Join me at Goethe-Institut Boston's Germany Travel Stipend Showcase and Information Session on Feb 27 6:30pm where I'll give a presentation on the research and art-work I did in Germany in Dec 2023-Jan 2024, along with the other Boston-area artist who received the same Studio 170 travel grant, Kaia Berman-Peters.
I'll talk about two amazing residency programs that I spent barely enough time at that you might want to know about, and several more that I learned about while there; a deep dive that I took into a community care/mutual aid project that I think the Boston art community could really benefit from knowing about and which I am working now to import here; some of the complexities of what's going on in the artist-activist community in Berlin as I experienced it; failure; breakdown; inadequacy; death; memorial...all the good stuff. Please come, it will be weird and fun (I hope) and then there will be dancing.
ALSO, it's an opportunity to learn more about the grant if YOU have plans to do a project in Germany in 2024 and need travel support. Details below!
Meet last year's stipend recipients - Learn about Studio 170 programs and how to apply - Featuring live music by DJ Chaia
Wondering what the Studio 170 (travel stipend to Germany and residency at Goethe) is all about and how to apply? Want to get to know past recipents? Join us for a Studio 170 Showcase and Info Session!
2023 Studio 170 Travel Stipend recipients Chaia (Kaia Berman-Peters) and Heather Kapplow are back from their respective residencies in Germany and excited to share their stories and projects with us. Join us for an evening of their interactive project presentations, a session on Studio 170, residency opportunities in Germany and how to apply, and a Q&A session. As a special treat, Chaia will perform a set of her Klezmer-informed house/techno grooves dance music.
Studio 170 ǀ Germany is a new travel stipend that offers artists of all disciplines, living and/or working in New England, support for projects that take place in and interact with Germany. Whether an artist residency or collaboration with an artist based in Germany, the support program helps to make these projects possible by covering travel, accommodation and transport costs.
Chaia (Kaia Berman-Peters) My name is Chaia and I'm an electronic music artist who brings together samples of Eastern European Jewish music with house and techno grooves. My trip to Berlin and performance at the Shtetl Berlin Festival centered both around Hofn Stantsye, an audio-visual installation I created in collaboration with Dan Tombs, and around the repertoire of Adriane Cooper, a pioneer of the Jewish world who wrote songs about peace and community-building. During my trip, I met with Dan several times and built a visual component for the installation. I also performed Adriane's repertoire for an audience of 500 people at the Jewish Museum of Berlin. While I wasn't able to perform the installation at the festival, I've been invited back to the next iteration of the festival in November and plan to perform it then. During my trip I also met with SoCalled and Dobranotch, artists at the forefront of the electro-folk scene and collaborated with them on two new remixes, which will be released this summer. https://www.chaia.online/
Heather Kapplow I’m a conceptual artist who makes participatory experiences and went to Germany for six weeks to do research for a future collaborative project called “Getting Somewhere Important?” that looks at how public spaces reflect social values around success and failure. And at creative ways people respond to public space that resist this embedded binary. I spent part of my time in Berlin at ZK/U Center for Art and Urbanistics, and the rest at a residency in Hamburg called Hyper Cultural Passengers.
My plan for the trip took some unexpected twists and turns, but I trained in a DIY, feminist model of peer-driven community care; investigated my internal landscape for some of the patterns I’d intended to look at in physical landscapes; and—perhaps because of the scale of death being reported in the daily news, or because my residencies were both near sites of mass detainment and deportation of Jews in the 1940s—ended up focusing on the difficulty of memorializing the uniqueness of individual human lives.
I closed the trip by producing a workshop and very simple installation called “Deathbed Dreams” at a radical/queer artspace in Hamburg called Villa Magdalena K. https://www.heatherkapplow.com/.