ONASSIS AIR 2020/21: THE SCHOOL OF INFINITE REHEARSALS

Onassis AiR Open Call 2020/21: The Infinite Rehearsal in Four Movements 
Application deadline: April 24, 2020, 5pm (GMT+3)

ONASSIS AiR, the (inter)national artistic research residency program in Athens, invites artists, curators, designers, activists, collectives, educators, lawyers, performance and film makers, economists, agitators, philosophers, and other practitioners to apply for 2020/21 Open Call: The Infinite Rehearsal in Four Movements, which runs between September 2020 and May 2021.

Fall 2020: Identities Annihilated
Movement I: September 14-October 25, 2020
Movement II: November 2-December 13, 2020

Spring 2021: Everything Equally Evolved
Movement III: February 17-March 31, 2021
Movement IV: April 7-May 19, 2021

Inspired by the title of a novel by Wilson Harris, The Infinite Rehearsal in Four Movements is conceived as a collective program focused on two research areas we find urgent to explore. Each Movement Group of five to six participants will engage in a collective “rehearsal,” bringing their own “instrument” in the form of their existing practice that clearly engages with one of the research topic areas in a radical way.

Fall 2020 & Spring 2021 Movement Groups will have one convener each—a practitioner in their own right, with an in-depth knowledge of the research topic explored, who will provide a framework for the two Movement Groups each will convene, in the form of possible readings, meetings with other practitioners, research trips, workshops, tools, etc.

Fall 2020: Identities Annihilated will be convened by performance theorist Hypatia Vourloumis. During Movement I & Il, we will, following Edouard Glissant, seek to attend to the ways in which identities cannot be reduced or made transparent. We will ask: ‘how are we all entangled, in the quantum physics’ sense, in a planetary "difference without separability" as Denise Ferreira da Silva writes? How are we always already “singular-plural” (Jean-Luc Nancy), in the elsewhere and otherwise? How can we destroy the fixed notions and categories of separation inherent to racial capitalism through the aesthetics of a transformative mode of history and time, through the aesthetic imagination and its materializations as transformative and abolitionist force?

Spring 2021: Everything Equally Evolved will be convened by writer and artist James Bridle in collaboration with Vessel. During Movement III & IV we will collectively explore some of these, and other questions: How can the tools we have at hand be reimagined to bring us down to Earth? How do we reassert the importance of community while building solidarity with the more-than-human world? What would it look like to take the intelligence of animals, plants, and ecosystems as seriously as we take the intelligence of smart machines? What is the relationship between distributed networks and distributed power? How do we practically engage with sensoriums other than our own? And what is vital about doing so here and now, on the edge of the Mediterranean and other, possible futures?

The working language of Fall 2020 & Spring 2021 research groups is English. All accepted participants will receive a research fee, housing & travel to/from Athens if from abroad, collective research budget, and other resources.

The House That Became a Home (2019/20)
Established by the Onassis Foundation in September 2019, Onassis AiR opened the doors of an empty building in the center of Athens to house a community of peers from Greece and abroad. Today, after six months of inhabiting this space, filling it with hours of thinking, talking, reading, testing, and making as well as eating together, Onassis AiR has become a home. This house now belongs to more than 30 artists, curators and art practitioners, who between September 2019 and June 2020, are supported through four existing modules: The Critical Practices Program, (Inter)national Artistic & Curatorial Research Program,  Exchange Residencies Program, and Emergency Fellowships Program. 

Onassis AiR team: Ash Bulayev, Georgia Giannakea, Myrto Katsimicha and Nefeli Myrodia.