Start-Up Lectures 2025
Presentation of the new fellows 2025: muSa mattiuzzi, Ren Loren Britton, Felix Kalmenson and Kris Dittel
In the Fellowship year 2025, which will take place from January to June 2025, the invited artists and theorists Ren Loren Britton, Kris Dittel, Felix Kalmenson, and muSa mattiuzzi will dedicate themselves to the political and imaginative dimensions of coalitions among marginalized groups, intimacy and desire as forces with political potential, contested airspaces between technology and nature, and gardens as interfaces of historical narratives and radical societal transformation.
The Fellows will present themselves, their work, and their projects at the Start-Up Lectures 2025, which will take place on Friday, January 24, 2025, at 6:00 p.m. at Künstler*innenhaus Büchsenhausen. The event will be held in English.
For the project Coalition Constellation, Ren Loren Britton will develop a filmic work exploring the collaborative practices of oppressed groups. The project intertwines events and narratives on social justice with planetary perspectives, asking how these storytelling practices can inspire our collective imaginations.
In An Infinite Love Letter: On Desire, Intimacy, and the Politics of Love, Kris Dittel examines how normative and non-normative forms of desire shape social realities and bonds, and explores the role of art in understanding love as a political force.
Felix Kalmenson focuses on Georgia’s flight routes in Under the Auspices, investigating migratory flows of both mechanical and biological agents within international airspace. This hybrid narrative of humans and nature weaves together observations of current disruptions, ancient infrastructures, myths, and speculations.
With the fourth part of Abolition Garden, muSa mattiuzzi continues exploring gardens as archives for stories of oppression and liberation. The installation combines historical narratives, such as the camellias of Brazilian abolitionists, with a vision of gardens as spaces for radical societal renewal.
After the four presentations we cordially invite you to meet and exchange with the Fellows over food and drink.
Fellows 2025:
Ren Loren Britton is a trans*disciplinary artist-designer who holds values that reverberate with trans*feminism, technosciences, radical pedagogy and disability justice. Their work practices with loving accountability towards collaboration, accessibility, trans*gender politics and critical technical praxis. In their conceptually driven practice they tend to a techno-historical storytelling that shifts possibilities in non-linear timelines; opening up space for ways of felt, sounded, storied and aesthetic modes of feeling-knowing-making.
Ren has shared artistic work within multiple institutions including Sonic Acts (Amsterdam), MACBA (Barcelona), Transmediale & HKW & Martin Gropius Bau (Berlin), Constant (Brussels), ALT_CPH Biennale (Copenhagen), Yale School of Art (New Haven), Kunsthalle Osnabrück (Osnabrück), Het Nieuwe Institute & Varia (Rotterdam) & Rupert (Vilnius). Recent academic articles have been published in Catalyst, MATTER, Digital Creativity, and within edited volumes by Bloomsbury Academic, Spector Books and Barbara Budrich.
Working in collaboration with multiple interlocutors, Britton actions MELT with Iz Paehr and Trans*Presents with Rosen Eveleigh, as well as other projects with beloved crossers.
https://lorenbritton.com/
Felix Kalmenson (they) is an artist and filmmaker whose practice navigates film, installation, video and writing. Kalmenson submits to the cadence of a poem, always in flux. They have exhibited internationally including at: Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven), Villa Arson (Nice), M HKA (Antwerp), MAC VAL (Vitry-sur-Seine), Z33 (Hasselt), Kim? CAC (Riga), Nida Art Colony (Nida). Kalmenson’s films have been screened at numerous festivals, including: Mostra São Paulo International Film Festival, Festival du Nouveau Cinéma Montreal, Vancouver International Film Festival, Arkipel, Doclisboa, Sharjah Film Platform, Kasseler Dokfest. The awards won by their films include the Prix George at Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur, in 2020. For the past decade, Kalmenson has collaborated with Rouzbeh Akhbari under the name Pejvak. They were research fellows at Jan van Eyck Academie (2020–21), as well as at M HKA Antwerp, and Van Abbemuseum Eindhoven, under the auspices of L’Internationale (2021‒22).
www.felixkalmenson.com
Kris Dittel (The Netherlands/Slovakia) is a curator, editor and writer. Her practice is driven by long-term research projects that materialize in various forms, including exhibitions, publications, public events, performances, texts, talks, and more.
Her most recent project, Unruly Kinships, included an exhibition, a study group series, and an event program, co-curated with Aneta Rostkowska (Temporary Gallery CCA, Cologne 2022-24). This project explored possibilities of kinship beyond the nuclear family and examined ways we may form relations with/in the world.
With Clem Edwards, Kris Dittel co-edited The Material Kinship Reader (Onomatopee, 2022), which addresses material relations beyond extraction and kinship beyond the nuclear family. Currently, she is co-editing two volumes: Unruly Kinships (Jap Sam Books, 2024) with Aneta Rotskowska, and a children’s book, Life with Fifi (Böks, 2024), with Angelica Falkeling.
Alongside her curatorial and editorial work, Kris Dittel is also an active educator, primarily serving as a research supervisor and writing tutor.
https://krisdittel.com/
muSa michelle mattiuzzi is a performer, visual artist, writer and filmmaker based in Berlin. She works across a range of media and modalities – often with the body and voice – and deals with presence, physicality, and communication. Unspoken contracts, colonial violence, official archives, personal fictions, and plantation memories – these are just a few of the elements that find their way into her work. muSa: “How to perform an official archive is one way of talking about what I do, whether I am making a video, a performative text, a sound work or a performance. Translation is the method I use to prepare for an encounter; it is not just a process of reformulating a message from one language into another. Translation is a labor-intensive, context-dependent process, as well as a form of critical fabulation.”
Location
Künstler*innenhaus Büchsenhausen