Dear Travellers,

On Thursday March 13 you are invited to board Bus 000.

departure: KABK, auditorium
destination: End of the World
departure time: 18:00

Should you choose to accept this invitation, this journey will take you through states of reflection, introspection and disillusionment in the face of global crisis and catastrophe, asking how we might face up to the state of decay we find ourselves in at this moment.

This session is based on the book Hospicing Modernity by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, which departs from the assumption that modernity is beyond repair, and asks how we can shift our energy away from trying to 'fix' it, and instead towards the sticky work of trying to lay to rest the stories, habits and behaviours we inherited from modernity. What grief, disillusionment and complexity do we have to befriend to do this work, and how can these states become generative for something else to be born?

We look forward to welcoming you on board to further probe these questions together. If you want to do some preparatory work, we recommend this short introduction video to get started.

Please find your ticket enclosed, and see you on Thursday.

Existential greetings,
Crew of Bus000
(aka hospicing modernity book club)

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The hospicing modernity book club (aka the hospies) have been meeting online almost weekly since summer 2024. (They likely join many other clubs and reading groups based on this book though they still haven't finished the book, and it's looking like they might never.) In these sessions they slowly digest the teachings together, as well as experiment with various somatic meditation techniques and visual mediums to assist in their hospicing. While originating as a book club it has become something more akin to a support and therapy group for practising modes of relating and sensing otherwise. The group recently held their first in-person retreat, spending an extended weekend co-habitating, resting and hospicing round the clock, and in the near future, they are planning a week-long hospicing modernity retreat.

This week we will be joined by Jasbir K. Puar, who has written extensively about disability and debility in the context of the occupation of Palestine. Jasbir K. Puar will be joining us live via zoom, from Cape Town where she is currently teaching.

You can find an extract from Jasbir’s writing on p. 40 of the Overwintering reader & activity book (available from KABK library if you don’t have your copy yet). You can also borrow Jasbir’s book The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability from the KABK library, from the collection of books acquired for Overwintering.

Please note that this lecture will touch on the current iterations of genocide in Gaza and practices of maiming and debilitation, so this could be sensitive material or bring up intense reactions for some of us. We plan to start and end the session with a grounding exercise.

Jasbir K. Puar is Distinguished Faculty of Arts Professor in the Social Justice Institute at the University of British Columbia and Extraordinary Professor in Women's and Gender Studies at the University of the Western Cape. She is the author of the award-winning books The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (2017) and Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (2007). Her articles have been published in journals such as Social Text and South Atlantic Quarterly, and in media such as Al-Jazeera and The Guardian. In 2019 she received the Kessler Award from the Center for Gay and Lesbian Studies (CLAGS) at CUNY, which recognizes lifetime achievement in and impact on queer research and organizing.

If you are not feeling well, you can instead join the lecture online via zoom. Click here to watch via zoom.

Also on Thursday 6 March in the Auditorium: Storytelling for Change with Karim Ali from the Gaza Sunbirds, hosted by the KABK Student Union with Crip The Curriculum, 1-2pm. More info on the KABK Student Union instagram.

On February 20, the February (snow) moon will mark the last quarter and Overwintering will host Toni Kritzer for a performance lecture titled The Sick Garden. In Toni’s words:

“The Sick Garden entangles my story of illness with the life of a garden in need of care. Questioning narratives of disability and sickness in ecosystems and in ourselves, I wonder how healing, both in the human and more-than-human, might be possible beyond restoration. If we cannot return to a romanticized condition of ‘health’ and ‘functionality’, which forms of care and tending-to can we find in the open wounds, the injuries, the impairment?”

Weaving a story of slugs and viruses, contamination and care, The Sick Garden tells of climate collapse, of ancestral knowledge of seasons and sowing times destabilizing below our feet. We will need to deal with sick ecosystems all the time, as ecological relations unravel. We will need to build gardens, and futures, where disease and disability have a place.

Toni Kritzer is a trans*, white, chronically ill/disabled performance artist, based in a forest close to Utrecht. There and elsewhere, they forage for stories beyond the human, and share these stories through artistic research, critical walking practices, and performance. From their upbringing in the rural south of Germany, they carry embodied knowledge of agricultural practices and folklore, making them a student of landscapes. With a background in theater, their work is interdisciplinary and includes performance, writing, facilitating, and communal gardening. In 2024, they graduated from the Academy of Theater and Dance Amsterdam. While there, they initiated a community garden in 2023, where they host a series of events that anchor gardening within art education, and explore/embody ecological (community) care. Toni’s work has been featured at Amsterdam Fringe, invited to grow in residencies (Zone2Source, hooops) and they regularly give lectures and workshops.

@tonikritzer

Covid requirements

For this week’s programme, in order to make this event accessible to disabled and immunocompromised members of our community, we ask everyone to wear a well-fitting, FFP2 or KN95 mask. There will be masks and tests available for everyone at the entrance, but you are very welcome to bring your own if you find that the ones we have don’t fit you well.

If wearing a mask for the whole event isn’t accessible for you (for instance due to sensory overstimulation), or if you have any symptoms (sore throat, runny nose, headache, fever, digestive issues...) we kindly ask that you stay home.

You can email us (overwinteringschool@gmail.com) to receive the event's materials, and Stephane (s.blokhuis@kabk.nl), to have your remote attendance counted.

The event won't be recorded outside of photographs, but we can send you the artist's performance script, as well as a link to an earlier video version of the work. You will find the homework in your copy of the reader.

Free, no rsvp necessary.

Overwintering, the programme of Studium General 2025 (link to main webpage), continues on 13 February with guest artist Lina Bravo Mora, who will share her work sedimenting in the times of clay:

sedimenting in the times of clay is an invitation for participants to hold a ball of clay in their hands and to delve into themselves and the memories of clay which our bodies hold, through the awareness of touch. Our bodies become porous, these membranes letting through the stories of macro relations that have shaped clay over geological time.

The clay that comes to sit under your fingernails travelled along the halls of the art academy, perhaps pulled from a trash can and hydrated back to life. But its movement stretches much farther and deeper than we humans can sense, becoming known to us in the sludge dredged from the harbor near Amsterdam, or bit by bit eroding from the bank of the Maas River, or neatly vacuum-sealed as a large brick for your next project after its extraction in a mine, all the while its mineralised life cohabitating with sand, silt and loam. Clay comes from a place, and actually forms those places.

Lina Bravo Mora comes from Sabana de Bogotá, Colombia and now lives in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. She is an artist and facilitator working with clay, water, soil, food and fire, researching visions and sensations on the geologies of touch, and our not-so-innocent entanglements with the territories we inhabit, dream of, and/or are part of. With a background in social anthropology, critical pedagogies, and creative conflict transformation, and now learning about generative somatics and embodiment for social justice.

Please note that this performance lecture will touch on the toxicity of the soils we live in and autoimmune responses of the body, so this could be sensitive material or bring up intense reactions for some of us.

For the first event of Overwintering, the programme of Studium General 2025 (link to main portal page), we will be joined by Angelo Custódio:

…in spiralling waters

In a body~phobic world, monsters are too few to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the ordinary hums of the common chorus. Its turbulent currents, of a dominant affect tone, echo in a collective shrug turned tidal wave. The vortex murmurs synchronised gestures of unquestioned movement. Unstable and theatrical, we exist as whirlpools, temporary bodies trembling with rupture and reverberation.

…in spiralling waters invites the audience to drift into the depths, where listening becomes quantum

Angelo Custódio (b. 1983, PT/NL) is a researcher, artist and performer experimenting with voice, writing and sound. He creates sonic based experiences from a crip~queer perspective, informed by critical theory and embodied knowledge. His work transverses poetics and techno-embodied ways of voicing while attuning the audience to different modes of listening.

www.angelocustodio.com

@oralityovermorality