How can we move from surviving to thriving while existing in a capitalist industry that still centers product(ion)? This session is about putting into words some of the working conditions that can be difficult to see because they are normalized.
Accessibility: Ground floor with ramp. Please send an email to phyllis@hautscene.dk if you have specific accessibility needs.
This event focuses on artists.
We can host 10 participants and will prioritize those who can join for both events on March 24th and 31st.
Sign up via phyllis@hautscene.dk.
Language: English
How do we map out our non-negotiables? How do we invite respectful dialogue where boundaries, needs, and embodied knowledge are heard? And how do we create a common understanding that intersectionality should always be included in the encounter with artists?
This can include the relationship to time, breaks and rest, deadlines, structures, ideas about productivity, our worth, and scarcity. The presentation is combined with an invitation to feel into the body through a shared break and presence.
Afterwards, we invite for collective reflection over a sandwich.
COLLECTIVE PRACTICE – ARTIST CARE is a newly developed knowledge framework that takes its point of departure in our context here and now, recognizing a lack of a common language to articulate lived experiences of inequality in Denmark – in Danish. At HAUT, we seek to create the best conditions for artists and artistic development, and we have hired the duo Elizabeth Löwe Hunter and Phyllis Akinyi as part of a focused effort on the development of intersectional* care and knowledge sharing for performing artists.
COLLECTIVE PRACTICE – ARTIST CARE thus draws on Hunter and Akinyi's long-standing care practices, and offers presentations, conversations and somatic exercises.
The prioritization of care emerges from HAUT's recognition that the artist's life is often precarious. This means that the artistic process coexists with and is influenced by the artists' material circumstances in everyday life.
In addition to the material frameworks and resources we provide, we strive to be present with an attention to how structural inequalities shape the artists we invite to residencies.
COLLECTIVE PRACTICE – ARTIST CARE aims to help us – artists and institutions alike – develop a shared vocabulary and a conceptual framework to better identify our challenges. The idea is that we must be able to name our needs in order to be able to address and accommodate them, and at HAUT we believe that it is necessary to recognize differences in order to work towards social justice.
Elizabeth Löwe Hunter, PhD, er uafhængig forsker, formidler og kulturanalytiker og undersøger racialisering, tilhørsforhold, og repræsentation i Danmark gennem feministiske, dekoloniale forskningsmetoder.
Hun har undervist i normkritiske forskningsmetoder på UC Berkeley og rådgiver organisationer i intersektionelle tilgange til dataanalyse, formidling og klientrelationer blandt andet i uddannelses- og kunstsektoren. Elizabeth har en PhD i Black Studies og Gender Studies fra University of California Berkeley og er specialiseret i at forstå racegørelse i en dansk og europæisk kontekst.
Hun vil desuden varetage formidlingsopgaver gennem en intersektionel tilgang
Phyllis Akinyi (she/they) is a Danish-Kenyan dancer, choreographer, and interdisciplinary performance artist based between Madrid and Copenhagen. Working at the intersection of flamenco, Africanist spirituality, and contemporary performance, their practice explores cultural hybridity, ancestral memory, and embodied resistance. Akinyi’s concept of Spatial Listening frames her durational and site-specific works, where sound, trance, and ritual create portals for diasporic presence. She is the founder and artistic director of Diasporic Dimensions and co-editor of Afro-Nordic Perspectives on Performance. Their work has been presented across Europe and the U.S., including at the Venice Biennale, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Yellow Fish Festival, and The Danish Royal Theatre.
Concept
Phyllis Akinyi (she/they) is a choreographer, performer, and flamenco researcher whose practice is rooted in rhythm, storytelling, and vessel work, centering care, embodied knowledge, and strategies of resistance.
Elizabeth Löwe Hunter (she/her) is an independent researcher, educator, and cultural analyst whose work examines racialization, belonging, and representation in Denmark, specifically through Black feminist ethics of care.
Theoreticians
We credit Patricia Hill Collins for a Black feminist ethics of care and Audre Lorde for notions of caring for oneself. And we recognize Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells, Combahee River Collective, Angela Davis, bell hooks, all of the above mentioned and many, many more for analyzing intersectionality before it was coined by Kimberly Crenshaw in 1989. Importantly, we credit Ylva Habel, Lena Sawyer, Philomena Essed, Gloria Wekker, Fatima El-Tayeb, and Françoise Vergès, among others, for anchoring intersectional approaches within our European context.
Intersectionality is a concept developed by Black feminists that we adapt to our context from the US-American context. With a feminist starting point, we make space for multiple perspectives and artistic expressions that lie outside the norm across both society and the Danish performing arts scene. When we express the importance of an intersectional approach, it means that we acknowledge the ways in which different forms of oppression operate simultaneously – ways in which artists experience interlocking inequalities. We work from the notions that if we take good care of the most vulnerable among us, everyone benefits. Therefore, we take as our starting point a Black feminist ethic of care and cite, for example, Patricia Hill Collins, Audre Lorde, Kimberly Crenshaw, the Combahee River Collective, and others.