kuti magazine
on improvisation
Apart from our curative activities and many collaborative works, each ZORAS member also engaged in a dialogue with a fellow artist outside the collective. Together with Maria Trautmann I explored and invented different improvisational techniques as methods of dialogue, that could eventually be used by artists and activists alike. In the end it was just as much a (re)discovery of the value of improvisation as a skill, a form of conversation, play and much more. I created these drawings as part of our dialogue while listening to the recordings of our musical improvisations. Finally, I created a short audiobook about our artistic dialogue. This is a link to all the sound pieces to be found in the Kuti issue https://soundcloud.com/zoras-collective
In April 2023 we, the ZORAS collective [https://www.silvanamammone.com/portfolio-3/zoras-collective], met for a two week residency at the culture centre Viernulvier in Gent to curate and co-create issue 69 of the Finnish Comics magazine Kuti. For half a year we had been planning and organizing our collaboration for Kuti. Finally, at our residency at Viernulvier we reunited in person. We drew together, started individual artistic dialogues with fellow artists and also invited other artists to contribute individual works to this issue of Kuti magazine. The result was presented at Helsinki Comics Festival in September 2023, where we also gave a workshop. In an exhibition we also shared our whole working process, which had started in July 2022 in Mynämäki at Saari residency. We were also very fortunate to be invited to the degrowth seminar Kohtuus Vaarassa at Koli National Park to share our exhibition and workshop.
cosmologies
These pictures were drawn collectively by all members of ZORAS. Having sketched a lot together during our residency in 2022, we now explored a more structured approach towards one of our themes and to collectively drawing itself, in the form of diverse creative restrictions we gave to ourselves.
Show me the way to the mountain hall
Radical fragility
Sitting with...
Common ground
the book of a thousand fragilities
“The book of a thousand fragilities” is my poetic approach to many topics and more complex, entangled processes and responses I experienced throughout our practices. You can read the full text in the magazine below or on my blog.
sparks
I wish I could write the book of a thousand fragilities. Stories of permeable membranes, feathers involuntarily traveling across an ocean, holes in nets that let the salmon escape. Eggs cracking to let life continue to the next chapter. Beech leaves, dry and crinkled, holding on to their thin branches way beyond autumn, making music together, calling spring. Tender vocal cords of husky voices telling stories that sound so much more thrilling exactly because. Of rough textures allowing for fifteen different mosses to grow. Of the accidental watery blotch that mingles every color on the paper, letting them travel to unpredictable places. Of limping minds and fractured hearts that stop trying so painfully hard, starting to joyfully, slowly live into change always already presenting itself to our hungry imagination. Cracks in walls that look like veins that look like roots that look like lightning. And those creatures in the walls fearing collapse, dreaming of collapse…
This is the complete issue. Next to yearly subscriptions, every KUTI issue is made available as an online version. Enjoy!