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reboot: responsiveness presents
Asynchronicity. A symposium-like gathering, hosted by Cally Spooner.

With Paul Abbott & Will Holder, Alex Baczynski-Jenkins, Taina Bucher, Elizabeth Freeman, Hendrik Folkerts, Irena Haiduk, Dana Luciano, Martina Roß-Nickoll, Cally Spooner with Sanna Blennow and Maggie Segale, Mark von Schlegell, Jesper List Thomsen, Jackie Wang and films by Pierre Bal-Blanc and Frances Scholz.

**Saturday, May 7, 2022, 8.59 am – 6.30 pm
Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne
Free Admission, no registration required

Sunday, May 8, 2022, 11 am – 8 pm
Ludwig Forum, Aachen
Free Admission, no registration required**

All contributions are in English. In Aachen, simultaneous translation into German is provided.

Asynchronicity is a symposium-like gathering of choreographies, lectures, sounds, screenings, and discussions assembled by artist Cally Spooner with reboot: responsiveness at Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne and Ludwig Forum, Aachen.

Asynchronicity takes as its backdrop the neoliberal paradigm of an always measurable performance. In this climate performance manifests at once as a regime of disciplinary power and a condition of everyday life, in which subjects constantly quantify, manage and stratify themselves until the social imagination and desire is deadened. Asynchronicity probes how such draining quests can be subverted by collectively fostering a resistance towards chrononormativity. Coined in 2010 by queer studies scholar Elizabeth Freeman (one of the gathering’s contributors), the term chrononormativity describes the prevalent use of time to organize human bodies toward maximum productivity.

Asynchronicity responds by unravelling the resistant potentials of becoming or remaining asynchronous. Over the course of two days, collaborators – artists, performers, musicians, theoreticians, dancers, curators and designers – are invited to unfold a diverse set of propositions for alternative, fugitive temporalities, affects and bodily practices that bend and subvert familiarity and which deliberately, or naturally, remain out of sync. Jointly introducing the notion of asynchronicity as an alternative, non-sequential mode of time, texts, movements, encounters and thoughts will collide across the partnering institutions in Aachen and Cologne.

Asynchronicity is part of Cally Spooner’s longterm research project Dead Time (since 2018) in which she finds and handles temporal structures beyond the Clock-Time standardizations that force labour, bodies, nervous systems, and digital technologies into a completely metric-orientated future. Conceived as the first of five assemblies hosted by the artist, that challenge the chrononormative order and the performance imperative implied.

While you may enter the symposium-like gathering in your own time - any moment or time span of preference - we suggest you experience its choreography in its entirety and in both cities, if possible.

reboot: responsiveness is the first cycle of reboot: - a collaborative, multi-cycle, anti-racist and queer-feminist dialogue encompassing performance and research based practices, jointly presented by Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne and Ludwig Forum für internationale Kunst, Aachen.

reboot:
Conceived by Eva Birkenstock, Nikola Dietrich, and Viktor Neumann
Core Collective: Alex Baczynski-Jenkins, Gürsoy Doğtaş, Klara Lidén, Ewa Majewska, Rory Pilgrim, Cally Spooner, and Mariana Valencia
Graphic design by Sean Yendrys

reboot: responsiveness is a cooperation of:
Kölnischer Kunstverein and Ludwig Forum Aachen

reboot: responsiveness is supported by:
Kunststiftung NRW, STIFTUNGKUNSTFONDS, and Neu Start Kultur