Why can’t we just go on the way we were?

If we change the standpoint we can study where we stand. 

Is it a store, a bar, a cafe, something linked to energy and sugar and caffeine? 

Traveling organisms, where one is carried by another to a mutually beneficial arrival or location. 

Take 1, Take 2, Take whatever.

What we wrote together at the time…

For the last two years, No Total, a group based in New York has been meeting, at Artists Space Books & Talks and elsewhere, to read, write, and discuss. Up until now, they have been meeting as a closed group but are now opening up an invitation to have a weekend together.

Arika have been entangled with the No Total group since Episode 4: Freedom is a Constant Struggle (where there was a transatlantic reading group/hook-up/performance project that culminated in a live event at the Episode) – practicing and doing, testing out and refining ways of being together at a distance and sometimes in the same place. We have provided support and context for readings, conversations, and ongoing actions.

These events look to continue some earlier conversations and begin new ones.

Throughout the weekend, we will be taking place. There will be a choreography of people, space, thoughts, movements, and time. Each day will have its own kind of logic in making people and places. Meet us if you can at Artists Space Books & Talks, 55 Walker Street, New York, NY 10013. Below is a schedule around which this choreography will hopefully emerge.

Friday May 29 – Party

9pm

No Total will perform Bernie. A time to lift each other up.

9.30pm

Constantina Zavitsanos and Amalle Dublon

10.30pm

Penis is Sophia Cleary and Samara Davis. They are a feminist punk band based in New York.

11pm

New Body Music. LA based dance duo’s first LIVE performance along with a special DJ Set.

1am

Close

Saturday 30 May – Territory

3pm

No Total will perform Bernie. A time to lift each other up.

3.15pm

No Total will teach Bernie.

6pm

Meal

6.30 pm

Mariana Valencia will give a joke.

6.45 pm

Jordan Lord will talk about the proximity of 55 Walker St. to W. Broadway, where artists once marched—led in part by Yvonne Rainer—declaring the death of SoHo.

7pm

Arias Abbruzzi Davis

7.30 pm

Metropolitan Avenue, Christine Noschese, Video, 61 min, 1985

Women grassroots activists from the Italian, Polish, and African American communities of Greenpoint-Williamsburg tell stories about their lives and collectively organize to save their neighborhoods.

9pm

Close

Sunday 31 May – Framing

1pm

No Total will perform Bernie.

1.15pm

Framing and screenings including:

Sandy Stone scene from Gendernauts, video excerpt from a film by Monika Treut, 1:16 min, 1999

Cultural theorist Sandy Stone demonstrates quite strikingly how feminine and masculine mannerisms can morph at a moment’s notice, if one is intimately aware of their differences and similarities.

Nicholas & Hillary, Elizabeth Orr, HD video, 8:55 min, 2015

A short experimental narrative filmed within a 360 degree tracking shot at Artists Space Books and Talks in NYC. The piece portrays neoliberal superpowers Nicholas Negroponte and Hillary Clinton performed by actor Jane Levy and NYC choreographer Mariana Valencia. Through gender and race-bending performances, the characters elaborate on the early development of the internet, their private lives, and anti-cartesian philosophy.

Permanent verbalization, Emma Hedditch, video, 30 min, 2015

A part live video essay made from images exploring cooling machines, the wearing of pyjamas outdoors and notes on self regulation.

Anxiety, Joseph Teeling, video and performance, 18 min, 2015

A film and performance hinged on evoking and mediating symptoms of anxiety and affects of desire.

4pm

Morgan Bassichis will be offering a few very practical tools to improve some of the most important things about yourself (not that there’s anything wrong with you!), based primarily on decades of human experience, mostly personal.

4.30pm

Melissa Dyne and Khaela Maricich collaborate as The Blow. Melissa works with frequency and Khaela works with something like frequency in the form of intimacy. They’ll be trying something new.

5pm

Snacks

6pm

Morgan Bassichis

6.30 pm

No Total will perform Bernie.

7pm

Close

Introduction

Take 1

We’ve been trying to counter the kind of common sense that would group us together (by means of separation) with the common senses we experience as a group.

If we change the standpoint we can study where we stand.

Why can’t we just go on the way we were?

Class tells a narrative of who we see.

How do different forms involved in expanding ideas towards a wider group of people lead to some productive experiences?

Take 2

Even within the common sense of a shared class, there are multiple differences.

Take 3

I’m gathering what surrounds from a biological level.  From a more internal and chemical anatomy of awareness

Is it a store, a bar, a cafe, something linked to energy and sugar and caffeine?

Take 4

Teach me how to Bernie?

A Structure that is using formal elements like lights and qualities of materials and movement as a kind of formatting device that we go in and out of.

Travelling organisms, where one is carried by another to a mutually beneficial arrival or location.  The whale carries the remora, it has more energetic resources, it has greater mass.  On the large whale who would quickly notice the minute remora?

Take 1, Take 2, Take whatever

No Total is…

No total is invitational.

The group No Total is a contemplation, growing without anticipation of arriving. We take position. We meet with one another, read, discuss, and sometimes write. We are curious about what happens surrounding knowledge and production. We surround.

We meet to share and change where, when, and how we work. There is a kind of work we want to do – the work of caring for one another, our practices, ourselves. This work is quite different from the work we need to do for subsistence, to provide the resources to take care of ourselves and others. We have day jobs and night jobs. We are thinking about these things.

We are implicated and escaping. We are in the know. We are partially funded, sharing spaces, and in need. We are parts. We are Ensemble. Our liminal bodies in the queered sphere are not lack.

We use our common senses to navigate a commons.

No Total is Ginger Brooks Takahashi, Emma Hedditch, Jordan Lord, Elizabeth Orr, Joseph Teeling, and Mariana Valencia. We have a relationship to Artists Space, their history and resources, which is proximal and peripheral, meeting regularly at Artists Space Books & Talks, 55 Walker Street, New York. No Total are involved with Arika, who have provided support and context for our readings, conversations, and ongoing actions, starting at Episode 4: Freedom is a Constant Struggle.

No Total is supported by Artists Space and their supporters

Arika is supported by Creative Scotland