge in practice / research?
What relationships between idea, technique, medium and method exist in ………………..?
Beginning with the ethos that looking at the ways other people work will always bring value to one's own work and that nothing is ever done alone or for the first time, “Not Quite King, Not Quite Fish’ opened with sharing the organising committee’s hopes for the vibe of the symposium.
On the occasion of the symposium two exhibitions were presented:
The Martini Effect
Unlike in a black box cinema, in this exhibition the viewer was configuring the loop, together with the information provided. Up and down-gone. Nothing but the linearity of the video file. Knowledge in moving images is situated twice, three times, four times, ad infinitum. ‘The Martini Effect’ featured moving image works by Pedro Florêncio, Lydia Debar, Kipras Dubauskas, Darren O’Brien, Migle Krizinauskaitė-Bernotienė, Sophie Durand, Greta Grineviciute, Madaleine Trigg, Miklós Ambrózy, Rasa Jančiauskaitė. Curated by by Sophie Durand and Miklós Ambrózy with the support of the Why Cut When You Can Fade collective (Greta Grinevičiutė, Migle Krizinauskaitė-Bernotienė, Miklós Ambrózy)
The Long Table
Akin to to places where most of our day-to-day work is carried out, the exhibition The Long Table accommodates (and in this instance - exhibits) thinking, as well as writing and making, tools, materials, glue and tape, samples, failures, successes, joys of exploration and frustrations of lack of convincing results.
Featuring material musings by Indrė Liškauskaitė, Simona Rukuižaitė, Migle Krizinauskaitė-Bernotienė, Miklós Ambrózy, Aistė Ambrazevičiūtė, Marta Frėjutė, Justina Semčenkaitė, Sophie Durand, Greta Grinevičiūtė, Gerda Liudvinavičiūtė, Rasa Jančiauskaitė, Ulvi Haagensen and Alaya Ang, Adomas Žudys.
Blank spaces between works became an invitation for symposium participants to contribute to this exhibition throughout the event.
This exhibition was organised by Sophie Durand and Povilas Marozas
coming together sessions
The symposium was punctuated by daily ‘coming together' sessions - originally named ‘epistemic decompression’ these sessions were designed by VDA and LMTA doctoral candidates to allow different ways of sensing to come to the fore, eschewing traditional logocentric modes oftentimes favoured in the academic institution. These included drawing led by Rasa Jančiauskaitė, movement and spatial exploration with Miklós Ambrózy and zine making with Sophie Durand.
The visual identity design was a collective process. Prior to the symposium Rasa Jančiauskaitė led a drawing session with fellow PhD candidates in Vilnius Academy of Arts, during which many different fish, birds and kings were born. From this a zine designed to be held onto and transformed was designed for participants to use throughout the symposium.
More than just a beast (but still Not Quite King, Not Quite Fish), the symposium was, and continues to be, an organism. Participants all encountered a collection of variables (a multitude of materialities and other others) and held onto these experiences and observations through different means, all now having ownership on how this reflection will continue in the future.
Crafted decoration throughout the SODAS 2123 cultural centre became a set of material elements that soaked into the atmosphere that the space participants, organisers and passers were temporarily inhabiting. This made it clear that the symposium was environmental, ‘Not Quite King, Not Quite Fish’ was its own ecology.
In the spirit of ongoingness and not to end days spent together with conclusions but rather more questions for the symposium participants:
-Could you please gather your collected material from the past days?
-How would you describe the experience of the symposium to a loved one or dear colleague?
-If there is anything you’d like to tell them but don’t have the words or material memories for? Can we find this within our collective resources so you can somehow archive it?
-What has this symposium given you that you can take forward in your own research?
-What ways of doing things shared by other presenters could be transformed within the context of your own work in new and generous ways?
-Have you noticed any strategies and patterns of thinking that were pre-existing within your work and world view? If you’ve noticed a shift in them, what forces are pressing on them to make this happen?
