Smashing Wor(l)ds – Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art

Hey you! Sir! Madam!  

Seemingly neutral phrases and words that we use to address others as well as ourselves are often quite intimate and hurtful. What if we cannot find them in a dictionary? What will come out of our mouths? What are the ways to disarm vocabularies to eliminate violence? What might we think and understand when we cannot name it yet? And how can languages open up to experiences and voices emerging from colonial and patriarchal, semantic non-existence? Please join us in this experiment and conversation!

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• Smashing Wor(l)ds is an artistic event with participants of the U–jazdowski art residency project, Smashing Wor(l)ds: Cultural Practices for re/Imagining & un/Learning Vocabularies. Their activities in lockdown Warsaw energised by women’s fight for fundamental human rights is an examination of language in the process of change. Reinvented in the face of ideological appropriation of words, the Smashing Wor(l)ds project is also a process. FRIDGE!EEE_hereo and the writer Sam Domingo are seeking ways to increase exposure and amplification of sounds and voices that, although silenced, unspoken and incomprehensible for the majority, do exist and affect our reality.
  • FRIDGE! EEE_hereo will present an improvised concert that is a variation on their joint exploration of the dominant space of modern social and public life. This space is cyberspace, the reality of constant listening and endless “noise.” Their sound performance and live exchange uses sound-radio spy devices, such as theremin, bugging and short-circuit devices used for daily communication, and above all from their own virtual stream and email intimacy of female artists as their critical backend, handheld tool. By working with sound inaudible to the human ear, ultrasounds or radio waves, FRIDGE!EEE_hereo bring that what we know as frequencies and vibrations absorbed by the body, into the audial zone. Amplified to the level of audible sound, they embody and re-code human response to the immediate environment.
• Sam Domingo, a writer and theatre practitioner in her native Manila, explores the experience of mis-gendering trans, non-binary people and those who escape “heteronormative standards.” Her interviews with non-binary and trans people in Poland and the Philippines, two countries with a culture shaped by the Catholic Church, will be the starting point for her literary intervention focused on sex and gender-based discrimination. The artist allows these intimate stories – often never told to anyone or in public – to resonate. She creates a collective voice, the starting point for inclusive communication, from the difficult and emotionally painful experiences of her interlocutors.

• More about the artists
  • Rhéa Dally
    • is interested in the potential for sound to become a political language beyond borders. She creates circuit-bending instruments, incorporating a variety of disciplines, genres and environments into her work. Rhéa attempts to engage linguistic limitations - focusing on the relationship between the Arabic language, and the constant themes of conflict prevalent in Lebanon where she comes from in relationship to sectarianism. Bending circuits, data poetics and interactive multi-sensory interfaces is her approach to instigate collaborative dialogue. The idea is to ultimately connect absence and presence by extrapolating a vast archive of information from our webs of experience. She began studying sound production and engineering to develop her ability to use sound as a means to defy how we approach circuitry. She continued her studies in Counselling and Communication as her creative process always bled into relevance in social spaces.
    • Dally’s residency is part of the Smashing Wor(l)ds: Cultural Practices for re/Imagining & un/Learning Vocabularies, a project financed by Creative Europe, programme by European Union.
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  • Freya Edmondes aka Elvin Brandhi
    • an improvising lyricist, sound, visual and performance artist originally from Bridgend, Wales. Her creative momentum is primed by an unfolding nomadic diligence. She has worked between Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan, Uganda, Senegal, and across Europe. She builds aberrant beats from field recordings, tape, vinyl, instrument and voice. The content of her work is context determined and priorities communication. Finding language for the ineffable nervous intensities characteristic to the historic immediate. Her performances in the group YEAH YOU are a flow of internal dialogue into the public space.

    • At the Smashing Wor(l)ds residency Freya collaborates with Rhéa Dally to explore the cyber-space, the dominate environment in which we socialise and to challenge the role of the user. They aim to excavate the psychosocial effect using their own stream of virtual intimacy exchange as critical recourse for analysing the immediate, trying to decipher in which mutant tense exists the disembodied subjectivity. They work with/on a-syntactical communication technology, analysing networkers aesthetic collaborations, daily efforts to make data tangible and humanise the digital whilst digitising human life.

    • Edmondes’ residency is part of the Smashing Wor(l)ds: Cultural Practices for re/Imagining & un/Learning Vocabularies, a project financed by Creative Europe, programme by European Union.
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  • Sam Domingo
    • is a writer and theatre practitioner. Born and raised in the Philippines, she writes essays, poems, and plays that have reached more territories than her two feet. She completed psychology and minor studies in English literature from the Ateneo de Manila University in 2019. She uses this background to discuss the silenced narratives of the human condition especially of the marginalized (LGBTQ+ community and migrant workers), our struggle with technology, and socio‐political issues in Asia. 
    • Her writings appeared in the International Business Times, CORDITE, and local literary portfolios. She is a contributor to CODAME, an international arts NGO based in the USA. In the performance arts, she has worked as a technical director, actress, and production head for plays staged by the Filipino theatre groups: Ateneo ENTABLADO and Tanghalang Ateneo. She has joined international conferences on the arts and cultures, such as the Harvard Project for Asian and International Relations (HPAIR) 2019, PASINAYA 2019 Festival of the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) in Pasay City, and ASEAN+3 Youth Cultural Forum 2019.
    • In October 2020, she was a fellow in the Curatorial Development Program organized by the University of the Philippines, Philippine Contemporary Art Network (PCAN), and Japan Foundation, Manila. Her curatorial project on Nena Saguil born out of the program will be presented in the Vargas Museum in 2021. She also currently explores ekphrastic poetry in an online artistic residency granted by !GWAK, an international art collective based in the United Kingdom.

    • At the Smashing Wor(l)ds residency at the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, Sam will explore the experiences of mis-gendering among transgender communities in two predominantly Catholic countries, Poland and the Philippines, approaching their lived experiences using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA).

    • Sam Domingo’s residency is part of the Smashing Wor(l)ds: Cultural Practices for re/Imagining & un/Learning Vocabularies, a project financed by Creative Europe, programme by European Union.

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• About the project
  • Smashing Wor(l)ds: Cultural Practices for re/Imagining & un/Learning Vocabularies
    • is an international project dedicated to the language used by art institutions. The various European cultural institutions involved in the project strive to contribute to the development of non-violent forms of expression and narratives, thereby contributing to reducing social and cultural exclusion.
    • The aim of the project is to balance official and dominant languages by introducing ways of expression based on diversity-based identities, social experiences and emancipation routes. The horizon of our work on language change is to enable comprehensive dialogue in all spheres of life. An important part of this process will be to support the narratives of marginalised communities.
    • One of the aims of the project is to create a good practice code. There will also be a podcast on vocabularies of the future that oppose xenophobia, transphobia, homophobia and racist.
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• Discussion hosts
  • Izabela Smelczyńska
    • a musicologist, improviser and author of texts about music. She performs experimental electronics solo and as part of the Euphonia Pseudolarix duo. She performed at the Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music, Sanatorium of Sound, Survival, Musica Privata. Author of music for radio plays, theatre performances and animation. She collaborates with Radio Capital, “Ruch Muzyczny”, “Glissando”, “Przekrój” and “Dwutygodnik”. Author of Poza rejestrem. Rozmowy o muzyce i prawie autorskim [Beyond the register. Conversations about music and copyright];
  • Sandra Frydrysiak
    • a cultural studies and sociology scholar working in gender studies, dance studies and new media studies. Lecturer in the Department of Cultural Studies at the SWPS University in Warsaw, the Department of Cultural Studies of the Polish University of Sciences in Toruń and the dance department of the Chopin University of Music in Warsaw. Member of the Interdisciplinary Research Centre Humanities/Art/Technology AAM. 
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• The Smashing Wor(l)ds: Cultural Practices for re/Imagining & un/Learning Vocabularies project is the result of a partnership between the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art (Poland), the Inna Przestrzeń Foundation (Poland), BOZAR (Belgium) and Kulturen in Bewegung (Austria). The project is funded by the European Union’s Creative Europe Fund.