“Who’s Doing the Washing Up?” #3: Hospitality, Secrecy, and Other Useless Movements

How can hospitality, silence and secrecy be tools for social organising?

Legendary multi-media producer, writer and DJ Terre Thaemlitz explores this question during a two-day residency and several performances at Bergen Kunsthall. In the face of increasing emphasis on exposure and over-sharing in everyday culture, Thaemlitz works with a commitment to silence as an active form of communication, and withdrawal and invisibility as necessary for survival.

Thaemlitz performs a rare live concert, an amalgam of lecture, audio and video, of her album ‘Lovebomb/Ai No Bakudan’ (2003) – and a new live radio show ‘Hospitality, Secrecy and Other Useless Movements’ produced together with long-time collaborator Laurence Rassel (Brussels, Belgium). Laurence is a cultural worker and Director of erg (école de recherche graphique – école supérieure des arts) in Brussels, whose work centres around feminist organisational practices, open source technologies and institutional questions. The show is broadcast live from Bergen Kunsthall and via Oslo-based feminist radio station radiOrakel 9,3MHz in Oslo and radiorakel.no.

Part of ‘Who’s doing the washing up?’ – a programme of live commissions in 2018 at Bergen Kunsthall exploring feminist organisational practices and modes of communication – and the structures that support these. The title of the series is used to address questions that often go unmentioned when thinking of possible futures: Who has a voice in these futures? Who’s doing the work to sustain them? What types of work are valued? And what happens when imagining new ways of organising begins with these questions?

Photo Arika, Episode 7: We Can’t Live Without Our Lives, Glasgow (2015)