KASSIA & THE NEW CONVENT(ION)

The composer, poet and Byzantine abbess KASSIA is considered the first European composer whose works have survived to this day. KASSIA was born in Constantinople in the year 810. She is an enigmatic personality not only as a musician. She is also a writer. More than 250 of her texts are preserved in the form of epigrams. Last but not least, she appears as a political figure, rhetorically opposing the emperor Theophilos in his search for a bride. And finally founds a women's monastery on the seventh hill of Constantinople, today's Istanbul. KASSIA is a kind of early feminist and cosmopolitan role model.

KASSIA was the focus of a digital conference in 2021 and the opera performance KASSIA in late 2021/early 2022, which represent the starting point of a special undertaking supported by many actors: For more than one and a half years, programmers have been working together with media and performance artists to program an online archive that aims to open up the possibilities of digital empowerment spaces for the issues of women's rights (Istanbul Convention) and new queer feminist practices and narratives.

The performative online archive KASSIA will finally be opened on December 14th. The Archive portraits the different parts of the project in a bundled form and links them interactively. The KASSIA archive aims to make the Kassia cosmos accessible, whereby all media developed in the previous project parts - music, texts, performance, lectures, images, portraits, etc. - will become components of this digital space. Visitors are invited to experience contributions from over 40 international musicians, poets, activists, and scholars, and to leave their own traces in Kassia's (digital) monastery.

www. kassia-archive.org by kainkollektiv, MIREVI (HSD), sputnic visual arts (a.o.), illustrations: Verena Herbst
 

December 14, 2022 / 7 pm
THE NEW CONVENTION I. ON DIGITAL ARCHIVES
with collaborators of the archive
(Istanbul Gender Museum, Pracownia Kuratorska a.o.)
hosted by kainkollektiv
Click here to register: https://bit.ly/3XjEgkq

December 15, 2022 / 7 pm
THE NEW CONVENTION II. ON SPACES OF EMPOWERMENT
with experts on contemporary art, feminism and the global south
hosted by kainkollektiv
Click here to register: https://bit.ly/3Xib3GF

In cooperation with the Heinrich Böll Foundation and the Istanbul Gender Museum.
Funded by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia in the Medienkunstfonds and by the City of Bochum.