Protocinema presents A Few In Many Places, curated by Abhijan and Mari Spirito, a multi-city group exhibition which addresses on-going collapses and cycles of violence, through various forms of collectivity. Taking place in Seoul, Bangkok, Istanbul, New York, Santurce, and Guatemala City, all of these interventions use sustainable exhibition-making models of reducing exploitation (of natural resources, labor and knowledge) and consumption (no shipping or flying). This year, collaborators present works on continuing inequalities happening in both physical and digital realms. Developed by Protocinema in 2020, A Few In Many Places maintains a foot in physical real-life, small and safe get-togethers in each community while utilizing far-reaching digital support structures, to be both hyper-local and globally interconnected. Each chapter is site-responsive while speaking across the regions and produced in a format that allows for forms of engagement under various conditions of lockdowns or other contingent situations.

In Santurce, Seoul, and Guatemala City, the artists will engage with the different communities and silenced histories through manifold ways. In Santurce, Escuela de Oficios, the collective platform of Jorge González’s practice, will present a series of interventions and in-person programs in collaboration with Organización del Pueblo Indígena Can-jíbaro de Borikén (CAN). Their project, Bateyes del Chibal, focuses on engaging with communal belonging within the context of ceremonial plazas, in Borikén (Puerto Rico), ancestrally called bateys by indigenous and Afro-descendent people in the Caribbean. In Seoul, Welcome to Ogasawara navigates trans-boundary waters of both the literal sea and the “sea” of current internet conditions which are now even more fragmented by boundaries of nationality, ethnicity, or citizenship. The collective will present a multi-platform online-and-offline project in the Champs-Elysee Shopping Plaza in the Euljiro district. In Guatemala City, the project will take place in Pagoda Imaginaria, developed by artist and organizer Esvin Alarcon Lam, who has invited artists Antonio Pichillá and Camilla Juárez to develop a collective exhibition: Pichillá presents an installation following his tradition as a spiritual healer from the Mayan culture. Juárez’s installation, video, and photographs document the performance titled Light Caravan, performed on 5 March 2021, as an act of women lighting other women on the streets of Guatemala City; and Lam, who reflects on the global botanical histories and how they are interlaced with the colonial expeditions financed by the Agricultural Department of the USA, presents a sound installation accompanied by raw bamboo grafted with natural flowers.

A Few In Many Places in Bangkok, Istanbul, and New York will focus on the image in its myriad forms as a site of collective investigation and re-learning as well as a tool to unhinge the cycles of violence. In Bangkok, Komtouch Dew Napattaloong works with broken cameras for photographs and video-audio installation along with sound work by Thanart Rasanon. The project continues the artist’s long-term investigation into the politics of movement and belonging, through an engagement with urban refugees and asylum-seekers, who in Thailand have no specific domestic legal framework for protection. In Istanbul, the exhibition takes vision, body, and movement as subject-matters, and as sensory metaphors of cycles, re-cycles, and breaks those cycles. Zeynep Kayan, with her video works using her body, replays endless repetitions of small physical movements, recalling somatic knowledge, which our bodies carry and transmit for generations. ARK, an on-going collaborative work by Kathryn Hamilton and Deniz Tortum explores the ways that contemporary technologies have provided the framework for understanding the relationship between the body and the world. For the New York chapter of the exhibition, Lila Nazemian in collaboration with Vartan Avakian, Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh, and Kristine Khouri members of the Arab Image Foundation (AIF) will explore histories of (forced) migration, memory and material culture through their intervention situated in a house on Colonels Row, Governors Island. Through photography, research texts, and film, artists as well as participants from the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies’ (NYU) Practitioner-in-Residence workshop (entitled: Unravelling Collections and Practices: Rights Materialities and Photographic Agency), will share ideas of and proposals to consider repatriation, rightful ownership, custodianship and control over culture and data.

A Few In Many Places is accompanied by a new edition of ProtoZine including the texts by the curatorial group Collective Rewilding (Sara Garzón, Ameli Klein, and Sabina Oroshi), philosopher Erik Bordeleau and a collaborative essay connecting two city interventions (Santurce and Istanbul) and five collaborators Kathryn Hamilton / Deniz Tortum, Zeynep Kayan, Jorge González, Mari Spirito.

Download the zine here.

More information here: https://www.protocinema.org/exhibitions/a-few-in-many-places2