De Ateliers is proud to present an accompanying public program to Offspring 2024: Underbelly on Saturday June 1 and 8. Entrance is free from 5pm.

Saturday June 1, 5-7pm
– 5-6pm: Jabari by Adama Keïta and Myriam Konté (MELANIN)
– 6-7pm: Concert with Morten Norbye Halvorsen

Jarabi is an ongoing curatorial-research project by Adama Keïta on history, traditions, and gender roles in West African societies through the sonic.In this sonic lecture by Adama Keïta accompanied by the female Senegalese ngoni player and performer Myriam Konté (MELANIN), the duo share in a tangible way, socio-musical concerns and necessary conversations on gender roles and traditions in (pre) modernity in West African societies.

Adama Keïta is an Indo-Guadeloupean and Senegalese researcher, orality practitioner, curator and writer. She grew up in Martinique before relocating to Namur, Barcelona, Johannesburg, NYC, Paris, and now Amsterdam where she is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in Critical Studies at Sandberg Instituut. Currently, her research focuses on Creole as an oratory political and poetic practice and the principle of the Pulaakuu in the Fulani community.

Myriam Konté (MELANIN) is a producer, instrumentalist, composer and DJ based in Paris. Her musical project was born in 2018 in Seoul, South Korea after having obtained her diploma from IESEG Paris. Until 2021, MELANIN co-hosted a series of cultural and musical events notably with SeMA, Seoul Community Radio and performed in Asia: Korea, China, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Thailand. Self-taught, MELANIN plays the flute and the n’goni, she explores both wind and string sounds which she associates with rhythms inspired by triphop. Being both French and Senegalese, MELANIN uses music to help create cultural bridges and promote plural identities, particularly those from the diaspora. The release of her first music video ‘MATAM DREAM’ is an ode to children from the diaspora who dream of returning home. MELANIN undertook several trips to Senegal to rediscover new sounds. MELANIN has collaborated with artists such as Sister Nancy, NIARIU, Delish Da Goddess, BoyFallOut, CAMO and Le Kaiju.

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Concert with Morten Norbye Halvorsen. Morten will perform using tape loops, samplers and sine-wave generators, forming a soundscape of alternating volume peaks. A live project exploring an online repository — as an abstract and expanding electronic album featuring collaborators both human and machine.

Morten Norbye Halvorsen is an artist and composer based in Bergen, Norway, whose sound works and musical performances are guided by props, websites, photographs, scripted recordings and concert appearances in an ongoing exploration of collaboration and sound. Halvorsen’s work has been included in group and solo exhibitions including OVERPRINTS, Gaudel de Stampa, Paris (2022), Field Works, Kalmar Konstmuseum, Kalmar (2020), My Summer is your Winter, Grazer Kunstverein, Graz (2019), HTML Curtain, Gaudel de Stampa, Paris (2019), 9th Norwegian Sculpture Biennial, Vigeland-museet, Oslo (2017), Wave Table Concert, Kunsthall Stavanger (2016), Gain Vapor Rise, Gaudel de Stampa, Paris (2016), All the Instruments Agree, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2015), The Companion, Liverpool Biennial, (2014), Pan Exciter, NoPlace, Oslo, Alluvium, Objectif Exhibitions, Antwerpen; oO, The Lithuanian/Cyprus Pavilion, 55th Venice Biennale (2013), Run, comrade, the old world is behind you, Kunsthall Oslo (2011), Repetition Island, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2010) and Paper Exhibition, Artist Space, New York (2009).

Saturday June 8, 5-8.30pm
– 5-5.40pm: Reading by Kate Morgan
– 6-6.40pm: Lecture by Floor Haalboom
– 7-8pm: Film screening of Jumama Manna’s Wild Relatives
– 8-8.30pm: Film screening of Shuruq Harb’s The White Elephant and Q&A

Kate Morgan will present a reworked reading from parts of their book Ingress, with a focus on acts of attention (plumbing, sweeping, ways of watching), and modes of ingress (via liquid, influence, wetting and dewetting).

Kate Morgan (they/them) is a writer and artist based in Glasgow, interested in the formal experiments in writing, and in transforming by close attention. Their book Ingress, a suite of linked essays, was released in 2023 by Pilot Press. Their essays, reviews, and prose poems have been released with the likes of Sticky Fingers, Nothing Personal, Art Monthly, MAP, TISSUE, and Worms. Morgan has variously studied fine art, furniture making and writing at the Glasgow School of Art, the Pratt Institute, Waters & Acland, and the Royal College of Art. Morgan’s furniture has won the Alan Peters award, and been shortlisted for the Craeftiga award. With Sinae Park, they run the journal Fortified, a publication that showcases writing and image-making about eating.

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Floor Haalboom presents Feeding the world: The places pigs live in are often invisible, just like the places behind the dusty stuff they eat. What does the world behind Bart Houwers’ Feeding Operation look like? In this lecture, Haalboom presents from her Dutch Research Council funded project ‘What does your meat eat? The global impact of Dutch livestock feed from 1954 up to the present’.

Floor Haalboom is a Dutch Environmental Historian and Historian of Science at Erasmus University Rotterdam and Utrecht University.

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Film screening of Jumana Manna’s Wild Relatives. Deep in the earth beneath Arctic permafrost, seeds from all over the world are stored in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault to provide a backup should a disaster strike. Wild Relatives starts from an event that has sparked media interest worldwide: in 2012 an international agricultural research center was forced to relocate from Aleppo to Lebanon due to the Syrian Revolution turned war, and began a laborious process of planting their seed collection from the Svalbard back-ups. Following the path of this transaction of seeds between the Arctic and Lebanon, a series of encounters unfold a matrix of human and non-human lives between these two distant spots of the earth. It captures the articulation between this large-scale international initiative and its local implementation in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon, carried out primarily by young migrant women.The meditative pace patiently teases out tensions between state and individual, industrial and organic approaches to seed saving, climate change and biodiversity, witnessed through the journey of these seeds.

Jumana Manna is a visual artist and filmmaker. Her work explores how power is articulated, focusing on the body, land and materiality in relation to colonial inheritances and histories of place. Through sculpture, filmmaking, and occasional writing, Manna deals with the paradoxes of preservation practices, particularly within the fields of architecture, agriculture and law. Her practice considers the tension between the modernist traditions of categorisation and conservation and the unruliness of ruination, life and its regeneration. Jumana was raised in Jerusalem and lives in Berlin.

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Film screening of Shuruq Harb’s The White Elephant. Shuruq Harb is a multidisciplinary artist, educator, filmmaker, writer based in Ramallah. Her film The White Elephant received the award for best short film at Cinema du Reel Festival in Paris, 2018, and was shortlisted for the Hamburg International Short Film Festival, 2019.

On the occasion of the Busan Biennale (2024), she is presenting the first iteration of her collaborative film project with Federica Bueti which looks at modern maritime histories, piracy and mobility in the Mediterranean Sea. She is also collaborating with architect and historian Nadi Abusaada on Al-Mashrou’, a documentary about the Arab Development Society (ADS) in Jericho, Palestine. The film delves into the enduring afterlives of this transformative 1940s project and its forward-looking ideas of Palestinian futurity. You can also catch her videos The Jump (2020) and In the Presence of Absence (2021) at the Biennale Gherdëina (2024). She is currently in Madrid for an art residency at Casa de Velázquez.

Using images shared on the Internet by Israelis during the Gulf War, the First Intifada and trance music gatherings, The White Elephant de-composes the portrait of a Palestinian teenager in the 1990s, through the distorted mirror of Israeli pop culture.

The filmmaker Shuruq Harb will be present and engage in a Q&A with the audience.