Edition IX—Bodies and Technologies (2022–23)

If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution proudly presents Edition IX—Bodies and Technologies (2022–23), our ninth biennial programme, featuring six new artist and research commissions from Susanne Altmann, Black Speaks Back, Samia Henni, Nuraini Juliastuti, Jessika Khazrik, and Constantina Zavitsanos, as well as a study programme led by our research fellow Devika Chotoe.

With Edition IX—Bodies and Technologies we tackle the complex and plural entanglements between bodies and technologies—from experiences of pleasure and intimacy to the ongoing embodied realities of colonial and ableist frameworks. These entanglements generate both possibilities for liberation and risks of further control. Bodies and Technologies lingers in this paradox, turning to the performance strategies and performance-based research methodologies of our artists and researchers to ask how technologies affect the experiences of bodies and vice versa. How do various technologies condition the performance and experience of one’s own body and of other bodies? And, in turn, how do different bodily experiences re-condition, retune and perhaps even disrupt technologies?

Following individual trajectories of development and presentation across 2022 and 2023, each of the Edition IX commissions looks at different intersections of technological performativity: Susanne Altmann examines the places—and displacements—of socialist techno-utopianism in women’s working methods at different periods in the erstwhile Eastern Bloc and former Yugoslavia; Black Speaks Back develops a line of research into technologies of intimacy and Black love as part of their ongoing work to build a vocabulary that speaks to the Afro-European experience in Belgo-Dutch contexts and counter-acts centuries-old structures of institutional racism; Samia Henni looks into the colonial architectures of French nuclear technologies and infrastructures, investigating the politics of historical visibility and archival access, as well as the possibilities for reparations; Jessika Khazrik presents a hypermedia research and performance project on the proximity of magic to the medical field, dwelling on the divinatory afterlives and militarised origins of biomedical practices of sonification, sensing, imaging and anamnesis; Nuraini Juliastuti articulates her vision of the ‘commons museum’, which draws upon the pedagogical practices within activist communities in Indonesia and Timor-Leste that are invested in the recuperation of suppressed indigenous knowledge; and Constantina Zavitsanos experiments with heat, image and sound outside of what is deemed the human hearing and seeing range, disrupting our understanding of dis/ability, dependency, capability and perceptibility.

On Saturday 2 July, audiences are invited to follow these different lines of investigation at an Introductory Event in Amsterdam where our Edition IX artists and researchers are present to share some glimpses into their projects-in-the-making. To learn more about the different curatorial facets of the programme and engagements with the Bodies and Technologies field of inquiry, audiences are also invited to tune in for a Radio Emma broadcast on Wednesday 29 June where the If I Can’t Dance artistic team, Frédérique Bergholtz, Anik Fournier, Sara Giannini and Megan Hoetger, and research fellow Devika Chotoe share their own entry points into Edition IX.

Acknowledgements
The commission of Samia Henni is co-produced with Framer Framed (Amsterdam), with the project’s development supported by the ‘Political Ecologies’ seminar, Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam; the commission of Nuraini Juliastuti is realised in dialogue with Sekolah Pagesangan (Yogyakarta, Indonesia), Lakoat Kujawas (Mollo, Indonesia) and Arte Moris Free Art School (Dili, Timor Leste); the commission of Jessika Khazrik is co-produced with Iaspis – The Swedish Arts Grants Committee’s International Programme for Visual and Applied Arts as part of their Holes, Spirals, Waves (2022) programme and supported by a residency at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (Munich).

If I Can’t Dance is structurally supported by the Mondriaan Fund and the AFK (Amsterdam Fund for the Arts), with Edition IX additionally supported by Ammodo.