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Bouquets [events]



Upcoming:









Past:

4 September, 7.30pm
Screening & Conversation
Diffrakt, Berlin




27 April, 2-4pm
Somatic LandscapesA workshop by The Hildegard von Bingen Society for Gardening Companions, led by Anju Marie Kasturiraj


1-5 April 2024
Sembrando Humedad,
Ruta del Castor, Mexico City


27 October - 8 December 2023
Exhibition: ‘bingenTV’
at Mimosa House, London

7 December 2023,
CLOSING PARTY of bingenTV
at Mimosa House, London


6 December 2023, Conversation and Listening Party
at Mimosa House, London


22 November 2023,
Artist talk by Taey Iohe,
at Mimosa House, London

11 November 2023, 5pm
Total Station, performance by Youngsook Choi
at Mimosa House, London


6 October 2023:
Workshop and performance, with Seda Ergul, Niya B, Sophie Seita,
Grand Union, Birmingham


10 October 2023:
Performance, by Naomi Woo and Sophie Seita,
Nottingham Contemporary,

6 August 2023
Hildegard’s cookies of joy,
online baking & writing workshop, led by Chiara Dellerba


SLOWLY AND SURELY
WITH AN ETERNAL WING
at The Pen Theatre, April 2023


Listening Session: Seeing Through Flames
at Nottingham Contemporary, March 2023


bingenTV at
Cockpit Theatre, August 2021, part of
Tete a Tete Opera Festival








still from bingenTV

Left to right: Milla Harding, Ishmael Kirby, Alice Morgan-Richards, Naomi Woo

bingenTV


4. September 2024, 7.30pm, diffrakt | zentrum für theoretische peripherie 

Film Screening and Conversation
Sophie Seita | Naomi Woo
(The Hildegard von Bingen Society for Gardening Companions)

bingenTV is a recent film by Sophie Seita and Naomi Woo that centres on three episodes of a fictional talk show, set in 1987. Playful, flirty, and delightfully weird, the talk show immerses audiences in the world of The Hildegard von Bingen Society for Gardening Companions, a queer-feminist collective originally founded by the German mediaeval mystic and musician Hildegard von Bingen in the 12th century. The talk show’s charismatic host Gardenia interviews ‘members of the society’: a cast of queer characters real and fictional, past and present, in a whirlwind jaunt through space and time.

Underneath the over-the-top 80s aesthetic and patent absurdity, the work is also a sharp commentary on how history is recorded, whose stories are allowed to be told, and how we know about the past. Drawing on speculative archives and techniques of autofiction, the artists ask: if there had been such a queer talk show, would it have been allowed to air, or would the archive have been lost to history? The artists point to the fact that queer communities of care have always existed, and have always been engaged in political and social struggle – their histories simply haven’t always been recorded.

For this special screening, Sophie Seita and Naomi Woo will invite the audience into the world of The Hildegard von Bingen Society for Gardening Companions, a queer feminist collective revived or ‘propagated’ by the artists in 2020. They’ve since been joined by numerous international artists, writers, researchers, farmers, gardeners, and audiences, in their efforts to critically think about flawed histories, experiment with and share other forms of knowledge, and build community and collaborate across practices, and even space and time. Since 2020, in response to the isolation of the Covid-19 pandemic, the collective has hosted online and in-person community gatherings, produced an opera, a website, a zine, allotment workshops on permaculture, somatic landscapes, compost, an exhibition, a ritual about water, complicity, and honouring queer and trans elders and kin lost to the water(s); and a writing group for people from low-income backgrounds. The project gives voice to hidden and forgotten queer history, interspecies and environmental care.

As part of this event, Woo and Seita will also invite audiences to participate in a short workshop by writing ‘scores for care’ and thus contribute to their archive of ‘suspected members’.

The event is organised in conjunction with Sophie Seita’s Werner Düttmann Fellowship by the Junge Akademie of the Akademie der Künste.

Bouquets [events]


Artist talk by Taey Iohe
Presented as part of Sophie Seita’s and Naomi Woo’s exhibition bingenTV at Mimosa House

Wednesday, November 22, 2023
  • 4:30 PM  6:30 PM
  • Mimosa House


Emerging wild fiddleheads, photo by Taey Iohe

Leak Out of Body, Leak Out of Planet

How do our defiant earthly bodies and we release our tears, pus, lymph, hormones, bile, blood, and embodied knowledge into an uncertain tomorrow? What are the consequences of this leakage resulting from our experiences of upheaval, land excavations, and weary bodies? The act of separating land from water isn't merely division; it represents an act of creation. Likewise, the separation of ailing bodies from the wounded planet is intricately linked to colonial actions, affecting those residing by the water's edge or at the outermost margins of society. What emerges as a result of leaking from these experiences of uprooting, land disruptions, and exhausted bodies? Artist Taey Iohe will share their ongoing artistic research on 'leak territories' in personal and socio-botanical accounts, navigating polluted environments, encompassing both natural and societal systems, with profound impacts felt by the most vulnerable beings.

Taey Iohe is a migrant art worker, a slow gardener, and a queer mother who creates and follows stories of decolonising botany as a practice through an Asian crip/queer feminist lens. Their approach fuses research-based work with personal narratives that challenge the socio-botanical entanglements within medicine culture, and climate justice. Taey is a co-founder of the Decolonising Botany Working Group and has presented a performance, A Refusing Oasis at Documenta 15 (2022). Taey holds a PhD in the programme of Gender, Identity and Culture at the School of English and Film, University College Dublin, funded by Writing On Borders. Taey is a working member of the Feminist Duration Reading Group and a resident at Somerset House. Taey teaches Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art.

Listening Source
https://www.nts.live/shows/phambinho/episodes/phambinho-3rd-october-2023



Bouquets [events]

Past:








bingenTV

Cockpit Theatre, August 2021, part of Tete a Tete Opera Festival

Documentary-opera meets quirky gardening show, bingenTV immerses audiences in the world of the Hildegard von Bingen Society for Gardening Companions, a queer-feminist collective originally founded by the German mediaeval mystic and musician Hildegard von Bingen and only recently uncovered by scholars. Through music, film, text, and a healthy dose of gossip, the show traces the history of the society and its revivals. With Sophie Seita as bingenTV’s charismatic host, and The Mermaid Cafe as the show’s dynamic studio band, you’ll not only be treated to a whirlwind jaunt through space and time, but also to some of history’s most insightful minds on interspecies and environmental care, plants, and healing. In the process, the performance offers a poignant meditation on hidden & forgotten voices in gardening history and beyond.
Photos: Claire Shovelton

bingenTV (live performance) Trailer (2021)


[closed captions by Collective Text]

Documentation of the full performance available upon request.

concept + creation

Sophie Seita
Naomi Woo

on-stage performer

Sophie Seita (& cameo by Naomi Woo)

 
research + video contributions

Adam Moore
Emma Attwood
Jenny Chamarette
Kat Addis
Istanbul Queer Art Collective
Dr. Susie Self
Taey Iohe
music

The Mermaid Cafe (Ruari Paterson-Achenbach & Joanna Ward)

Video and sound editing

The Cockpit Theatre, & Sophie Seita & Naomi Woo
Trailer edit: Ruby Reding

captions

Collective Text

special thanks

Duplikat Press
Botanical Paperworks
Bill Bankes-Jones
Leo Doulton
Anna Gregg
The British Council, Farnham Maltings, Canada Council for the Arts and the High Commission of Canada

further reading

  • Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang,  ‘Decolonization is Not a Metaphor’
  • Jamaica Kincaid, My Garden(book)
  • Mamoud Darwish, ‘Who am I Without Exile?’, translated by Fadi Joudah
  • Lisa Robertson, Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture
  • Carolyn Steedman, ‘Reading the Past’
  • Donna Haraway, ‘Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin’
  • Joe Crowdy, ‘Queer Undergrowth: Weeds and Sexuality in the Architecture of the Garden’
  • Lisa Moore, ‘Queer Gardens: Mary Delany’s Flowers and Friendships’
  • Arakawa and Madeline Gins, Making Dying Illegal Architecture Against Death



Bouquets [events]


Total Station, performance by Youngsook Choi at Mimosa House, Saturday 11 November 2023, 5pm


Youngsook Choi's performance, Total Station, invites the audience to hold the space for grief over losses by separation and hierarchy derived from colonial science around nature and life forms. Posing Western knowledge production as dominance-oriented ideologies and weaving through the speculative narratives of the elephant named Larut, this performance recalls, sits with and listens to the spirits merely reduced to ghostly numbers of theodolite survey in neo/colonial structure. Total Station attempts a spiritual upholding for interrogating the full circle of violence of extractive systems and conjuring up the interspecies healing moments of imagining otherwise.

Youngsook Choi is an artist/researcher trained in human geography. Under the umbrella theme of political spirituality, her performances and multi-faceted installations explore intimate aesthetics of solidarity building and collective healing. Grief has been the focus of Youngsook's recent practice, posing collective grief as the process of socio-political autopsy upon certain types of death and environmental destruction. Not This Future (2020), commemorating the Essex 39 incident rooted in the Formosa Disaster; Book of Loss (2022), intervention performance grieving seven lost glaciers; In Every Bite of the Emperor (2021-ongoing/long-term), the transnational weaving of neo-colonial narratives around damaged ecosystems are in tandem with this inquiry.

Various institutions have supported Youngsook's works. Amongst them are Arts Catalyst, Asia-Art-Activism, Barbican Centre, Camden Arts Centre, Coventry Biennial 2021, Estuary Festival, FACT Liverpool, Flat Time House, GOSH Arts, Heart of Glass, Liverpool Biennial 2021, Nottingham Contemporary, Up Projects in the UK; ARKO Art Center, Seoul Mediacity Biennale 2023, Seoul Museum of Art in Korea; Documenta 15, Kunsthalle am Hamburger Platz in Germany; Gerimis in Malaysia; and Nextdoor ARI in Australia.