Sunday 10 September 2023, 2pm
Exist is a festival and event series founded in Palestine, with the aim of building bridges between artists, musicians, DJs and curators from Palestine and across the globe. Its broad, transnational family are united in a desire to use art to impact their environments in critical ways, and through their engagement with anti-colonialism in the context of Palestine and beyond. Originally founded in 2019 by Odai Masri, Exist has since taken place as an ephemeral but impactful meeting point for musicians and artists who care for the Palestinian cause, and manifest this care in how they love one another. We've listened to our music, grown our family and danced together for hours in Ramallah, Amman, Beirut, Athens, Oslo and Berlin; now we've invited our collective to grace Cafe Oto and The Yard in London. The festival now defines itself as a growing family of siege-breakers who refuse to let Palestinian artists confront injustice alone. Exist is proud to bring together film, talks, music, performance, and dance events from underground veterans such as Choronzon and Drew McDowall as well as super powerful Exist heads like Kujo and Dirar Kalash.
This festival is generously funded by the following parties:
Tony Tremlett
Laure Genillard
DRTCO
Other People Imprint
On Friday the 30th of June 2023, Odai Masri aka Oddz, the founder of the festival suddenly passed away, leaving us with an abundant and deep conviction of what a generous ancestor can do for us.
We owe Odai the vision and groundwork for the accomplishments of this festival, its tightly knit network, and most importantly, we owe him our ethos of marrying uncompromising sound curation with uncompromising caregiving. He insisted on queering Palestinian narratives while resisting victimhood by acting as one another's care structures. This edition acts as a moment to remember him gracefully and extend gratitude for the time we were lucky to share with him. We invite our audience to act as carriers for these memories which we are so privileged to be able to keep with us. Exist is Odai's legacy, and we insist on keeping it strong, fearless and bound by love
Marleen Boschen is an artist, lecturer and researcher. She has recently finished a PhD at Goldsmiths where her research focussed on seed banking practices as ecological imaginaries, border ecologies and more-than-human sovereignty. She teaches on art and ecology at Goldsmiths and Chelsea College of Art. Marleen is currently curating the artistic programme for the garden of Villa Romana in Florence and co-curated Soil is an Inscribed Body: On Sovereignty and Agropoetics together with Elena Agudio at SAVVY Contemporary in Berlin.
Charles Pryor is an artist and agroecologist who works at the intersection of agroecosystem resilience, more-than-human storytelling and moving image. He has an MSc in Climate Change and International Development from the University of East Anglia. Charles has led agroecology workshops at Sakiya, Palestine; unMonastery, Greece; Goldsmiths University, UK and Cityplot, Berlin. Exhibitions and events include: Sunlight Doesn’t Need a Pipeline at Stanley Picker Gallery; After Progress at the Sociological Review; Unifix Festival; How to Show Time in Monochrome at Manifesta13; Storytelling in the Anthropocene at Tenderbooks and Feral Kin at Auto Italia South East.
A short description of the film
A womb of things to be and tomb of things that were
Marleen Boschen & Charles Pryor, 2023, 28 min
'Womb of things to be and tomb of things that were' is a film by Charles Pryor and Marleen Boschen that explores collaborative survival, containment and vulnerability through seeds. Via episodic, speculative storytelling we follow seed banking and saving practices across the globe from the Millennium Seed Bank and the John Innes Centre in the UK, to a forest gene bank in Poland and a food sovereignty organisation in Palestine.
The film traces how seeds move in and out of these banks and how their metabolic life slows down in processes of freezing. Exploring how practices foster ecological imaginaries of restoration, repair and custodianship the film asks what futures might really be in store for these seeds. What does it mean to remove a lifeform from its world in order to save it?
What are these practices saving their seeds for, but also what escapes them in freezing life?
Supported by the Arts Council England.
Zahra Malkani is a multidisciplinary artist. Her research-based practice explores the politics of development, infrastructure and militarism in Pakistan through the lens of dissident ecological knowledges and traditions of environmental resistance.
She is a co-founder with Shahana Rajani of Karachi LaJamia, an experimental pedagogical project exploring new radical pedagogies in connection with ongoing struggles in Karachi. Zahra is currently a fellow at the Jan Van Eyck Academie where she is working on a sound research project exploring the intersection of mysticism and resistance through sonic and oral traditions in the aquatic landscapes of Pakistan.
Rrose is the latest incarnation of Seth Horvitz, an interdisciplinary artist from California (residing in London since 2015) whose 30+ year musical history weaves in and out of dancefloor culture and academic circles. Seth’s work focuses on the limits of perception and the idiosyncrasies of machines, and the Rrose project applies these ideas in order to create a noisy, yet intricately layered and immersive form of techno. From this core, the project extends its tentacles into specific pockets of the avant-garde, leading to collaborations with artists such as Bob Ostertag and Charlemagne Palestine and reinventions of works by 20th century composers such as James Tenney. Rrose’s first vinyl releases on the Sandwell District label came cloaked in mystery, as did the following string of releases on his/her own Eaux label. As a DJ and live performer, Rrose has appeared at warehouses, clubs, museums, forests, ventilations shafts, opera houses, and sweaty basements across Europe, Asia, and the Americas.
http://rrose.ro | http://eaux.ro
