Thursday 5 October at 7 pm at the North Hall

The Contemporary Art Centre happily invites you to the second event in the series of the Prelude of the 13th Baltic Triennial featuring a talk and a workshop by the Berlin based artist collective Lou Cantor.

We are keen to open our hearts to all kind of robots: trust them with our secrets and our shopping lists. We let them entertain us as well as ease some of our daily chores. As embodied subjects, they are ultimately customizable to our fancies. They come as males and females of any ethnicity, as flamingoes or twist dolls, and even basketballs. However, they are also double-edged swords: providing us with familiar interaction while suspending disbelief, they act as information filters benefiting organizations that created them. At a time when the interface is now the message, Lou Cantor poses the question: “can the breakdown of a relationship between embodied subjecthood and the performance and archiving of knowledge be a means of liberation?”.

During their talk and workshop at CAC, the artist collective will invite people to participate in an experience that will be structured around the alternative therapy method called Family Constellation Therapy, developed by Bert Hellinger in the 1990s. The method, deemed as pseudo-scientific and sometimes even bluntly labeled as a hoax, borrows from elements of existential phenomenology and indigenous spiritual mysticism inherent in native Zulu culture. During his time serving as a missionary in the 50s and 60s, Hellinger learned the Zulu language and got acquainted with their culture which is characterized by a positive and actual presence of the group’s ancestors, which are thought to live in a spirit world called unkulunkulu (meaning “the greatest of the great”), where they constantly require to be remembered. Otherwise, if one of the ancestors happens to be forgotten, she might seek to remind about herself by bringing trouble to the forgetful descendants.

Via an improvised theatre play, Lou Cantor will explore the possibilities of the Family Constellation Therapy for rethinking relationships with disembodied agents that we encounter in our own experience as well as construct an artificial intelligence avatar in the process…

Lou Cantor is a Berlin-based artist collective founded in 2011, whose main scope of interest is grounded in intersubjectivity and interpersonal communication. Lou Cantor’s practice explores the polysemic minefield of contemporary communication, where medium, message, and meaning constantly fold back into each other. Previous exhibitions include The Policeman’s Beard is Half Constructed, Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn; Spiritual Reality, Decad, Berlin; Fellow Travelers, apexart, NY; Cyborg Dreams, NY; The Labour of Watching, leto gallery, Warsaw and OSLO10, Basel; Language and Misunderstanding, CUNY, NY; Epistemic Excess, Artists Space, New York; 7th Berlin Biennale and New National Art, Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw.