Assembling Practices of Resonance and Dispersal

The event opens with a site-specific listening session at the Höttinger Steinbruch, followed by a return walk to the Kunstpavillon for an artist talk and discussion with Tammy Langtry and Talya Lubinsky, moderated by Kandis Friesen.

At the Höttinger Quarry, Lubinsky will present two audio pieces, developed in collaboration with Langtry in the framework of their long-term artistic research project, Sedimenting Stories. The project is centred around the Strand Street Quarry, situated at the edge of Table Mountain in Cape Town, South Africa. Here, stone was mined by enslaved people since the beginning of slavery in the Dutch Cape Colony in 1653. With these stones, the city’s colonial buildings were constructed and cobblestone roads were paved. 

We begin at the Höttinger quarry as a reference to the quarry as a resonant site, the emptied contents of which have been used to build durable and monumental forms. No longer concentrated in one easily identifiable location, the dispersed stones allude to the ways in which histories and their attendant presents are embedded in the fabric of everyday life. Together, the listening session and talk propose the Strand Street Quarry not only as a historically significant site, but as a conceptual framework for thinking through the extraction of geological matter and human labour. The absence of the quarry is a hole that can hold, a container for multiple circulating stories, songs, and presences. 

This invitation extends from Kandis Friesen’s current fellowship research project Karaganda, Karaganda, anchored in the slow dissolution of Karlag, a massive former Soviet gulag (forced labour camp) in central Kazakhstan. Opened in 1931 as a coal mining complex, it was quietly closed in 1959 and subsumed into daily life, its structures remaining in partial but practical ruins. Friesen approaches the site as an expansive structure of memory, focused on the ways in which land, architecture, and sound hold and transmit historical memory: through muted voids and absences, grafted narratives and structures, slow pilings and gaping holes.

In both projects, two specific sites of violent extraction are conceptualised as frameworks for thinking through, and with, notions of resonance and dispersal. Through assembly and gathering, each site is approached as a space that holds and transmits sonic and historical resonances. In coming together, we are attuned to the dispersal of both materials and narratives that circulate and constitute the worlds in which we live.

Order of event:

15:00 Meeting at Höttinger quarry

15:10 – 15:50 Listening session with Kandis Friesen & Talya Lubinsky

16:00 – 16:30 walk to Kunstpavillon

16:30 – 17:00 Break & finger food

17:00 – 18:15 Conversation with Tammy Langtry & Talya Lubinsky (hybrid)

 

Accessibility Höttinger quarry

Unfortunately, the quarry is not wheelchair accessible.

Accessibility Kunstpavillon

The conversation is hybrid and will be held in English. You can either attend in person at the Kunstpavillon or follow the event online via Zoom. The Kunstpavillon is accessible via a lift (please use the bell next to the stairs). An accessible, wheelchair-friendly restroom is available inside the Kunstpavillon. To participate via Zoom, please send an email with the subject line “Zoom Link: Kandis” to office@buchsenhausen.at. You will receive the Zoom link via email approximately one hour before the event begins.

 

Tammy Langtry is an independent curator, cultural producer and researcher based in South Africa. A graduate of the University of the Witwatersrand, her curatorial research explores urban, spatial and familial histories in Southern Africa, with particular interest in how artistic practice engages archives, memory and place. Her work develops collaborative, research-led projects with artists that examine critical histories in the making of Southern African cities. Langtry has held fellowships with the Àsìkò Fellowship in Cairo (2025) and the Creative Knowledge Resource (CKR) research fellowship (2024-2025). She is Managing Editor of Ellipses Journal for Creative Research and a sessional lecturer in the Fine Art Department at the University of the Witwatersrand, where she teaches Professional Practice: Ecologies of Practice. 

Talya Lubinsky is an artist and organiser from Johannesburg, currently based in Berlin. Her recent artistic practice investigates the poetic and material qualities of elemental matter as aggregates to bring into conversation seemingly disparate geographic and temporal contexts. Solo exhibitions include Melting Stone, Flossenbürg Concentration Camp Memorial, Flossenbürg (2022). Marble Dust, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2020), Floating Bodies, Iwalewahaus, Bayreuth, (2017) and If we burn, there is ash, Wits Anthropology Museum, Johannesburg (2016). Lubinsky received an MFA with distinction from University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. She is a PhD candidate at the University of the Western Cape, in the Department of History.