IMPROVISATION AND MEMORY – WHAT IIIF?  2021

Welcome to the fifth edition of the What IIIF? Festival to be held in Berlin from dinner on September 16th September to the afternoon of September 19th 2021 !

This ongoing collective, interdisciplinary and international research festival is dedicated to answering the absurd question: Can improvisation be documented ?

WHAT IIIF? brings together International Interdisciplinary Improvisation researchers from Europe and beyond. We focus on a method and a subject for several days, and through labs, discussions, performances and observations, we ‘document’ improvisation practice on an interdisciplinary level. This work feeds and develops the open source website www.improvisation.wiki.

After Amsterdam in 2017, London in 2018, Gothenburg in 2019 and our pandemic inspired Nowhere & Everywhere festival online in 2020 (and ongoing) Berlin 2021 is our fifth peer-organised research festival. We will be hosted by Exploratorium Berlin, whom we wish to thank for their ongoing support.

In Berlin, we wish to focus on:

— MEMORY —

What role does memory play in your personal improvisation practice and/or reflection?

How can we use strategies of remembering, reminding, forgetting while improvising?

What questions, obsessions, fascinations, discomforts or troubles does this subject bring for you?

What types of memory are particularly relevant to your practice?

Here are a handful of possible memory-related topics, just to get your juices going. Of course you will have your own!

• memory as traces — in language (writing) or images and figures (symbols)
• long-time, ultrashort and short-time memory
• embodied memory
• memory and (personal/cultural) identity
  Memory is a narrative that constructs your personality (you can remember things that have not happened)
• memory filters: insignificant/ waste/ fragment/ forgetting/
  Is fragmented/faulty memory a problem or a chance for improvisation?
• digital memory vs. analogue memory and their usage in performance
  (…)

We hope that some of these topics resonate with you and look forward to your contributions!

—

We will explore this theme by deepening the research practice we developed in previous What IIIF? editions – it is ripening into a form we could call ASSEMBLAGE. 

As examples, see the ever-developing knowledge base on improvisation.wiki or this tumblr book that came out of the London edition of the festival.

ASSEMBLAGE could be described as a continuous moving between performing and reflection, resting, eating, writing, drawing, playing, and being. All stable in movement. 

A new artistic research tool that we are going to use for this in Berlin is the Taswir atlas developed by House of Taswir, an international platform for artistic research and diasporic thinking (taswir.org). 

The Taswir atlas is developed as a collaborative art work by Shulamit Bruckstein. The atlas “allows for the display of an open number of artifacts, objects, soundclouds, film clips, texts, that may enter into variable, unpredictable, and dynamic relations with each other.”
–> taswir.org/atlas/  

Here is the atlas that we made together at WHAT IIIF? 10 TO 10 on May 15, 2021 that was live streamed on Facebook : https://www.atlaz.space/atlas/MxFZrGjhN8rah3YLZ

THERE ARE TWO WAYS TO PARTICIPATE :

YOU CAN COME TO BERLIN

and/or

YOU CAN CONTRIBUTE TO THE MAKING OF A TASWIR ATLAS BEFOREHAND

IF YOU WANT TO JOIN US in SEPTEMBER IN BERLIN:

Please send us by August 10th an email in which you say:

• YES !  I want to come to WHAT IIIF? Berlin from 19:00 on September 16th (Thursday) to 16:00 on September 19th (Sunday).  
• you give us your email and telephone number
• you give us an idea about your discipline(s) / instruments / passions …
• you send us 2 or 3 sentences, 2 or 3 pictures and/or a poem, reflection, photo about how MEMORY plays a role in IMPROVISATION for you. 

Please send your mail to Reinhard at reinhard.gagel (at) posteo.de

IF YOU WANT TO JOIN THE MAKING OF THE TASWIR ATLAS BEFOREHAND : 

Please send an email to Reinhard at reinhard.gagel (at) posteo.de expressing your interest and your city, and he will send you the parameters for sending content. 

IN GENERAL : 

The festival is free, peer-to-peer and no-budget in the sense that people are responsible for their own costs and we share costs if we for example have shared meals. If you need an official letter to apply for funding in your own country (e.g. for travel/lodging), we can provide you with an official invitation letter.  Thanks to Exploratorium Berlin for hosting WHAT IIIF? 2021. 

@esmeraldadetmersWe can help you find housing if you need help. There are very cheap hotels nearby and we have several couches/rooms available with friends. Please contact ulrikebrand.vlc (at) gmail.com

Due to the corona situation, we expect to have a limit of 16 participants that can gather physically at the Exploratorium in Berlin for the full four days. We will likely create a mix of online and offline participation, and outside-performance possibilities. After hearing how big the group is that likes to physically travel to Berlin, we will inform you how we will proceed.

Thank you for your interest. We are looking forward to hearing from you!

THE BEGINNING // Benedikte Esperi/Thomas Johannsen/Catharine Cary

THE CURRENT CREATIVE TEAM // Thomas Johannsen/Shelley Owen/Danielle Davidson/Esmeralda Detmers/Catharine Cary

THE BERLIN DREAM TEAM // Reinhard Gagel/Ulrike Brand