Villa Aurora Events Archive
June 2024
Organ & Electronics Concert at the Villa
Villa Aurora (520 Paseo Miramar, Pacific Palisades, CA 90272)
Our current composition fellows at Villa Aurora, Laurie Schwarz and Mert Moralı, together with their composer friend Jack Herscowitz from the Los Angeles scene, invite you to re-imagine and re-experience the acoustic space of the Villa with two improvisational sets of electronics and organ.
Duration: 50 minutes
June 2, 2024
2:00 PM - PDT
Admission is free
RSVP mandatory here
Participants
Mert Moralı is a Berlin-based composer from Izmir, Turkey. His current art and research practice focuses on the relationship between prosthesis and corporeality and on how this relationship is conditioned by space and its socio-political connotations. He studied theory and composition at Bilkent University and composition and electroacoustic music at the Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler Berlin.
During his residency, Mert Moralı intends to create a compositional platform to explore the extent to which the performing body can resist archiving, cataloging, and death. He will address the question of how the dead work of artists is recycled in the form of recordings through collaboration with the living for the purpose of capital accumulation. In his work, he aims to connect this recycling and accumulation to the temporal-spatial conditions of the sites in Southern California.
Laurie Schwartz is a composer, intermedia artist, and curator whose work considers sound, movement, and visuals as materials of composition in the broadest sense. Incorporating field recordings, fragments of conversation, choreography, or video in counterpoint with instrumental, vocal and/or electronically processed sounds, she probes the space between music composition, experimental theater, and performance art. She is initiator and curator of the series itinerant interludes that presents performances at exhibition openings in galleries and museums.
During her time at Villa Aurora, Laurie Schwartz will develop two intermedia projects: clouds & colloquies, a performative installation centering on the theme of precarity (environmental, societal, and political) and the furies, a multimedia work (episode #3 of her performance series Outtakes from the Dangerous Women Files) focusing on the witch as feminist archetype and disrupter.
Parking Information
Free shuttle service departs from Los Liones & Sunset starting 1 hour before the event. Last shuttle to Villa Aurora leaves 15 minutes prior to the event.
SCHEIBLETTENKIND: Book Presentation and Discussion
Goethe-Institut San Franciso (657 Howard Street San Francisco, CA 94105 USA)
Participant
Eva Müller is a freelance cartoonist, writer, and artist. She lives and works in Hamburg. Her stories are published internationally, presented in multimedia readings at festivals, cinemas, literature houses, and museums, and have won several awards. She is also an activist and cultural worker, most recently as co-founder of the Comics Union under the umbrella of documenta fifteen.
Partner
In cooperation with the Goethe Institut San Francisco
Archives in / of Transit: Historical Perspectives from the 1930s to the Present
Villa Aurora (520 Paseo Miramar, Pacific Palisades, CA 90272)
Information
The workshop "Archives in / of Transit: Historical Perspectives from the 1930s to the Present" explores new ways of thinking about archives, archival records, and other artifacts historians might use as primary sources to gain deeper insight into the history of migrants in transit and the knowledge they possessed, produced, transmitted, or lost. With a starting point in the history of Jewish migration from National Socialist-occupied areas, the workshop broadens out to investigate the experiences of refugees and migrants fleeing genocide, armed conflict, and persecution throughout the twentieth century. Specifically, it uses the idea of “lost knowledge” (Steinberg/Strobl) to ask how migrants who leave their homes try to convey both the sense of loss and the disorientation that accompany the navigation of new lived realities—from the geographical to the socio-cultural, political, and beyond—in correspondence or other materials that capture any aspect of their flight and migration.
The workshop is convened by the German Historical Institute Washington; USC Shoah Foundation; Holocaust Research Institute, Royal Holloway; University of London; Queen Mary, University of London; and the Wiener Holocaust Library, London. Partners of the event are USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research; Thomas Mann House, Los Angeles; Villa Aurora, Los Angeles; and Feuchtwanger Memorial Library, University of Southern California, Los Angeles.
The full program of the workshop can be found here.
Please RSVP here.
On the occasion of the workshop "Archives in / of Transit: Historical Perspectives from the 1930s to the Present," Villa Aurora is hosting a series of panels for invited workshop participants on the topics "Solidarity, Gender, and Activism," "Collections and Agency" and "War and Violence."
This event is convened by the German Historical Institute Washington; USC Shoah Foundation; Holocaust Research Institute, Royal Holloway; University of London; Queen Mary, University of London; Wiener Holocaust Library, London & Villa Aurora & Thomas Mann House Los Angeles.