Open Studio

In the first episode, we talk with Davinia Ann Robinson, an artist from London and Rupert resident in January 2021. In this rather intimate conversation over a cup of ceremonial cacao, Davinia shares her stories and artistic methods of working with 'colonial emotions' she has encountered as a Black Female Body, building on her intense relationship with the earth as a living material explored through sculpture, sound, writing and performance. Davinia also reads an excerpt from the new work she developed during the residency, a poem called 'Translucent Permanence'.

Francesca Grilli is a Brussels-based Italian artist whose main practice is performance art; however, she also works with sculpture, film, audio and other media, as well as esoteric practices. The scope of her artistic research is quite broad but the core of her work is focused on different facets of the human condition: age, fragility, family ties, power relations, among others. In her multiple poetic and intimate artworks, she seeks to provoke honest, thoughtful and almost cathartic public reactions through presenting the viewers and participants with profound experiences. These include being put in a dark room together with trained birds of prey or being presented with two pianists of stark age contrast, one of whom is a hundred years old and the other, a child. The power and purity of childhood is also at the centre of her latest work, Sparks (2021), in which she invites the audience for a palm reading session with children as oracles. Francesca Grilli’s project Sparks is presented by Contemporary Locus and supported by the Italian Culture Council.

Ceel Mogami de Haas’s artistic practices incorporate both visual and literary work. In fact, it could be said that his art fuses the two together, as he creates large sculptural inlays that tell poetic stories and draws from literature creating visual scenarios. He uses a variety of media, often playing with their properties and substituting one with another. Thematically, his work explores the core of humanity and animality, reaching through thousands of years towards palaeolithic art and centuries of literature as sources of inspiration.

Miriam Naeh is a London-based multi-disciplinary artist whose work is deeply influenced by human practice of storytelling. In her installations-as-narratives, she combines Middle Eastern mythology, post-humanist thought, humor, and personal experiences. This mixture produces de-centralized experiences, where the viewer is invited to participate in a quasi-mythological story, at the same time creating it and giving it particular meaning. Miriam combines a variety of media in her work and is particularly interested in the binaries of the real versus fictional, natural versus artificial. She invites the viewer to explore this ambiguous world where grotesque meets fragility and laughter meets 'the sad sublime'.

'Open Studios' podcast introduces Rupert’s recent resident and sound artist Judith Hamann. In this episode, Judith shares her recent experience of isolation and moving between different places, and how these have influenced her work with different genres of music and sound. As a result of her long-term studies into sound, different music notions and theories, she has been engaging in some experimental and collaborative projects. These have resulted in such compositions for cello and electronics as Days Collapse and Shaking Studies.

Ittah Yoda is an artist duo consisting of Kai Yoda and Virgile Ittah, living between Berlin, Paris, and Tokyo. Their practice combines traditional processes with digital technology as a vector for cross-cultural creative collaborations, with a focus on deep time, archaic heritages of humanity, and the collective unconscious. In this Open Studio podcast the artists reveal what influences them and why they find collaborations so crucial to their projects such as it was during their workshop with the participants of the Alternative Education Programme at Rupert — concluded in the exhibition No History of Its Own in the framework of Rupert at apiece, opened early August 2021.

In this episode, Tyler Matthew Oyer meditates on their recent music, which will premiere with a live performative show at the end of their two-month-long residency at Rupert. Oyer also elaborates on some of their inspiration and in relation to this, their recent sculptural-collaborative project Pyramid: A Work in Progress referenced the ouevre of iconic sculptor and installation artist Paul Thek known for his environments and ultimately a queer subjectivity.

On this Open Studio episode, we are talking to Julijonas Urbonas, the founder of the Lithuanian Space Agency, which currently presents its project Planet of People at the 17th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia.  Julijonas is an artist, designer, researcher, engineer, lecturer. He is the former Pro-Rector of arts at Vilnius Academy of Arts and the CEO of an amusement park in Klaipeda. For more than a decade, he has been working between critical design, amusement park engineering, performative architecture, choreography, kinetic art and sci-fi and has been developing various critical tools for negotiating gravity: from a killer roller coaster to an artificial planet made entirely of human bodies. As part of his research, he has coined the term  ‘gravitational aesthetics’, which involves manipulating gravity to create experiences that push the body and imagination to the extreme.

Katja Aufleger is a Berlin-based sculptor whose artwork functions as a metaphor or an analogy for talking about a variety of diverse yet interlinked topics, from personal relations to cosmic bodies, social critique and potentiality of a disaster. At the core of her artistic work lies a question of power relations, which function both as a creative and destructive force. Before all, Aufleger’s objects and installations work as a provocation for a viewer. Observing her masterfully-crafted artworks is a double-edged experience, as a beautiful form either directly or indirectly references a series of alternative potentialities, be it a possibility of explosion, chemical reaction, a visual experience of sound or other. This way her works become a multi-layered experience where the viewer’s consciousness and subconsciousness participate in the creative process.

In this episode, Alice Bucknell unfolds some of the notions and ideas recurring in her art and writing practice. The artist has disembarked from a background in visual anthropology towards storytelling and worldbuilding through her own practice and collaborations with other artists. Her recent projects draw connections between architecture, science fiction, non-human intelligence, magic, and hyper-ecology — all of which can be recognised in her newest video Swamp City, recently released in the Venice Architecture Biennale. Here, she elaborates on her methodology as artist and writer, and shares some details of her upcoming collaborative platform New Mystics, which was developed during her stay in Vilnius.

Howard Melnyczuk explores the relations between digital culture and power by seeking means of using the former to confront the latter. His conceptual artistic explorations problematize casual uses of technology, inquiring into the different ways we naturalize the impact that it has on our sense of privacy, world-views and identities. In doing so, he seeks “loopholes” in the neo-liberal digital environment, where the same technologies might be used for creating awareness and resistance against the underlying power structures. Howard’s means of artistic expression vary from photography to installation, to code, and present a critical re-appraisal of the new reality we are all subjected to.

Rupert’s resident, Anna Reutinger, offers insight into her sculpture/installation/performance practice — from the craft practices of her family to a study of neolithic, medieval and contemporary ornamentation of vernacular objects and a series of interviews with makers and historians in Lithuania and beyond. For this podcast episode, the artist suggests craft as an apotropaic force, in which the body, environment and material are given special attention and time. Her stay concluded with a solo-exhibition titled Stuck in the same muck at project space Editorial in Vilnius. 

Vytenis Burokas can be called a conceptual artist who has recently consciously shifted towards a ‘material path’. His somewhat minimalist artistic expression is backed by a substantial body of thought, critique and storytelling. He draws equally from critical theory and classical literature, maneuvering between the ancient materialist philosophy, post-humanist critique and medieval scholasticism. Erudition becomes his artistic tool to debate collectivity, lived space, intellectual heritage and modernity, among many other crucial topics. Yet behind every project also lies a personal story, an alter ego, who adds a personal and even somewhat emotional quality to the author’s intellectual explorations.

In this episode, Rupert's former resident, Sophie Hoyle, speaks to Yates Norton about their work on mental health, anxiety and trauma and how these topics are talked and thought about in Lithuania and other contexts. Sophie Hoyle opened Rupert's 2020 public programmes on care and interdependence with a screening at Editorial. At 20:45, Sophie speaks about alternative DIY sexual healthcare services; an example of this is Gynepunk collective (who offer workshops on using open-source gynaecological kits e.g. open-source microscope, a 3D printed speculum and a centrifuge).  *This episode was recorded in the beginning of 2020. Sophie’s current personal pronouns are they / them. 

In this episode, Rupert’s artist-in-residence Sean-Roy Parker talks about his artistic practice, his approach to the social as an artistic strategy, why he initiates knowledge-based and skill-sharing activities and how he exercises alternative currencies.   Sean-Roy Parker (United Kingdom) is an artist, environmentalist and community cook based in London. His work builds social frameworks inclusive of marginalised voices and alternative currencies like labour exchange to encourage practical, post-capitalist action using abundance and care. During his residency, Sean undertook ‘Slow Yield’, a research project about the lifecycle of materials, complexities of civic responsibility and tackling waste culture through collaborative problem-solving. Alongside scavenger walks, eco-sculpture and fermentation experiments, he was working on new text and sound work in the surrounding terrain. Sean-Roy Parker was an artist-in-residence at Rupert in August 2020.