Hybrida AiR is a residency program that took place between the 24th of June and the 6th of August, 2021 featuring nine artists from five different European countries. We announced an open call for participation and selected seven participants whose works touch upon aspects of the virtual and the physical realities of life today. Hybrida AIR consisted of two consecutive phases taking place digitally and on location.

Rendering the creative process and its stages in this hybrid format, we aim to explore diverse ways of reading, writing, and creating art content, and the topologies that this approach can generate.

as opposed to techne?

It is becoming harder to separate art practice from its connection to technology. Their boundaries seem to be dissolving while the world is being redesigned digitally at an increasing speed. The first month took place online as a series of video meetings with the whole group once a week. A digital platform functioned as a virtual studio space where the participants of the residency were able to map out their work processes making them visible to the public. It was a way of getting to know each other and sharing what we did, leading up to two weeks of work on location in Älvsbacka in Sweden.

pixel perfect, evoking a craving for dirt, mud, and moisture

Do artists have the right tools or the time to question how they produce, communicate, or exchange cultural objects and experience? If the artistic activity has always been synonymous with paving new ways to experience the world around us, allowing for new models and abstractions, what happens now that the toolkit is becoming more and more virtual, and our reality more flat and shiny?

The residency format, online and in physical space, was both an adaptation to current circumstances, with the pandemic still unfolding, and a relevant mode of working, which relates to questions about digitalization and the creative process.

user—tester—hacker

How can we employ the disposition of the artist both as antagonist and producer again? Now is the time to renegotiate the modes of producing, handling, and assessing content, its type, and distribution. One needs to find a good stance in order to be able to recognize the outlines and shapes of things, the patterns that prompt points of reference and departure. How can artists develop a critical and hybrid perspective instead of only tokenizing their new virtual role?

The format of this residency serves to put these thoughts to the test. It is a starting point for a way of working, which can allow the creation of a more fluid framework that holds and hosts feedback loops, renderings, forkings, fusions, and tensions. These results can be fed back to the source in various ways such as theory, logistics, artworks, critical analysis, events, hierarchies, prompts, exercises, documentation, and rituals. It is important to focus not on a chaotic production, but rather listen, accept, adapt and prioritize how to calibrate this emerging framework: in other words to learn how to master its granular elements and its switches.

We would like to depart from the classic mode of exhibiting and proceed in a strategic manner with an open-ended score that is quite free. It is a curatorial and artistic experiment, a wager pushing the boundaries of a residency plan. This asks from residents to devise their own methodology, and construct their own goals when it comes to shaping their missions before, during and after their residency.

The location of Älvsbacka is in stark contrast to a digital environment of working. The estate that we are using has a centuries-old history. Nature is slowly taking over the facilities once inhabited and flourishing, and now slowly decaying. We hope that this way of working and the experience of coming to Älvsbacka has been an inspiration to the participants.

The exhibition unfolds on multiple planes forming a polyphonic network created on the site. Producing works and shaping an exhibition during the brief time span of two weeks was a challenge. Lines of thinking and making flowing in multiple resonances. Poetic contamination, honesty, fragility, and a good dose of humor created unexpected openings that can potentially give way to new other works. Our exhibition is a gesture calling for the exuberance of an open and fleeting community that creates its promise against all odds.

We gamble, we build, we invoke, we give signals, we entangle, we literalize, we bind, we fall and grow, and we rise.

Text by Text by Alena Alexandrova, Giorgos Tsiongas, Joar Torbiörnsson. (read more) (less)

Rising
sculpture, video, text

I will speak with the voice of others. At the end we all know. Yes, it is a“we.” We were affected and we understood. We have no name and we are many. We have a voice and we have a gesture. Ours is action because this is all there is left. It is our rising up as an affirmative gesture. We know about time. We know that time is no more. It is others that are still bound to time and will try to figure out our names, and will perpetually try to tell our story, in time, as a narrative. But we know that there are no narratives that can tie our experience because we are the naked protagonists. We are your worst pain and we are your desire.

Alena Alexandrova is a cultural theorist based in Amsterdam. She teaches theory at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam. She holds a PhD from the University of Amsterdam. Currently, she is writing a book Anarchic Infrastructures: Re-Casting the Archive, Displacing Chronologies, and working on Unclaimed Images, a project investigating the afterlife of photographic images (in collaboration with photographer Johannes Schwartz). She is the author of Breaking Resemblance (Fordham University Press, 2017) and has published internationally in the fields of aesthetics, performance, and visual studies, and regularly contributes to art publications and catalogues. She has curated exhibitions around the conceptual figure of anarcheology. (read more) (less)

Studio View
painting, sculpture and installation

Sat in front of a glowing screen, I crawl across the internet, saving and highlighting photographs of brightly lit artist studios. These images, featuring stern faced painters posing in front of colourful canvases, are destined to be altered and re-distributed across the web, channelled into an infinite scroll for the uninformed to mindlessly flick through on their way to the gym, or while ordering drinks at a bar.

In my process, doctored and subtly distorted, the images feature digitally created artworks. They become large-scale physical paintings, from rotting cars to the inside of Amazon warehouses and drone strikes. The act of pushing these images out into the digital sphere is to further a growing persona of a painter, one that inhabits messy studios, is an occasional smoker and has a dubiously high artistic output. By utilising tools honed by those wishing to destabilise governments, I too hope to capitalise on people’s negligence to research what they see and consume online. Each new body of work I produce is accompanied by a series of fabricated studio images taken off of the screen and translated into the real, created as printed and painted onto original artworks. These hybrid paintings are complemented by translucent 3D printed sculptures of paint tubes, ghost like forms that explore ideas surrounding transparency in the digital age.

Bob Bicknell-Knight is a British artist, curator and writer working in installation, sculpture, painting, video, and digital media. His work is influenced by surveillance capitalism and responds to the hyper consumerism of the internet. He’s interested in ideas surrounding the automation of work and global power structures, alongside critically examining contemporary technologies. Bicknell-Knight is also the founder and director of isthisit?, a platform for contemporary art created in May 2016.

Selected solo exhibitions include Eat The Rich at Galerie Sono, Paris; Pickers at INDUSTRA, Brno, Czech Republic; It’s Always Day One at Office Impart, Berlin; Bit Rot at Broadway Gallery, Letchworth; State of Affairs at Salon 75, Copenhagen and CACOTOPIA 02 at Annka Kultys Gallery, London. He has spoken on panel discussions and given artist talks at panke.gallery, Berlin; Contemporary Calgary, Canada; Tate Modern, London; University of Cambridge, Cambridge; Camberwell College of Arts, London and Goldsmiths, University of London, London. (read more) (less)

the weight of thousand bodies – all that crashed, the plants you had picked so attentively
installation, sound piece
(in collaboration with Alena Alexandrova and Giorgos Tsiongas)

Dear Gabriel,

At one point you would have to land, this is clear. You had to do so to avoid smashing into the ground. I could already sense it, though, you fall- ing from the sky; the impact. When one of your wings broke, I witnessed the transformation.

One wing still attached to your body flickering from a distance. I wish you could have accepted somehow all that was taking place. It was an act of resentfulness, it cut everything in half. That royal posture of yours… There was nothing else to do and I don’t want to pose a new question. I bear the weight of a thousand bodies, all that crashed, the plants you had picked so attentively. You did tell me about the engravings. I remember. They were burning on your legs and blood was oozing from tiny holes, your whole skin swollen, pierced through. I should have listened more closely, now I only have this afterimage. I cherish it.

Gabriel deals with the experience of failures of systems, which leads into a process of transition. While camping, we create a ground within a place. How do we position ourselves, play in the mud, and embed ourselves within a larger ecosystem? Gabriel employs a strategy of dissociative logic in order to tap into desires to travel past the borders of our species. The solitary project of the individual to merge with a larger world and the feeling of defeat which comes with our attempts to keep being ourselves. How can our root system branch out within a larger ecology? Gabriel studied sculpture and installation at the Royal Danish Art Academy in Copenhagen. He has exhibited internationally in Portugal, Sweden, Denmark and Italy. (read more) (less)

Dialogue Between Two Signal Lights
installation

Signal lights are interlocutors in the space of industrial production. They direct the flow of goods in machine controlled paths. As a signalling device, their function is similar to traffic lights. They construct intricate paths of ordered interchange between key points. Signal lights are a figure of a networked and global world of structured movements.

Coded visual signs proliferate across industrial spaces. Machinic and human operators tag goods with tickets and receipts as traces of transactions. Embedded into flows, they progress on paths within logistical systems and larger machinic networks. This connectivity encapsulates the entire world with networks that colonize human relations and exceed the individual actors. Much like a clock articulates the infinity of time into radial segments, networks demarcate movement within the bounds of their connections, thus creating the illusion that the world is structured into logical parameters and categories, and is exploitable by human activity. This global network functions like a language, shapes thinking and channels it through networks, which reduce our access to the world. This obscures the possibility of radical departures within thought, or even removes it entirely. The creation of such a possibility is a vital goal for the decolonization of thought.

Jeroen Kortekaas creates sculptures and images in which motifs of transportation — such as flight, traffic signals and signage — become metaphors for metamorphosis. In his work he is interested in relations where the notion of unitary subjectivity becomes challenged. (read more) (less)

Tick Mummy
installation, virtual reality, text

The structure of the work is based on three routines relating to the tick: a parasitic arachnid which, due to its hemophagous diet, acts as a vector of many serious diseases affecting humans. By extension, the routines relate to forest biomes and the increase and mutations in tick-borne infections over time.

An unnamed protagonist interacts with, or observes, three characters that narrate, in indirect ways, their perspectives on human – tick relations. The first strand is an anthropocentric perspective driven by an irrational fear and disgust that manifests itself as an addiction to a misplaced, unceasing propitiation and worship in exchange for immunity to pathogens; a mindset based on the mantra “love that which you fear.” This draws from insect deities such as the Scorpion Goddess, the scar- abs of Ancient Egypt, and William Burroughs’ centipede cult in his novel The Western Lands. The second strand references a non-anthropocentric perspective outlining an admiration for the tick and similar animals based on Jakob von Uexküll’s concept of Umwelt or the living environment as perceived by a particular organism. This notion, specifically in relation to the tick, has been expounded upon by Uexküll, Giorgio Agamben and Gilles Deleuze. In the third strand we become voyeuristic spectators of an exchange between one character who involves a reticent, indifferent partner in a particular routine. He claims to have just returned from a camping trip and needs someone to help inspect his intimate or hard to reach body parts for ticks. An uncomfortable dynamic is created because only one participant assumes it is intended as a sexual act. The two VR environments depict two sides of a corridor connecting a ravine and a pavilion featuring tick symbols. These environments show both similarities and discrepancies with descriptions in the monologues of the characters.

Faysal Mroueh creates VR and video game environments that experiment with narrative perception in 3-dimensional space. The environments present settings relating to tropes of science-fiction that evoke pathological, sexual experiences as well as reimagined human-animal relations and symbolism. (read more) (less)

Bonds
sculpture and installation

The subject of the holograms are bonds. Behind loans, insurance policies and tradable contracts, there is a bond that lies in a promise. Usually there is collateral, some kind of thing held hostage, in case of a failure to pay. The process is one of the abstraction of value that comes about with the growth of the financial sector into an industry that does not necessarily service the “real” economy, but rather dominates it.

Yet, these processes of investment and the movement of liquid capital remains invisible to the eye. The idea of making a hologram comes from a synthesis of two preoccupations: 3-dimensionality and virtuality. A style of virtual 3-dimensionality in the form of a hologram that represents a node on the network of time. I started tying small men to sticks with elaborate variations in the knots used to tie them. So they are bound. They are pictures of bonds in a second sense. It is a light-hearted pun that evolved in thinking about ways to visualize financial instruments. The act is deeply invested in the production of sadomasochistic imagery. This feeling seems deeply contemporary to me. The casual sadism of impersonal systems. The flippant observation of the fact that there might not be a way out of the systems that have been put in place. Even a sense of infantilization as a compensation for the loss of agency. The little bag of toys, two hundred miniature men, can be delivered by Amazon anyplace in the world, precisely because an infrastructure is all-encompassing. Infrastructure is always the background that has to be deleted so that consciousness can place the foreground into focus.

Geirthrudur Finnbogadottir Hjorvar is a visual artist that creates work that can be described as a form of lyrical (or perhaps surreal) conceptual- ism, with an ever-deepening emphasis on the formal qualities of matter as it finds itself embedded in the economic paradigms of production. Her current body of work centers around the interpentetration of ideological / material matrices and how they produce the infrastructures of (intersub- jective) reality.

Geirthrudur Finnbogadottir Hjorvar graduated from the Iceland University of the Arts and the Malmö Art Academy (MFA). She has exhibited widely in an international context, including the Museo La Tertulia (CO), W139 (NL), Cosmos Carl, Overgaden (DK), Kunstverein Ingolstadt (DE) and Kunstverein Milano (IT), and been selected to take part in renown residencies such as Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten (NL), amongst others. (read more) (less)

Appendix II
drawing, sculpture and installation

In the myth of Zelephos there are multiple interpretations of his process of transformation and how the first infernal apparition came to be. We resist one definitive interpretation, because it is believed to be the pursuit of one definitive truth that was a contributing catalyst towards the blackening of the green and the demise of the Anthropocene.

Subjectivity and the multi- ple in language and philosophy is therefore practiced by all in our Order. Some believe Zelephos was unworthy of communion with his Holy daimon and so was punished for his ineptitude when attempting the rite of Saturn. Others say this failure was the catalyst for his transcendental metamor- phosis. Another interpretation is that Zelephos was a hermit, who although was just, was still burdened by his humanity and so was punished for all the souls his human ancestors had tortured. One could say this myth was a mere construct created by our Order to instruct all Chaotes on how to accept sin and abandon desire. We can only speculate because our reality is now uncertain. Only what is seen can be somewhat known. It is my hope that these drawings show you how his humanity broke him and why the Aether still remembers his nightmares.

Mary Furniss is a British artist whose current practice is centred around the development of a queer ecological occult narrative that investigates permaculture, toxicity and herbal alchemy through an art practice encompassing drawings, installations, sculptures and paintings. Furniss has exhibited nationally and internationally, including at Konstakademien, Stockholm; Museum of Contemporary Art, Santiago and Liverpool Biennale, Liverpool. They are currently working on a graphic novel, titled After Pandora, which will be released in September later this year, published by Persson Valijani in Stockholm.

Whilst at the residency she’s been working on a new series of hyper-de- tailed drawings (first image) for an upcoming book release, titled After Pandora, published by and due to be released in September later this year. They are currently based in Stockholm, Sweden. (read more) (less)

Untitled
sculpture

“Dig where you stand” is a good motto, as unexpected things and memories emerge, while others dissolve at exposure to the winds. The work that I am making is inspired by the history of Älvsbacka, the place where I grew up. While organising the residency I saw it through a different lens, as a zone of creativity on several planes.

Both of nature slowly covering up and transforming the remains of its history, and of a group of artworks finding their form and material articulation the short time span of two weeks. The material and social history of the site, documents and images were accessible through internet archives as part of my research during the digital phase of the residency. The material reality which they came from remains both submerged and present as hand driven nails buried in the soil of the garden, century old planks barely visible underneath the water, and building foundations covered in canopy. The last standing structures are slowly decomposing into building materials, water, moss and fungi, with traces of iron production and the activities that followed its bankruptcy up to this day. The location provides an opening for a study of time, as well as culture and social textures, and how they shape the environment. It is elusive and this is the thrill of history, a constant reconfiguration of matter and memory.

Joar Torbiörnsson works with sculpture, installations and drawing with expressions that are sometimes bordering on the minimal as well as the humorous. He creates a reduced visual language that reflects an interest in history, ephemeral experience, sheer materiality, negative space and concerns the ontology of the artworks.

He studied design at HDK, Gothenburg (2015) and fine arts at Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam (2019). He is part of a curatorial duo with Giorgos Tsiongas under the name Hybrida and has curated and participated in exhibitions in Stockholm, Berlin, Amsterdam, Milan and New York. He is currently based in Berlin. (read more) (less)

apophenia
poetry, installation, and a sound piece by Alex Murray

/ throw 1
no sequencing
/ throw 2
reading & writing as a chance operation
/ throw 3
the body text to depend on transparencies

/ throw 4
carrying text back & forth
/ throw 5
the elective affinity between language & water
/ throw 6
writing as an audiovisual exercise
/ throw 7
allowing the transmutation of the content
/ throw 8
alchemical writing ◡ the deck of a ship
/ throw 9
the ghost of the oracle ◡ no words
/ throw 10
the ambience of ice cracking ◡ opening a random page
/ throw 11
the vanishing of the starboard side
/ throw 12
the gala ◡ timpani

Giorgos Tsiongas is a poet and performance artist. He lives and works in Athens. He studied Geology at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Fine Arts at Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam, and Art Praxis at the Dutch Art Institute in Arnhem. He has published books of poetry in Greek and English, curated and exhibited in Athens, Amsterdam, Stockholm, and other cities in Europe. His work trades in crypto self-actualization as a tool for confronting a mirrored external self. Currently, he works with the idea of poetic language functioning as a chance operator or an oracle. Giorgos’ poems work on the page or as future blueprints for other infrastructures, prompting the reader to explore an augmented reading potential. (read more) (less)