Following the principal filming of Oriana at EMPAC and in Puerto Rico, and the production of a score by Brazilian ensemble Rakta, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz will be back in residence in the Theater to work on the post-production of her feature-length moving image work. 

Oriana entwines the linguistic structure of Monique Wittig’s iconic 1969 feminist novel Les Guérillères with the material and conceptual ground of the Caribbean. It visualizes the ecstatic potential of a near-future, non-binary world order through the struggles of its protagonists to imagine a new sort of sensorium—an autonomous language of post-colonial and post-patriarchal society.

Animated by a shifting cast of collaborators from music, performance, art, and poetry, Oriana is being produced in Puerto Rico and at EMPAC, where the center’s theatrical infrastructure forms the backdrop to an iterative and recursive moving image work.

EMPAC building tours are offered throughout the fall season. In October, a Director’s Tour will be led by Johannes Goebel; in November, a Technology Tour will be led by Lead Video Engineer Eric Brucker; and in December, the building tour will be led by Front of House Manager Avery Stempel.  

OCTOBER 12 with Director Johannes Goebel

Join EMPAC’s founding director Johannes Goebel for a tour of the building (and overview of the program) that he helped realize and has led through EMPAC’s first 11 years. Goebel will take visitors through the EMPAC building with an eye and an ear to the “human-scale” functions he strove to achieve in taking the project from a lofty vision to one of the world’s most advanced media centers.

NOVEMBER 2 with Lead Video Engineer Eric Brucker

From 3D film productions to green-screen animations, flying cameras, and panoramic projection environments, EMPAC is a lush visual world. This tour focuses on EMPAC as a film- production facility and high-resolution screening venue.

DECEMBER 7 with Front of House Manager Avery Stempel

A general overview of the EMPAC building, with focus on its architectural highlights and programmatic capabilities, this tour will take guests through all four EMPAC venues, audio and video recording facilities, and the many spaces in between. 

Join EMPAC’s curators for a tour of the building and a behind-the-scenes look at artist Beatriz Santiago Muñoz’s new production. Santiago Muñoz is in residence to film an ensemble of performers in Studio 1 and the Concert Hall for an EMPAC-commissioned video installation that will be premiered in fall 2020.

Sarah Hennies performs an evening of her work for solo percussion and electronics featuring her works Falsetto and Fleas. Through slowly evolving textures, Hennies’ music opens up a space where small changes become events. Her music often explores the act of performance: whether through showing the amount of energy it takes to maintain a constant appearance in front of others, the exhaustion of maintaining a sound once it has been established, or the vulnerability of having one’s every small move amplified through observation.

Working with both traditional orchestral percussion instruments and found objects, Hennies challenges rigid definitions by relating the structure of her work to themes of queer and trans identity, love and intimacy. Hennies has mentioned in interviews that percussionsts are unique in that they don’t have a specific instrument. Their identity and role changes constantly with the context of different pieces and even within a single piece. The standard definition of a musician identified by their instrument does not hold.

In Hennies’ performance, listeners and performers are encouraged to enter a shared space that reflects everyday life. Hennies’ music begins to expose the exhaustion and virtuosity of maintaining even simple actions. A gentle sound, such as the ringing of a small bell, is sustained beyond virtuosity to expose the exhaustion of maintaining even simple actions that are thought of as societal norms. As these sounds are challenged by the addition of other actions, her performance becomes more and more mesmerizing: an act of determination.

In this talk, Zackery Belanger will present a new perspective on acoustic architecture and the shapes of spaces – ideas that grew out of innovative approaches in the design and construction of EMPAC’s studios and venues.

The design of EMPAC challenged its acoustics consultants to venture into unknown territory. The results turned out to be excellent, which is a rare occurrence with radical new approaches in acoustics. The fabric acoustic ceiling throughout the concert hall is the only ceiling of such light material in the world, and the acoustic panels covering the walls of the two large studios work miraculously without a scientific explanation of the acoustic perception experienced by artists, engineers, and audiences. This talk will be presented in Studio 2 allowing for an auditory experience of its design.

Belanger was a member of EMPAC’s acoustic design team with Kirkegaard Associates. In collaboration with Grimshaw Architects he mathematically designed and modeled the panels for the studios. After the completion of EMPAC, he stepped back from consulting and enrolled in the Program in Architectural Acoustics in Rensselaer’s School of Architecture. There, and as a Researcher-in-Residence at EMPAC, he collaborated with EMPAC Director Johannes Goebel to investigate the panels. At a pivotal moment in the work, the panels in Studio 2 were removed row-by-row with measurements taken and analyzed.

Every aspect of a space – its dimensions, surfaces, materials, ornament, furniture, objects, and occupants – combines to yield its acoustic character. Unfortunately, rooms are not yet designed this way, and acoustics remains a realm of extraneous materials and surfaces to be added (or avoided) in the designed environment. Belanger’s design work, research, and experiments point to a radical new perspective: an accessible, shared parameter – the geometry of physical spaces – is proposed as a catalyst for the integration of acoustics into architecture.

The push for LGBTQ state recognition, civil rights, and cultural visibility has been accompanied by a push for the recording and preservation of LGBTQ history as an epistemic right. Carleton University professor Ann Cvetkovich will address the recent proliferation of LGBTQ archives as a point of departure for a broader inquiry into the power of archives to transform public histories. These new LGBTQ archival projects must respond to historical and theoretical critiques, including decolonization, that represent archives as forms of epistemological domination and surveillance or as guided by an impossible desire for stable knowledge.

Drawing on the work of Tammy Rae Carland, Ulrike Mueller, Kent Monkman, and others, Cvetkovich’s talk will focus on how artists use creative and queer approaches to archives that are simultaneously critical and transformative. Their experiments in archival preservation and innovative media practices grapple with the materiality of the archive in order to reveal its ephemeral and affective dimensions.

Ann Cvetkovich is Director of the Pauline Jewett Institute of Women’s and Gender Studies at Carleton University. She is the author of Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism; An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures; and Depression: A Public Feeling. She is currently writing a book about the state of LGBTQ archives and their creative use by artists to produce counterarchives and interventions in public history.

The galactic premiere of the audiovisual performance EKO will be performed in the splendid void of total darkness. Erasing the audience’s perceptual boundaries, this absolute absence of light is interrupted for only fractions of seconds with bursts of micro-animated geometric forms emanating from an LED wall display. Returning again to darkness, abundant retinal afterimage impressions unravel within each viewer’s eyes, slowly fading and fusing with the surrounding darkness until the eventual next eruption of light. Attuned to the fragile nature of these ghostly retinal afterimages, the piece’s ambient electronic soundscape gently diffuses through the space with occasional infra bass density.    

New York-based Austrian artist Kurt Hentschläger creates audiovisual installations and performances. Between 1992 and 2003 he collaborated with Ulf Langheinrich in the pioneering artist duo Granular-Synthesis. EKO is the third work in his ongoing series staged in complete darkness. Beginning with the 2017 installation SOL and the recently premiered 2019 installation SUB, EKO is a dedicated live performance within this body of work.

A conversation with Ileana Ramírez Romero, director of Tráfico Visual. This informal discussion on the Venezuelan and Latin American cultural scene will be led by curator Vic Brooks.

In 2009, Ramírez founded Tráfico Visual, a digital platform for contemporary art. The platform is dedicated to the dissemination of content linked to contemporary art and the Venezuelan and Latin American cultural scene. Currently, Tráfico Visual is a contributor to Publishing Against the Grain, a traveling exhibition organized by Independent Curators International (ICI), and in fall 2019 is participating in El Revés de la Trama, 45th Salón Nacional de Artistas, Bogotá.

As Director of Programs at Fundación Cisneros in Caracas, Ramírez directed the Fundación Cisneros Seminar 2017-19. The Seminar is held in Caracas, Venezuela, and was created in 2011 to encourage the multidisciplinary study of culture and modern and contemporary art in Latin America. The seventh edition Disruptions: Dilemmas Regarding the Image in Contemporaneity was conceptualized and presented by Ramírez in 2018. She has also promoted educational projects and initiatives such as the artists residency program in Caracas and the Art in Context talks series.

Light refreshments will be provided.

Ramirez earned a degree in law from Andrés Bello Catholic University (UCAB) but her affinity to visual culture and arts led her to develop an extensive professional career in the art scene. She was Coordinator of Programming at Centro de Arte Los Galpones and Coordinator of Exhibitions at Sala Mendoza. At the end of 2017, with the cultural office of the Spanish Embassy in Venezuela, Ramírez organized the Seminario de Crítica de Arte. Ramírez has organized numerous interviews and meetings between individuals in the local and international artistic communities.

Drawing upon the relationship of Black Pentecostalism to performance studies, as well as the relationship of quantum mechanics to the human experiences of loneliness and love, Ashon Crawley will present a lecture on his action painting practice as well as performative modes of breath, including shouting, noise, and speaking in tongues.

Ashon Crawley is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies, African American, and African Studies at the University of Virginia. He is author of Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility (Fordham University Press), an investigation of aesthetics and performance as modes of collective, social imagination, as well as the forthcoming book, The Lonely Letters, an exploration of the interrelation of blackness, mysticism, quantum mechanics and love. All of his work is about otherwise possibility.

Turkish duo Taldans—Filiz Sizanli and Mustafa Kaplan—will perform Dolap, a work featuring the two dancers and a full-size refrigerator. First performed in 2000 and born from the simple task of carrying the fridge from one location to another, the piece features unlikely and precarious movements as Sizanli and Kaplan manipulate the appliance almost as a third performer. Staged in the EMPAC Lobby, the performance creates a stark environment for the audience to engage with the strenuous physical action required to move a heavy appliance in a controlled, elegant manner.

Taldans was formed at the Theater Research Laboratory (Tiyatro Araştırma Laboratuvarı) in Istanbul, Turkey, and takes its name from the dance program founded at the center by directors Filiz Sizanli and Mustafa Kaplan. Regarded as one of the boldest choreographic teams in Turkey, the duo has worked together for over 20 years. In addition to this performance, Taldans will be at EMPAC for a residency in Studio 1. They will work with EMPAC’s technical team and infrastructure to further develop the choreographic, stage, and audio elements of their work.

Dance scholar and curator Noémie Solomon will facilitate a conversations with the artists following the performance. Refreshments will be served.