Beginning with the audio engineering technique of ‘ringing out a room’—to locate resonant frequencies—after the siren, before the bell turns broadcasting infrastructure (radios, headphones, microphones, cables) into a site-responsive sound system that hums with feedback. after the siren, before the bell takes place the first Monday of the month, beginning after the blare of the public test sirens ends at 12:01:27, and ending at 12:59:59 when the ringing of large city church bells commence.
This iteration of the work will feature performance maker and sociologist Diane Mahín who will be “growling,” a technique often used in black metal performances. She will be building a layered internal monologue that will loop through the radio system, breaching and flooding into the passageways of the Pakhuis Wilhelmina warehouse where P/////AKT is located.
after the siren, before the bell is supported by Amsterdam Fonds voor de Kunst, and was developed with project space When Site Lost the Plot (Amsterdam, NL).
Diane Mahín is a Dutch-Iranian performance maker and sociologist based in Amsterdam. Through sound, image, and physicality, she scrutinizes the human body as a material object in order to dissect social constructions, as she wishes to grasp their absurdity and humor. Dissociation, emptiness, and death are recurring themes in her work. The sociologist in her is fascinated by social constructs and human subjugation to social systems. She uses the rehearsal studio as a laboratory to look at social constructs removed from their context. Hidden human sounds such as cries, gut-sounds, and grunts, function as a catalyst to re-frame these socially constructed behaviorisms. After her studies at Goldsmiths, University of London and Maastricht Institute of Performative Arts, Diane recently graduated from Sandberg Institute. Her works have been shown in visual arts, theater, and new music contexts such as Museumnacht Amsterdam, Rewire, KIKK (BE), Frascati, Veem House for Performance, STUK Leuven (BE), XING Bologna (IT), Motel Mozaïque, and Instrument Inventors Initiative. Alongside her individual practice, she makes performances with her brother Manuel Groothuysen under the name FADAT.
Marissa Lee Benedict and David Rueter’s (USA/NL) collaborative site-adapted videos, sculptures, installations, and drawings intercept infrastructural platforms and linguistic architectures from the “official world.” Stealing standards and processes from technologies of possession, communication, or hosting, the duo assembles, documents, and re-performs these worlds as unruly fantasies, lodging materiality, voice, intimacy, and, at times, their own bodies into the crevices of their logistical genealogies. They have exhibited work in the 34th Bienal de São Paulo (BR); 16th Venice Architecture Biennale (IT); Msheireb Museums (QT); The Renaissance Society (US); The Arts Club of Chicago (US); The Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago, US); Ditch Projects (US); and Contemporary Art Brussels (BE). Their work has been supported by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts (US), the National Endowment for the Arts (US), the Oregon Arts Commission and Ford Family Foundation (US), and the Amsterdam Fonds voor de Kunst (NL); they have participated in residences at Rupert (LT), the Banff Centre (CN), the Jan van Eyck Academie (NL), and the Headlands Center for the Arts (US); and their work has been reviewed by Artforum (US), Revista (BR), Agenda Magazine (BR), and Hyperallergic (US), and published with Mousse Publishing (IT).
