LEHAVDÍL – להבדיל – ODDZIELENIE

Dip your fingers in chalk or water. Touch the rim of the glasses in front of you. Listen to them chant in an ever-changing harmony. As day becomes night, you enter their sonic portal.

participatory sound performance
cooperation: Justyna Skoczek
Miodowa street 51, in the tunnel leading to the New Jewish Cemetery
28.6.-2.7. 21:00-22:00
EN/PL  

Wojtek Blecharz is a Polish sound artist living and working in Berlin, Germany since 2015. In 2006, he graduated with honors from the Frederic Chopin Music Academy in Warsaw, and in 2015 he received a Ph. D. in Music Composition from the University of California in San Diego. Between 2012-2018, Wojtek had been curating the “Instalakcje” music festival at Warsaw’s Nowy Theater, featuring non-concert music: sound installations, performance installations, sound sculptures, music videos, music theater etc. Wojtek has also directed his three opera-installations. www.wojtekblecharz.com

Justyna Skoczek – a pianist, tutor and author of texts and music pieces. She graduated from the Academy of Music in Wrocław in the piano class led by Professor Włodzimierz Obidowicz (2003). Ms Skoczek collaborates with a double bass player Paweł Jabłczyński, and with a Wrocław ensemble, Małe Instrumenty (Small Instruments), playing contemporary and experimental music and also carrying out musical projects involving people with disabilities. Since 2021, she has been musical director of the National “Stary” Theatre in Krakow.

Enter the spice box. Smell the aromatic plants; taste, touch and absorb them. Let them ground you into the body and activate memory in the mind. Journey through expanded senses, before you return to the mundane world with their presence. 

installation & workshop series
cooperation: Anna Gruszka aka Ruta Pindyrunda, Maciej Gustab
Sebastiana street 32, at the Bosak family house
installation: 28.6.-2.7. 12:00-20:00
workshops: 28.-30.6. 17:00-18:30, 1. & 2.7. 14:00-15:30
EN with PL translation 

Shelley Etkin is a transdisciplinary artist, educator and gardener based in Berlin, with roots in the U.S./Turtle Island and Israel/Palestine. She works at the intersections of art and ecology, engaging with relations between bodies and lands through place-based knowledges, integrating practices from dance/somatics, herbal medicines, pedagogy, and community organising. Shelley stewards the ‘Garden as Studio’ platform for artistic research at Ponderosa, an arts centre in Brandenburg Germany, and co-facilitates the ‘Social Body Apothecary’ with Siegmar Zacharias and Kitti Zsiga, among other long-term collaborations including with Jared Gradinger, Angela Schubot, and Aune Kallinen. Shelley is a guest lecturer at the International Campus of Humboldt University Berlin and the Theater Academy of the University of the Arts Helsinki. She holds an M.A. in Ecology and Contemporary Performance (Finland), B.A. in Gender Studies (USA), a Permaculture Design Certificate from Earth Activist Training (USA) and is a student of homeopathy (UK). For Shelley, participating in this Jewish Culture Festival in Krakow is an ancestral reckoning. By listening to the knowledges of plants and land and being guided by those relationships, processes of decolonisation are always in negotiation through a living, shifting terrain of questions. Within this context, I ask: how can I be in relationship to my cultural heritages without that being distorted into nationalisms? How can my personal cultural connectivity, as a Jew of Eastern European descent, living in Germany, with roots in Israel-Palestine, inform my practices of allyship with Palestinian emancipation and land stewardship? How can medicinal encounters with plants support spaces of complexity, vulnerability, resilience, and solidarity? Might regenerating senses of belonging create more just and reciprocal relationships with places? How can this move us all further into integrity, beyond binary power dynamics? www.shelleyetkin.com 

Anna Gruszka (Ruta Pindyrynda) – socio-cultural animator, engaged in ethnobotany and natural heritage, based in Poznan. She carries out research concerning the use of smoke from burned plants in medicine and folk magic in Poland as well as the contemporary contexts of such a practice. Her activity comprises also the projects connected with urban gardening, among others in the Experimental Heritage Garden at the Poznan Gate, an initiative originated thanks to her idea. She also co-founded the Society, Dziewczyny w Naturze [Girls in Nature] and a member of the Eco-feminism Collective.

Maciej Gustab – a graduate of biology studies at the Faculty of Biology of the Jagiellonian University. So far, his work has focused on the optimization of the conditions for the in vitro regeneration of the specific plant species. Currently, he is a doctoral student in the Doctoral School of Biomedical Sciences of the Małopolska Centre of  Biotechnology at the Jagiellonian University.  His scientific interests concern mainly botany, crop plants and the effective use of their potential by humanity.

Touch the braided candle. Cast your shadow as the fibers guide you through the space. Collectively weave intentions with your hands. 

site-specific installation
Beera Meiselsa 18, in the cellar of Café Hevre
28.6.-2.7. 12:00-20:00
no language  

Florence To is a multidisciplinary artist that creates sound and light installations, generative motion graphics, and scenographies with an architectural approach to spatial design. The Scottish-born Hong Kong artist researches psychoacoustics and phonetics, merging cognitive and emotional behaviours, in order to develop multidimensional processes in her practice and understand how varied sensory configurations are experienced in space.  She has established residencies and commissions with the Berliner Festspiele, STRP Eindhoven, Mass MoCA in Massachusetts, and The Spatialization and Auditory Display Environment [SpADE] in Limerick. In 2019, she worked with the Photonics group at the International Iberian Nanotechnology Laboratory in Portugal, exploring the science behind light detection, generation, and manipulation, and understanding how wavelength propagation processes can enable humans to rationalize the behaviour of their internal optics. www.florence-to.com

Sebastiana street 32, at the Bosak family house
30.6. 16:00, 1. & 2.7. 17:00
EN

On Friday, Saturday and Sunday, curators of “Lehavdíl” Lianne Mol and Yael Sherill share how the project came into being.  

The Curatorial Collective for Public Art (CCPA) is an independent agency for the conceptualisation, production, mediation and representation of public art based in Berlin, Germany. It develops curatorial formats for site-specific, transdisciplinary, critical and urban art. CCPA understand the “public” in the term public art as the medium and material of its practice. As an initiative without a fixed space, it often works in the urban space; however, its practice extends into the public sphere, as well as the public in the sense of audience. Due its nomadic character, the collective is not tied to an exhibition space, and continues to conceptualise context-specific formats for its projects, which elude the traditional understanding of curating. After “Kumzits” in 2021 and “Maiseh” in 2022, which were created in collaboration with Jerusalem-based art organisation HaMiffal, “Lehavdíl” is the third project that CCPA is involved in curating for the Jewish Culture Festival.