Insides: MAGDA CHOWANIEC

Hello, how are you?

Screens are my new clothes I wear
on top of missing you!
Sensing a slight tension in my neck and shoulders
Exhausted bc of too much screen time
Pressed between different digital media, too little in the media of my body
Hating the disembodied routines
Missing my friends and my mum
Angry and anxious, happy and lonely and a lot with my own thoughts atm

Where are you right now?

In my 32m2 Gemeindebau flat in Margareten

Which sounds surround you?

A clock
Kids playing at the playground
Boys laughing and rapping
A mix of languages like honey on my soul
Mothers screaming
Cars driving
Birds chirping

Have you been productive so far? What are you working on?

I have been recently working on the online Symposium “Music Pours Over The Sense”, co-organized with Veza Fernandez, supported by the Doctoral School for Artistic Research at KUG Graz where I’m working. Symposium is a gathering of artists and researchers busy with relationships between bodies and sounds and focuses on the influence the political crisis and pandemics have on them. It takes place on 15th  & 16th of May online and is open for everyone to join.

Otherwise I initiated together with some other folks from free dance and performance scene  a petition Rescue of Arts (Jetzt unterzeichnen: Rettung-der-Künste//Rescue the Arts!), did some dance improvs with musicians on Zoom and do some live sessions with Markus S.- my partner from Mermaid & Seafruit. I think and write a lot.

I do not feel like producing but all the time like practicing.

What inspires you right now?

The power of practice and how the pandemics makes us on one hand reclaim different strategies but on the other, how it brings us back into a disembodied and individualist life style – friction of both. The impossibility of touch, of non-verbal communication and all the lack of realm of invisible inter-human relationality existing when we are physically together – all that makes me very reflective.

Reading material you can recommend?

“Music swims back to me” a poem by Anne Sexton
“Zwischen ich und Du. Dialogische Philosophie der Liebe” by Angelika Krebs
“The improvisation studies reader”
“Using the sky. A dance” by Deborah Hay
“Strange Tools” by Alva Noe
“The Black Unicorn” by Audre Lorde
Some artistic research of my friends

To listen?

Dancing mostly to my friends live streaming on twitch, otherwise loads of Sade, Tears for Fears, hd mirror, Talisto

For fitness in the park:

To watch?

Practices and lectures shared online f.ex. university of underground or nobody’s discipline

What’s your opinion on live-streams? You see any alternative ways to support the music community?

I rather play a mini concert for 8 friends of mine since 10ppl gatherings are allowed. I can live stream it. Live streaming only, playing for nobody makes me broken hearted – I am a live performer shaped by the relationship with the audience. Stadt Wien should offer extra funding for the concerts to be held for 8 ppl – the rest of the artist fee has to come from the public funding.

What are you missing most? What are you afraid of?

I miss touch and other bodies and voices the most… I learn and talk sharing my practices with others…I plead for non-verbal and non-lingual forms of knowledge and skill to be shared on a physical plane, not as pressed into a video medium or into a body of text
Embodied knowledge forced into words of text
injected into veins like tranquillisers
Criticism desired in shape of an office chair
Fresh air stays outside
as a potential of re-imagination
I am afraid to lose people I love, otherwise of nothing much

What will change you think?

I feel people started to reclaim the public space in the non-conformist ways, there seems to be less judgement and less order within the interactions. I hope it stays this way. I hope people will remember the oppression performed on their bodies and minds during the lockdown and will not take the others and their surrounding for granted. I wish the basic income comes into life and there will be a global limit on the awfully rich. I wish that culture and art will eventually be seen as oxygen and let into fields of education and of research

What is the gig or occasion you were most looking for, that was cancelled in this period?

ImpulsTanz and live choreography with 40 women (the last one still might happen)

Are you still able to pay your rent?

I am the luckiest person on the planet atm – since Sept 2019 till exactly end of August 2020, I have a part time job as a senior scientist (what the fuck is this name? I prefer Senior Astronaut) at KUG Graz. It is my first ever part time job and first time that I am not a freelancer – I was born Sunday and I am mega privileged.