On the 19th of January, 5 PM we invite to SODAS 2123 residency program participants artist talk.

During the event Vicente Mollestad (Bolivia/Norway) will tell more about his research, that questions how to utilise cannibalism as an anticolonial strategy and how to predict tomorrow’s rappers from today’s immigration streams.

Mako Ishizuka (Japan/Sweden) will present her project that travels through different places where the artist becomes a stranger and how her project develops and changes, under the impact of various locations, workshops and interactions with the locals.

The event will take a place at Vilnius Art Academy, Doctoral studies building, 102 auditorium, Malūnų g. 3, Vilnius.

Mako Ishizuka was born in Kobe, Japan. She studied Interdisciplinary Studied (culture/philosophy/sociology) in Japan, and free art at Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam and Malmö Art Academy in Sweden. Many of her projects were developed on the platform of residencies, such as Capacete (Brazil), Bag Factory (South Africa), and IASPIS (Sweden); also through collaboration with locals, including architect-group Septembre (France), and Graduate School of Intercultural Studies at Kobe University (Japan). She has presented her practice at Architecture Biennale in Venice, EHESS in Paris, Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, Kunsthalle Exnergasse in Vienna, International Literary Festival in Riga, amongst others. For her social project, she won the production prize from Fondazione Pistoletto among the UNIDEE grant awardees.

Since 2018, she has been engaged with a project ‘After-Ripening & Corruption’, which deals with the cultural and language translations in the lives of people on the move, where she scoops up what are in the shades of the process of movements such as emotions, deviations, and assumed errors. It travels through different platforms where she becomes a stranger, and she develops what emerged at the last location further in the new local context through social experiments and workshops with the people she encounters. There she aims to bring out their human instincts and active attitude, appreciating the changes that occur in the course.

Vicente is a Bolivian-born artist based between La Paz, Bolivia and Skien, Norway. His artistic practice develops within and around the relationship between the west and the un-western, particularly how coloniality lives and sets the premise for the development of globalism, immigration and culture production.

He works with various mediums, including installation, painting, sound, text and performance, and there is a continuous exploration of alternative spaces, audience and what he defines as practice.

Among recent projects is an investigation of the phenomena that was European cannibal films from the 70s-80s, and looking into how global immigration and world politics shaped and continues to shape the Norwegian rap scene.

Mako Ishizuka and Vicente Mollestad residency is supported by Nordic Council of Ministers.

SODAS 2123 activities are supported by Lithuanian Council for Culture and Vilnius city municipality.

Special thanks for Vilnius Art Academy.

Cover picture: Vicente Mollestad The Current is strong and un-western, installation view, Spriten Kunsthall, 2022.