PlusX on the topic of Sick Architecture hosted by Lauryn Youden

Hosted by Lauryn Youden during her residency at Open Forum, Berlin, this radio show takes the concept of “Sick Architecture” as a point of departure. Inviting a selection of chronically ill artists, thinkers and creatives to think about the way spaces of care (in particular the home) are designed, produced and lived in through the lens of chronic illness and disability. The contributions of this radioshow were recorded during a live listening and reading session at Open Forum on October 30, 2022.

Lauryn Youden (b. 1989, Canada) is a performance and installation artist and poet based in Berlin, Germany. Her practice derives from my research in and navigation through the medical industrial complex / colonial medicine, ‘alternative’ healing practices and traditional medicine for the treatment of her chronic illnesses and disabilities. By publicly presenting her personal experiences and re-evaluations of history, her work illuminates and advocates for repressed, marginalized and forgotten forms of radical care and Crip knowledge.

Danish-born Lee S Lund is an artist. They are currently based in Denmark and study Fine Arts.

Since 2020, the artist and choreographer Miriam Kongstad and sound artist Alexander Holm have collaborated on numerous performative and sound-based scenarios for both exhibitions and live events. In their collaborative practice, they blur the lines between genres and art forms, by combining choreographic, musical, and visual strategies.

RA Walden is a transdisciplinary artist whose work centers a queer, disabled perspective on the fragility of the body. Walden is interested in our ability and failure to navigate physicality, interdependency and vulnerability both communally and individually; understanding world-building not as a visionary tool for an imagined future, but as an embodied methodology for the now. Their contribution ẍây ithřa is a constructed language, formulated in response to the inherent ableism of the English language. Focusing on the inadequacy of lexicon surrounding pain, disability, and care, ẍây ithřa offers a growing vocabulary, a foundational text, and a set of idioms all of which foreground the sick and disabled experience. In this recording you will hear a set of 11 pledges, whose ideals make up the basis of the language. A translation of the work can be found on Walden's website. This work was commissioned by Kunstinstituut Melly and first shown at 84 steps at Kunstinstituut Melly in 2021. ẍây ithřa was developed in collaboration with linguist Margaret Ransdell Green.

Elio J Carranza’s work extends between experimental moving images, games, and sculpture. In their practice, they apply material technologies, collective fiction storytelling, and image production software for the purpose of developing (play) ecologies that visualize and complexify queer dissident intimacies. Their most recent work deals with habitualized boundaries of bodies and sexualities in the post-pornographic framework. Carranza is passionate about critical pedagogy and invested in matters around autonomous healthcare and sickness. This text was inspired by a playtest of Spit City with by Elio J Carranza and Zwaantje Kurpershoek. Spit City is a P&P Role Play Game developed by Elio J Carranza.

Miriam Jana is a german/polish social worker based in Berlin, Germany.

Ro is a sound artist and poet based on unceded coast salish territory and occupied duwamish land (so-called Seattle).

Baal & Mortimer is the project of A. Grübler that sonically explores the spaces between sound and image, language and body, matter and speculation. After the debut album DEIXIS via Bureau B (2020) and THE TORSO TAPES EP via Italic (2021), she released the album CON-STRUCT via Bureau B in September 2022, working with the sound archives of electronic music pioneer Conrad Schnitzler. In their piece Chrysalism there are interested in a speculative hypothesis for how Saturn, the planet linked to melancholy, received his rings, stating that a former moon of Saturn, named Chrysalis, was torn into pieces 160 millions years ago forming his rings in the distinct steep axial tilt. Chrysalis also describes the immobile state of some insects undergoing transformation, which can be seen as a symbol and placeholder for the partly extreme morphological processes people with clinical depression go through again and again, oscillating between states of complete immobility and returning to life.

Cornelia Isaksson is a Swedish artist and dramaturg based in Berlin, Germany. She read with support from Theresa Zwerschke.

Ebb Bayley is an American artist based in Berlin, Germany.

Kari Rosenfeld (b. Houston, TX) is an artist currently based in Berlin, Germany. Kari’s work often deals with ontology, political and social affect, religious and mythological narratives, image, genre, and attachment. They have degrees in American Studies and Philosophy from the University of Texas at Austin and graduated from Dutch Art Institute Masters of Art Praxis in 2021. They were a co-founder and Artist in Residence at the Cairo Institute of Liberal Arts and Science—Alexandria.

M Casey is a Berlin based poet, writer, artist, whose work has featured at Vorspiel / transmediale & CTM, König Otto / KINDL, Berlin; Gallery 46, Courtyard Theatre, London; and is the author of Indignant, a short play of experimental dialogues and poetics published by SUB/SUR Editions + Hato Press. Their piece settle is a sonic poem of four intentions, four stanzas enmeshed in a dialogue of two voices, passing words of relief between each other, a dose of each form one to the other, set against an arrangement of layered vocals and found objects.