KASSIA & THE NEW ISTANBUL CONVENT/OPERA-TION

Conference announcement

A DIGITAL CONFERENCE SERIES

BY KAINKOLLEKTIV & Partners

In cooperation with the Heinrich-Böll-Foundation

Kassia Marmorstatue

The composer, poet & Byzantine abbess KASSIA, who lived in Constantinople in the 9th century, is considered the first European female composer whose musical works have been handed down and still play an important role in music history today. In addition, Kassia founded a women‘s monastery on one of Istanbul‘s seven hills after rejecting a marriage proposal from Emperor Theophilos. Kassia thus appears as a kind of urfeminist role model. kainkollektiv and the Turkish-German composer  Burak Özdemir, together with the Ensemble Musica Sequenza, take this „power woman“ as the starting point for a (post-)feminist opera - the SONGS OF CARE(VOLUTION).

The performance is integrated into an analog and digital conference from September to October 2021, including an online exhibition, with which the project is explicitly intended to contribute to the current feminist debate, not least in the context of Poland‘s and Turkey‘s current efforts to withdraw from the Istanbul Convention on Women‘s Rights in Europe. From September to October 2021, a six-part analogue-digital conference series will be created, with speakers* from Poland, Germany, Turkey, Iran, Cameroon, South Africa, etc. and in concrete collaboration with the Women‘s Museum Istanbul led by Meral Akkent, the activist initiative Pracownia Kuratorska from Krakow and universities from Germany, Poland and Turkey as well as the Heinrich Böll Foundation, the Goethe Institute Krakow & the Goethe Institute Istanbul.

The conference aims to take up the current feminist debates and discourses in various European countries, which are currently manifesting themselves in the form of huge demonstrations and women‘s strikes, but also in small initiatives between academia, activism, care work and art, and connect them with the issues and the art and care work of Kassia. In particular, the aim is to provide a forum for current (feminist) initiatives, discussions and actors to network and develop a kind of „Map of Action For A Feminist Future“ - not least with an urgent view to the current reception and implementation of the Istanbul Convention, which is currently being fundamentally called into question by the Polish government and was recently completely abandoned by Turkey.

The aim of the NEW ISTANBUL CONVENT(ION) in reference to Kassia‘s medieval women‘s monastery is to create a hybrid, digital-analog format between science, art and activism, in which new narratives of a (post-)feminist future can be spun and designed. With artists, activists, scholars and students from Poland, Germany, Turkey and in alliance with collaborators and accomplices of our already existing networks in Cameroon, South Africa and Iran, the KASSIA project instigates a dialogue that opens across national and disciplinary boundaries:

An aesthetic and creative space for topics such as feminism, gender justice and care work, of which Kassia is the patron saint. The series will be realized along the following panels/sequences, in which aesthetic/artistic forms of presentation (lecture performances, online concerts) meet scientific experts, researchers and audience discussions. In them, they create a mental and poetic-theoretical space that ranges from Kassia‘s own poems from the 9th century to Donna Haraway‘s Cyborg Manifesto and the current positions in gender studies - and back again, in the spirit of a quote that comes from one of Kassia‘s poems: „I hate the silence when it is time to speak / I hate the one who always conforms. / I hate the one who does not encourage everyone with words. / I hate him who speaks without examination / I hate him who teaches without knowledge.“

 

Kassia Conference Series - Fall 2021

09th September, 2021: KASSIA AND THE FALLEN WOMEN. AS OVERTURE OF THE CONFERENCE SERIES

Host: Germany, kainkollektiv & friends

23th September, 2021: FEMINIST WORK. THINKING THROUGH METHODS, FIELDS AND CONDITIONS

Host: Krakow: Pracownia Kuratorska

30th September, 2021: THE RECEPTION OF KASSIA

Host: Turkey/Sweden: Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul

14th October, 2021: Imagining Kassia's New Istanbul Convent-ion

Host: kainkollektiv / with Havle KadIn Derneği, SabancI University Gender and Women's Studies Center of Excellence

21st October, 2021: ON SPEAKING & BEING. FEMALE SPACES OF LANGUAGE

Host: kainkollektiv / with Mirjam Schmuck (kainkollektiv), Mithu Sanyal, Kübra Gümü!ay and Lydia Ziemke

(suite42)

23th - 24th October, 2021: KASSIA – THE NEW ISTANBUL CONVENT-ION: ACT LIKE YOU CARE!

bringing together all actors)

 

 

More info at www.kainkollektiv.de

Registration welcome to info@kainkollektiv.de