The Ascension of Uli Schwarz
live storytelling / sonic performance, radio installation (both in collaboration with Niko de Paula Lefort), etching printed series, social media performance, creative writing
The Ascension of Uli Schwarz is an artistic research on the Brazilian long term whitening program, in relation to Germany’s white supremacist project still underlying society and politics. The multimodal storytelling develops different languages according to the supporting media, finding in them all a balance between noise and information in which ambiguity allows conflictual aspects of miscegenation and the rhetorics of privilege to emerge. The piece plays generativelly with operations such as excess and redundancy, and involves at different instances and scales environmental interactivity, artificial intelligence, the takeover of pre-existing infrastructures and appropriation of content at various levels.
The work attempts to situate itself in political and discursive ambivalent zones, hoping that in this liminality some disguised mechanisms that sustain the status quo might surface. The artists walk on a tightrope: on one side, attempting to use their positionality and self-criticism to criticize at large how the instrumentalisation and commodification of decolonial and anti-discriminatory discourses have been incorporated by the social apparatus, ultimately acting against its own causes and maintaining hegemonic structures; on the other side, in constant risk of doing exactly that: packaging biography, family trauma and identity development opportunistically.
A double-edged situatedness allows playful strategies and a locus of speech around questions of social mobility and representation. The project draws inspirations from different examples of charlatanism in the arts and in the artists' personal journey, and also explores systems of fashion, specially situating them within actors that didn’t experience marginalization symmetrically.
By creating different intimate situations, specially by exposing oneself, personal family pictures and stories, the artists play with today’s entanglements between private, public and what is published. Since the last decade, how do we grant authority to authors? How do they take that responsibility? What role do personal connections play in building trust on information? How human connection is disrupted by misinformation, strengthening the apparatus?
Live Performance, in collaboration with Niko de Paula Lefort
4 low-power radio transmitters, 10 radio receivers, modular synthesizer, microphone, SuperCollider patches, placebo pills
Closed group performance for maximum 15 people, 40 Minutes
A live storytelling performance, in which voice and field recordings are expanded by the space, the micro FM radio environment and modular synthesis. A trickster narrator conducts the audience into a journey of paranormal experiences, family stories, and sublime encounters between the self and the environment. The narration is supported by hypnotic dramaturgical elements and psychoacoustics, as well as the possibility of taking placebo medication. By sharing personal stories in a closed circle, trust is built but often put in question as the experience is also creating discomfort and doubt.
Radio Installation, in collaboration with Niko de Paula Lefort
4 low-power radio transmitters, 10 radio receivers, 40 minutes 4 channel sound composition
A micro FM radio environment transmits a non-linear narrative that mixes family stories, hypnotic genealogical cues and rhetorical phrases taken from different contexts, usually disguising a resistance to engagement and to the recognition of privilege and power dynamics. A fabric of lively noise envelops the narrator, making it necessary to engage physically with the apparatuses in order to find meaning, and lose it again. The spatial design, composition and intonations (both from the voice as from the acoustics of the receivers with the space) evoke different modes of recounting: storytelling, psychotherapy, inner monologue, stream of consciousness, confession, gossip, manipulation, brainwashing, proselytism... The technological components are installed appropriating existing infrastructures on site.
Etching Printed Series
7 prints on watercolor paper from zinc plate etching using toner transfer
In collaboration with the Bisonte Foundation in Florence, the series is the result of a manual blending of family portraits and snapshots of artworks from the latest edition of the Biennale de Venezia. The printing technique itself together with environmental factors participate in the printmaking process so the result follows the ambivalence between noise and information performed throughout the whole project. The ambiguity present in every print unveils our prescribed gaze, but also allows an engagement that results, if successful, not in the realization of a model but in its distortion.
Social Media Performance
Instagram profile @embranquecida, AI generated images using Mid Journey, creative writing
Using the social media platform Instagram as a stage for a long durational cinematographic storytelling, Uli Schwarz (they/them)© share family pictures, self-portraits, family stories and rhetorical sentences. The images are artificially generated with Mid Journey, using family archives, snapshots of artworks from the latest edition of the Biennale de Venezia, and stills from the work “Generaciones” of the visual artist Laura Fong Prosper. By playing dramaturgically with the apparatus revolving Instagram, a generative narrative unfolds. Uli Schwarz wants to play around with programs - the brazilian whitening program, the german white supremacist program, and how those currently interpolate the social program on Instagram - revealing the “degree of importance of the apparatus upon the types of ontological relations that we establish with it, both as a model and an instrument.” (Apparatus in Flusseriana: An Intellectual Toolbox, Rodrigo Maltez Novaes, 2016). The social media performance is not given by the artist but by the apparatus dramaturgically operated, the profile is an object that is not performing a role but allowing a role to be attributed and emerge from within.
live storytelling / sonic performance, radio installation (both in collaboration with Niko de Paula Lefort), etching printed series, social media performance, creative writing
The Ascension of Uli Schwarz is an artistic research on the Brazilian long term whitening program, in relation to Germany’s white supremacist project still underlying society and politics. The multimodal storytelling develops different languages according to the supporting media, finding in them all a balance between noise and information in which ambiguity allows conflictual aspects of miscegenation and the rhetorics of privilege to emerge. The piece plays generativelly with operations such as excess and redundancy, and involves at different instances and scales environmental interactivity, artificial intelligence, the takeover of pre-existing infrastructures and appropriation of content at various levels.
The work attempts to situate itself in political and discursive ambivalent zones, hoping that in this liminality some disguised mechanisms that sustain the status quo might surface. The artists walk on a tightrope: on one side, attempting to use their positionality and self-criticism to criticize at large how the instrumentalisation and commodification of decolonial and anti-discriminatory discourses have been incorporated by the social apparatus, ultimately acting against its own causes and maintaining hegemonic structures; on the other side, in constant risk of doing exactly that: packaging biography, family trauma and identity development opportunistically.
A double-edged situatedness allows playful strategies and a locus of speech around questions of social mobility and representation. The project draws inspirations from different examples of charlatanism in the arts and in the artists' personal journey, and also explores systems of fashion, specially situating them within actors that didn’t experience marginalization symmetrically.
By creating different intimate situations, specially by exposing oneself, personal family pictures and stories, the artists play with today’s entanglements between private, public and what is published. Since the last decade, how do we grant authority to authors? How do they take that responsibility? What role do personal connections play in building trust on information? How human connection is disrupted by misinformation, strengthening the apparatus?
Live Performance, in collaboration with Niko de Paula Lefort
4 low-power radio transmitters, 10 radio receivers, modular synthesizer, microphone, SuperCollider patches, placebo pills
Closed group performance for maximum 15 people, 40 Minutes
A live storytelling performance, in which voice and field recordings are expanded by the space, the micro FM radio environment and modular synthesis. A trickster narrator conducts the audience into a journey of paranormal experiences, family stories, and sublime encounters between the self and the environment. The narration is supported by hypnotic dramaturgical elements and psychoacoustics, as well as the possibility of taking placebo medication. By sharing personal stories in a closed circle, trust is built but often put in question as the experience is also creating discomfort and doubt.
Radio Installation, in collaboration with Niko de Paula Lefort
4 low-power radio transmitters, 10 radio receivers, 40 minutes 4 channel sound composition
A micro FM radio environment transmits a non-linear narrative that mixes family stories, hypnotic genealogical cues and rhetorical phrases taken from different contexts, usually disguising a resistance to engagement and to the recognition of privilege and power dynamics. A fabric of lively noise envelops the narrator, making it necessary to engage physically with the apparatuses in order to find meaning, and lose it again. The spatial design, composition and intonations (both from the voice as from the acoustics of the receivers with the space) evoke different modes of recounting: storytelling, psychotherapy, inner monologue, stream of consciousness, confession, gossip, manipulation, brainwashing, proselytism... The technological components are installed appropriating existing infrastructures on site.
Etching Printed Series
7 prints on watercolor paper from zinc plate etching using toner transfer
In collaboration with the Bisonte Foundation in Florence, the series is the result of a manual blending of family portraits and snapshots of artworks from the latest edition of the Biennale de Venezia. The printing technique itself together with environmental factors participate in the printmaking process so the result follows the ambivalence between noise and information performed throughout the whole project. The ambiguity present in every print unveils our prescribed gaze, but also allows an engagement that results, if successful, not in the realization of a model but in its distortion.
Social Media Performance
Instagram profile @embranquecida, AI generated images using Mid Journey, creative writing
Using the social media platform Instagram as a stage for a long durational cinematographic storytelling, Uli Schwarz (they/them)© share family pictures, self-portraits, family stories and rhetorical sentences. The images are artificially generated with Mid Journey, using family archives, snapshots of artworks from the latest edition of the Biennale de Venezia, and stills from the work “Generaciones” of the visual artist Laura Fong Prosper. By playing dramaturgically with the apparatus revolving Instagram, a generative narrative unfolds. Uli Schwarz wants to play around with programs - the brazilian whitening program, the german white supremacist program, and how those currently interpolate the social program on Instagram - revealing the “degree of importance of the apparatus upon the types of ontological relations that we establish with it, both as a model and an instrument.” (Apparatus in Flusseriana: An Intellectual Toolbox, Rodrigo Maltez Novaes, 2016). The social media performance is not given by the artist but by the apparatus dramaturgically operated, the profile is an object that is not performing a role but allowing a role to be attributed and emerge from within.
The Ascension of Uli Schwarz, storytelling / sonic performance (within works of Tuli Mekondjo), Open Studios and Domestic Exercises. Homework for a Sustainable Togetherness, at Villa Romana, 2024 © photo Ela Bialkowska, OKNOstudio. Courtesy of Villa Romana, Florence.
The Ascension of Uli Schwarz, storytelling / sonic performance (within works of Tuli Mekondjo), Open Studios and Domestic Exercises. Homework for a Sustainable Togetherness, at Villa Romana, 2024 © photo Ela Bialkowska, OKNOstudio. Courtesy of Villa Romana, Florence.
The Ascension of Uli Schwarz, Radio Installation (within works of Tuli Mekondjo), Open Studios and Domestic Exercises. Homework for a Sustainable Togetherness, at Villa Romana, 2024 © photo Ela Bialkowska, OKNOstudio. Courtesy of Villa Romana, Florence.
The Ascention of Uli Schwarz, etching printed series, © photo Monai de Paula Antunes
The Ascension of Uli Schwarz, social media performance on Instagram, Screenshot
(below) example of a post with AI generated images and creative writing
I will start by telling about my grandmother, my father’s mother, as she is the source of most content yet to come to this wall. My grandmother was born in the middle of nowhere in the state of Rio de Janeiro, to an indigenous mother and faith healer father, along with nine siblings whose names all started with the letter “I”. From what she could tell me, their livelihoods were what geographers call “subsistence”. Her house was made of adobe, I know that because someone told me that when she was a child, she would sometimes have the blues and hide under her bed and scratch the floor so much that it would dig a hole and hurt her fingers. Most of her stories involved non-living entities that would intervene with the events of the living, and also about relatives that would come from everywhere: Switzerland, Middle East, Africa... Her humble and syncretic upbringing, and how open and unprejudiced she was, always gave me an underlying sense of humility that I held on to growing up in a deeply unequal country. Despite hardships when I was a child, in my lifetime my family was never deeply subjugated and we all ascended socially for various reasons. In the last 20 years of her life, my grandmother lived in a house with a pool and a tropical garden, and 11 televisions. She died before Bolsonaro was elected but around 2013/14 we had hard clashes in my visits to Brazil because of the contrast of my experience abroad and the rageful inaccurate statements she was replicating. Around that time, she told me - in a context unrelated to the political events - that her grandparent was a farmer who owned slaves. I did the math and started to speculate that her ancestors were not only a melting pot that crossed each other’s path, but also small farmers whose business model was based on forced unpaid labor, and didn’t manage to reform their operations when slavery was abolished, falling into poverty.
The Ascension of Uli Schwarz, studio view with AI generated images, Open Studios and Domestic Exercises. Homework for a Sustainable Togetherness, at Villa Romana, 2024 © photo Ela Bialkowska, OKNOstudio. Courtesy of Villa Romana, Florence.
The Ascension of Uli Schwarz, detail of studio view with AI generated images, Open Studios and Domestic Exercises. Homework for a Sustainable Togetherness, at Villa Romana, 2024 © photo Ela Bialkowska, OKNOstudio. Courtesy of Villa Romana, Florence.