Templuralities

‘Templuralities’ is a long-term artistic research into cosmologies that offer alternatives to the linear-progressive model of time. Through a polysensorial practice of experiencing and knowing, this research proposes re-tuning our senses towards re-embodying time, for every-body keeps time.

‘Keeping’ time is both an act of scientific inquiry and artistic intimacy. This research proposes a triad of artistic-scientific things that hold and unfold time: instruments, myths and codes. Instruments – musical, scientific or those of the human body-mind itself; myths – aural and textual forms of stories that tell time; and codes – sacred-geometries and intelligent-algorithms from digital to occult. This time keeping triad calls into focus the ecological implications of temporal structures and therefore to our entangled relation with the environment. Responding to the extractive-exploitative bent of colonial thought that still motors modernity and its globalised malaise, Templurlities assert that acts of decolonisation are always also acts of environmental affirmation.

Initiated by the Sono-Choreographic Collective in 2020, the Research unfolds through collaborative practices and shared presentations which we call Environments & Playgrounds.

Coming from practices of sculpture, music and dance, we, Kerstin Ergenzinger, Bnaya Halperin-Kaddari and Kiran Kumar, initiated the Sono-Choreographic Collective for transdisciplinary art and research. Our work distils into sound and object making, as well as movement and writing.

At the core of our collaborative practice is play: We play intentionally to seek, affirm and share a life-ness, which we see as so important to the world today. We play our self-made research instruments, and also our human body-mind. We play attentively with notions of subtlety, embodiment and consciousness through the arts.

In actively seeking out various constellations of collectivity, we engage in interpersonal dialogues, focused reading groups, workshops and publications with other artistic and scientific collaborators, beyond our core trio. Through these collaborations we intend for Sono-Choreography to tap into the generative potentials of inter-cultural and interdisciplinary differences in order to expand personal encounters of something ineffable into shared experiences of nuance.

It is in this sharing of ineffable, nuanced co-presences that we locate our urgent resistance to the excesses of modernity, to tendencies of higher, stronger and faster. Our resistance is both micropolitical, in that it proposes subtle modes of sensing, as well as of planetary proportions, in its search for more life sustaining cosmologies. Our practice of Sono-Choreography always strives to tease out more than monistic ways of sensing, experiencing, knowing and therefore relating-with our worlds.