Underground and Improvisation. Alternative Music and Art after 1968

The symposium focuses on central questions of alternative artistic strategies that arise from the juxtaposition of and the relationship between underground and improvisation, East and West: What is the term "underground" understood to mean in the West? How is it understood in the East? And who defines themselves how? In what way is improvisation political, and which political aspects of improvisation are relevant today? How were the dividing lines and the blurring of boundaries between the arts discussed in the East and in the West? What remained and what made history? How is the current drift of some representatives of the alternative art scene to the right to be interpreted?

I: Politics of Improvisation

9:30 am
Introduction: Angela Lammert

10 am
Total Music Now: Jazz Experimentalism in Intercultural Perspective
Lecture with discussion: Harald Kisiedu
Moderation: Johannes Odenthal
This talk is concerned with the experiences and musical practices of critically important multi-reedist Peter Brötzmann. His intercultural engagement with black musical knowledge and his frequent collaborations with Afro-diasporic musicians represent a challenge to notions of exceptionalism that have informed the emancipation narrative surrounding European jazz. Brötzmann's experiences highlight that the convergence between European and African American systems of musical knowledge was much more prevalent than has often been acknowledged.
In English

II: What was "Underground" in Eastern and Western Europe?

11:30 am
Jan Ságl, Alena Ságlová-Veit
Moderation: Angela Lammert
Jan Ságl, who documented the Czech underground in photographs, did not agree with the accession to an oppositional political structure, as demanded by Ivan Jirous, artistic director of the band The Plastic People of the Universe, and brother of his wife, the artist Zorka Ságlovà. His photographs, which he hid after some of the band members were arrested in 1976, had long been considered lost and were rediscovered only six years ago.
In German

12:30 pm
Katalin Ladik, David Crowley, Emese Kürti
Moderation: Angela Lammert
Katalin Ladik used her naked body as a medium of rebellion and subversion. She achieved a position of proactive resistance provoking directly the masculine dominance and becoming an anti-normative, aesthetically unclassifiable rule breaker through her "otherness", through the performative extension of her poetry, exploring the limits of both language and body language. She is a member of contemporary marginal art. Her voco-visual improvisations, the fleshiness of her sound creation, her vital-erotic gests made her one of the most radical and most vulnerable female artists in the West of the East, in former Yugoslavia.
In English

3 pm
Piotr Rypson, Daniel Muzyczuk, Mara Traumane
Piotr Rypson, today deputy director of the Warsaw National Museum, was in the 1970s a pioneer of the Polish "underground" and activist between art and punk. He began collaborating with the Remont Gallery in 1978, then run by Henryk Gajewski, and edited the gallery's magazine Post. The curator Daniel Muzyczuk and the art historian Mara Traumane will discuss with him what kind of "underground" experiences can be transferred between past and present.
In English

4 pm
Experimentalfilm in Ost und West
Birgit Hein, Claus Löser, Helge Leiberg
Moderation: Cornelia Klauß
In Western Europe, the experimental film movement began under the influence of the New American Cinema in the mid-1960s. By the beginning of the 1970s, experimental filmmakers from East and West were already in touch with each other, for example at the Łódź Film Festival in 1973 or through the inclusion of individual positions such as that of Joseph Robakowski in the 1977 "documenta 6" exhibition. However, the Super 8 films of the 1980s, mostly recorded with live soundtracks, had different characteristics to the films made in the West. What they did have in common was the potential to protest against the prevailing cinematic images; propaganda on the one hand, mainstream cinema on the other. Key figures in this discussion will look back from today's perspective and ask what has remained?
In German

III: Free Music Production and Women

5:30 pm
Joëlle Léandre
Moderation: Markus Müller
In Western Europe, the experimental film movement began under the influence of the New American Cinema in the mid-1960s. By the beginning of the 1970s, experimental filmmakers from East and West were already in touch with each other, for example at the Łódź Film Festival in 1973 or through the inclusion of individual positions such as that of Joseph Robakowski in the 1977 "documenta 6" exhibition. However, the Super 8 films of the 1980s, mostly recorded with live soundtracks, had different characteristics to the films made in the West. What they did have in common was the potential to protest against the prevailing cinematic images; propaganda on the one hand, mainstream cinema on the other. Key figures in this discussion will look back from today's perspective and ask what has remained?
In English

6:30 pm
Joëlle Léandre (double-bass)

8 pm
HEARTH
Kaja Draksler (piano)
Susana Santos Silva (trumpet)
Mette Rasmussen (alto saxophone)
Ada Rave (tenor saxophone)
€ 13/7

10 pm
Deconstruction
Katalin Ladik
Natalia Pschenitschnikova (voice)
Claudius von Wrochem (violoncello, voice)
Compositions by Mátyás Wettl, Milan Knížák, Szymon Stanisław Strzelec, Jan Ságl, Georgy Dorokhov
€ 9/6

Programme on 19 Apr and 21 Apr 2018.