different hopesthe question of ‘what to do?’ after the deillusionization of old regimes of commercial, technological, artistic, political, social utopias
programBroadcasting RRadio TritonBroadcasting RRadio Triton by OFFoff, Domes FM, a.pass and RRadio Triton, 26.01.2019
an audio editing of a live lecture, 55’ to 70’, 2019
Author and Performer/Lecturer Sina Seifee
Editor Pierre Rubio
Sound Christian Hansen
The lecture was performed in March 2017 in Brussels within the lectures series “Book Club” at a.pass (advanced performance and scenography studies - a platform for artistic research)
Sina Seiffe is an artist-researcher-storyteller working on poetics of animal description (ecological cosmologies of nonhumans-with-history). Born in Tehran (1982), he studied Applied Mathematics in Beheshti University and Visual Arts in Charsoo Institute of Art in Tehran. After moving to Germany in 2011, he graduated in Cologne with master diploma in Media Arts from Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln (2014) and received his postmaster in Advanced Performance and Scenography Studies from a.pass in Brussels (2017). A two-year research program in which he developed his work on bestiaries, and a deep interest for other people’s projects and how we get on together in communities of knowledge. His artworks (realized in different forms of lecture-performances, reading group, workshops, image making, video and writing) are about the questions of technology, storytelling, globalism and intercultural mythologies in the heterogeneous knowledge-worlds of art and sciences, with attention to the premodern era.
The essay/performance investigates the fragile intersections of friendship between digital avatars and trans-animals in the social media in Tehran’s landscape. Through personal animal-findings and fairy-tale associations the ‘An Animal Escape Case’ interprets the epistemological openings and closings in cross-species sociality in Tehran domestic landscape exemplified in the everyday use of mobile phones where images of pets circulates and different species meet in mediated formats. The essay/performance analyzes all that anthropomorphism performs and withholds on and with animality in the situated conditions of contemporary Tehran domestic life and addresses the relationships between people, animals and place in a socio-technological milieu as complex as Tehran’s urban environment with its politics, televised operations, public/private cross- boundaries, its wilderness, and technologically mediated stories and rumors that populate its landscape.