„Asynchronicity – symposium-like-gathering”

“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 unraveling 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 long term research project „Deadtime“ (since 2018) in which she finds and handles temporal structures beyond the Clock-Time standardizations that force labor, 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.