Looking back at Kem School 2024
2024 saw the 4th edition of Kem School - a queer-feminst educational program, performative process of learning & unlearning which in this iteration also tasked itself with a reflection on collective forms of resistance. Over the course of 4 blocks that took place throughout the summer, a group of 16 participants became a temporary, experimental body which together explored new embodied modalities of community. This year’s programme engaged them in a diverse set of formats, ranging from bodily to discursive, collaborative to individual practices, and everything situated at their intersections.
The participants of Kem School 2024 were:
♡ mariia Lemperk
♡ Marek Zieliński
♡ Daniel Reuter
♡ Olga Konik
♡ Mo Tomaszewska
♡ Neo Mosa
♡ Klau Skuza
♡ Minu Elsherif
♡ Opal Ćwikła
♡ Basia Stanko-Jurczyńska
♡ Frania Sutryk
♡ Oliwia Kulikowska
♡ Kaś Urbaniak
♡ Julia Krupa
♡ Alesia Maisei
♡ Ula Dziurdzia
Metheoring with Alicja Czyczel
A critical component of this year’s Kem School was the metheoring (mentoring) process with Alicja Cyczel. This process is constituted by the presence of a “mentor”, who guides participants through experimental pedagogical formats as well as maintains the groups’ cohesion - it functions as a space of reflection and as an ongoing digestive system of the school. Alicja, a Warsaw-based choreographer, somatic educator and community builder, was present during every block of this year’s Kem School - from the first one where she helped negotiate and establish a contract of rules in the group, to the last one during which she facilitated a polyphonic singing session. All throughout, Alicja’s presence was like a body of water that stretches and contracts, lubricating all the points it touches, exerting an inward pull. Drawing on her choreographic experience, Alicja also introduced elements of somatic practice and expanded notions of choreography, encouraging participants to think of their being together in choreographic terms.
The term “metheoring” marks an attempt to depart from “mentoring” as a category enmeshed in dynamics of rigid, vertical hierarchy towards a more fluid
co-relationality, in which knowledge and experience flow in multiple directions.
Choreographic workshop with Jagna Nawrocka
Kem School workshops are devised to introduce participants to a range of performative and choreographic tools as well as engage them in diverse registers of knowledge across disciplines. The first workshop this year was held by Jagna Nawrocka - a dancer, choreographer, member of the Queer Movement Academy and Kem School 2022 allumna that we keep coming back to. She led our participants through a charismatic excercise in embodiment, exploring ways of seeing and looking through diverse orifices and treating the skin as a vast, voyeuristic surface. Through guided somatic tasks, Jagna helped participants to activate their bodies with shifting, non-human narratives, while opening them up to their own performative capabilities. Having only just met, our newly-founded Kem School group found themselves exploring a choreography of intimacies, opening out towards one another.
Collective trip to Teatr Cinema, Michałowice
The Kem School experience is facilitated through formats that extend beyond the convetnionally educational, to include such immersive formats as group trips. The second meeting of Kem School 2024 saw the group spending a week together at Teatr Cinema - a building housing the homonymous, experimental theatre troup which was a critical proponent of collective, avant-garde art practices, nestled in the polish Karkonosze mountains. Over the course of a week, participants
self-organised, cooked, ate, moved, rested and explored together. The abundant landscape of the surrounding polish mouintains also hosted a diverse range of collective practices, proposed by Kem School participants - mariia’s rock-kissing session, walks guided by Alicja, Minu & Mo’s performance in a mountain stream.
A vital part of this block was consituted by Liz Rosenfeld, who joined us in our mountainous retreat to ntroduce a combination of moving image, reading, and body-based work to collectively probe at strategies of resistance within performance and art-making, focusing in particular on the way resistance feels somatically, in our bodies. Departing from their own strategies as a queer artist, Liz facilitated an environment for collective, bodily research as a means of transforming theory and discourse into performative action. Through aditional engagement with texts such as Paul Preciado’s Countersexual Manifesto and Johanna Hedva’s Sick Woman theory and nightly screenings of queer cinema works such as Resisting Paradise, Born in Flames and Whipsers of the Jaguar, we worked through a host of ideas and embodiments of queer resistance to hegemonic structures.
The workshop with Liz culminated in a durational, 1 hour long collective performance on the rocks surrounding our mountainous home, soundtracked to a collaborative playlist of music evoking feelings of dissent.
Workshop and Soft Kiss Club with Ian Kaler
The third block of Kem School 2024 was spent in collaboration with Ian Kaler, who shared his practice of movement in relation to the stage. Over the course of his workshop, Ian engaged the participants in a choreographic process of exploring fading imprints and traces, allowing the participants to slowly plant the seeds of stories. Through bodily explorations of space, collaborative dialogues and minute attention to somatics, our Kem School students were able to collectively approach a stage appearance. This process culminated in a new iteration of Soft Kiss Club - a name which designates the time and space when Kem School opens up for a fleeting encounter with the public. This year it happened on Saturday the 24th of August at TR Warszawa where we bore witness to an open rehearsal, a work in process and in collaboration between the participants of Kem School 2024 and Ian Kaler.
The final block of Kem School was spent in recollection and reflection on the previous months of work. A workshop with Ania Nowak generated strategies of collective rest and feedback, while formats proposed by Kem School participants such as object fixing and zine making constitued a tender ending point for Kem School 2024.
Kem School couldn’t happen without the generous support of our partners, particularly at Kryty,a Polityczna. Our endless gratitutde and thanks go out to them.