Wednesday, 4 September 2024, 7.30 pm, diffrakt | centre for theoretical periphery
Film screening and conversation with
Sophie Seita | Naomi Woo
(The Hildegard von Bingen Society for Gardening Companions)
bingenTV is a recent film by Sophie Seita and Naomi Woo that centres on three episodes of a fictional talk show, set in 1987. Playful, flirty, and delightfully weird, the talk show immerses audiences in the world of The Hildegard von Bingen Society for Gardening Companions, a queer-feminist collective originally founded by the German mediaeval mystic and musician Hildegard von Bingen in the 12th century. The talk show’s charismatic host Gardenia interviews ‘members of the society’: a cast of queer characters real and fictional, past and present, in a whirlwind jaunt through space and time.
Underneath the over-the-top 80s aesthetic and patent absurdity, the work is also a sharp commentary on how history is recorded, whose stories are allowed to be told, and how we know about the past. Drawing on speculative archives and techniques of autofiction, the artists ask: if there had been such a queer talk show, would it have been allowed to air, or would the archive have been lost to history? The artists point to the fact that queer communities of care have always existed, and have always been engaged in political and social struggle – their histories simply haven’t always been recorded.
For this special screening, Sophie Seita and Naomi Woo will invite the audience into the world of The Hildegard von Bingen Society for Gardening Companions, a queer feminist collective revived or ‘propagated’ by the artists in 2020. They’ve since been joined by numerous international artists, writers, researchers, farmers, gardeners, and audiences, in their efforts to critically think about flawed histories, experiment with and share other forms of knowledge, and build community and collaborate across practices, and even space and time. Since 2020, in response to the isolation of the Covid-19 pandemic, the collective has hosted online and in-person community gatherings, produced an opera, a website, a zine, allotment workshops on permaculture, somatic landscapes, compost, an exhibition, a ritual about water, complicity, and honouring queer and trans elders and kin lost to the water(s); and a writing group for people from low-income backgrounds. The project gives voice to hidden and forgotten queer history, interspecies and environmental care.
As part of this event, Woo and Seita will also invite audiences to participate in a short workshop by writing ‘scores for care’ and thus contribute to their archive of ‘suspected members’.
The event is organised in conjunction with Sophie Seita’s Werner Düttmann Fellowship by the Junge Akademie of the Akademie der Künste.
