Collapsed Architecture (1975) by Alvin Baltrop. Courtesy the artists.
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This program is co-presented off-site with The Invisible Dog Art Center
As part of the research for their performance work The Dumps, and as an extension of their Technical Residency at CPR and co-presented with The Invisible Dog Art Center, Simone Aughterlony and Jen Rosenblit organize In Our Decline, a symposium aroused by an urgent and necessary un-doing of things – aging, un-worlding, decay, ruination, and collapse.
The day-long symposium features performative activations, visual art offerings, and public conversation and engagement with a range of artists, curators, and scholars including A.K. Burns, Jack Halberstam, Ryan McNamara, Felipe Ribeiro, and Avgi Saketopoulou, and more to-be-announced, along with performances by lab participants who will join Rosenblit and Aughterlony in their research, including Effie Bowen, devynn emory, Raja Feather Kelly, Stephen Thompson, Connor Voss, Joseph Wegmann, and Colin Self.
A detailed schedule for the symposium is forthcoming.
This program is an extension of a Spring 2025 Technical Residency with Jen Rosenblit and Simone Aughterlony in March 2025.
ABOUT THE DUMPS
The Dumps is an extensive research and performance project by Simone Aughterlony and Jen Rosenblit that confronts architectural ruination against a backdrop of the capitalist drive for renewal. Departing from Jack Halberstam’s theory around Un-Worlding and The Aesthetics of Collapse, the project considers an erotics associated with abandoned architecture, often flagging or gesturing toward decline. What is it that gets lost and who do we lose amidst a constant drive to rebuild and refurbish? Is it love for or fear of ruins that determine the drive for futurity based on ownership, heated floors, privatized and insulated views, and the eventual promise of accumulated abundance?
By way of weathered, eroded, collapsing and abandoned architectures, the work refocuses erotics, sex, and sexuality as a public affair. The Dumps is not a site to disregard but an abundance of situations to be reckoned with. In the end, The Dumps might evict us, liberate us, even emancipate us from the promise of progress, not through clarity but through the aesthetics of confusion.
Through the creation of the work, Rosenblit and Aughterlony will host gatherings for local artists in each city where they are in residence, methodically articulating a further unwinding, undoing, aging, and decay associated with the research proposition itself and in resistance to further world-making. Acknowledging that the proposition of collapse is riddled with contradiction amidst the effort to speculate on futurity, in this context, to undo, we must first do, build, arrange, and organize as a way to initiate a focus towards the un-worlding and take stock of all that we have inherited.
IN OUR DECLINE
In Our Decline is a symposium taking place in NYC, nestled between residencies in Brooklyn at The Invisible Dog Art Center and CPR – Center for Performance Research, and positioned site-specifically in the well visited, dwelled, lingered, preserved, and beloved Invisible Dog Art Center, its industrial space, and the vertical stacking of a constantly eroding New York City. With the imminent closing of this community space at 51 Bergen Street, the work also takes on a necessary speculation of demolition in relation to this community space, excavating a promise of collision as being and getting in the way of progress.
Inviting a local network of artists and thinkers, this gathering contemplates and complicates the process of performance making. The symposium seeks to focus without centralizing or, more importantly, without further marginalizing, bodies and communities historically associated with abandoned or deemed-unlivable spaces. In actively inviting the public to tend to the impulse of traumatophilia, the gathering arouses potential and incites a curiosity for the role of rot when acknowledging these ruins that continue to hold us, our fairy tales and our myths, managing to make us distinct from the rubble itself, and considering the wreckage, the weathered, and the decayed as available remnants for a collision with the future, a biased archive of the past, and a sobering recognition for where we are now.
SUPPORT
A co-presentation between The Invisible Dog Art Center and CPR – Center for Performance Research, both in Brooklyn, NY with further support from the Prohelvetia Global Research Grant and Imbricated Real.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Jen Rosenblit makes performances based in Berlin after many years in NYC surrounding architectures, bodies, text, and ideas concerned with problems that arise inside of agendas for togetherness. Rosenblit’s works lean toward the uncanny, locating ways of being together amidst (un) familiar and impossible contradictions. The methodology supports an expanse of meaning as it emerges between things and moves toward an unwinding and a possible collapse. Desire and sexuality linger as reoccurring points of departure without demanding a singular aesthetic or representation. Rosenblit is a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow, a recipient of a 2014 New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award, a 2023 La Becque (Vevey, CH) artist in residence, and currently teaches at Hochschulübergreifendes Zentrum Tanz Berlin. Rosenblit has collaborated with artists including Simone Aughterlony, Miguel Gutierrez, A.K. Burns, and Philipp Gehmacher in various capacities via performer, writer, creator, and director.
Simone Aughterlony is an independent artist based in Zurich and Berlin, working predominantly in dance, performance, and visual art contexts. They have been devising queer-spirited choreographic works over the last sixteen years. Engaging with alternative forms of kinship inside their process, new constellations emerge as possibilities for reconfiguring a culture of togetherness that fosters both familiar and unknown quantities. Their works playfully compose with representation and its saturation, seeping into and embracing the phenomenology of mis-recognition and the absurd. Aughterlony approaches art making as a practice where they navigate the contradiction between the domination of desire alongside the agency of all elements. They regularly teach at academic institutions such as ZHdK - Zurich University of the Arts, Manufacture in Lausanne, and DAS Art Amsterdam, amongst others, as well as devising and facilitating laboratory formats and frames for sharing and producing knowledge. In 2020 together with Marc Streit they founded Imbricated Real, an independent structure for contemporary art practice.