FRArt Vibes and Leaks goes elastic

1. Vibes and Leaks: biographies

  • type: Article
  • ref: DOC.2021.183

Jara Rocha researches, mediates and experiments with the cultural studies of technology, from a trans*feminist sensibility. Identifies as a cultural agent who depends on others, tending to attend to the semiotic-material emergencies of the mundane. For example, together with Femke Snelting, she is currently looking after the Possible Bodies project (volumetric technologies), with Nicolas Malevé she is investigating the promises of artificial vision algorithms, with Xavier Gorgol and Kym Ward study the somatopolitical operations of voice production in the workshop series "Vibes & Leaks", with Lucía Egaña she observes the mechanisms of institutional passing, with Joana Moll she measures the forces of the most everyday technocolonialism and with Laura Benítez and Helen Pritchard she stresses the notion of partial reparation by writing "queer analytics" regarding experiences of damage.
Together they often work with politics and aesthetics embedded in infrastructure, textual mass logistics, and test non-formal forms of learning in collective situations such as the Euraca Seminar, Teaching to Transgress, Relearn Summerschool, or The Underground Division, in differenciated frameworks such as Constant (Brussels), Transmediale (Berlin), Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid), LUMA (Arlès), UdelaR (Montevideo), Goldsmiths (London), Mediacity Bienale (Seoul), Sonic Acts (Amsterdam), CCEL (Lima) , Schloss Solitude (Stuttgart), MIT (Cambridge) or La Gaîté Lyrique (Paris). http://jararocha.blogspot.com/
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Kym Ward has over ten years of experience in running socially engaged arts projects, and both designing and conducting Arts-focussed research. She is invited to run project-based courses at various European universities and notfor-profit associations. Kym explores methods of non-verbal communication with different user groups, using a person-centred approach to develop Artsbased health interventions. She is Project Coordinator at The Brain Charity in Liverpool and has been running musicbased therapy workshops for people living with dementia since 2018.
Kym co-founded and is director at Bidston Observatory Artistic Research Centre, on The Wirral (UK) – a not-forprofit autonomous study site which enables researchers from multiple disciplines to develop communal projects. Her work has been supported by the Jan Van Eyck Academie and Mondriaan fonds in The Netherlands and Goethe Institute in Germany.
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x. (Xavier Gorgol) is working in-between states: student, teacher, animator, performer, activist, volunteer, witch. While currently working as a part-time administrative at her/their/his alma mater, erg (école de recherche graphique), they/he/she is teaching traditional 2D animation with a feminist and queer point of view to the students at the same school. He/they/she is co-organising the project TTTToolbox that she/they/he helped creating in 2017. Interested in the art pedagogies and their relations with feminist, queer and intersectional theories, she/he/they is studying to get a secondary school teacher degree (agrégation) and started a master degree specialising him in gender studies with the french speaking universities in Belgium.
Over the past years, x. collaborates on different projects, with Kym Ward and Jara Rocha on “Vibes&Leaks” building knowledges they/she/he gathered over her/their/his experiences in pedagogical contexts. He/she/they collaborates with the artist Rares-Augustin Craiut on diferent food performances developping working axes : animation, pedagogy and voice.
From 2011 he/she/they is participating in the activities of the organisation Genres Pluriel.le.s, an NGO active for the rights of transgender and intersexual people.