“Counter Codex”, a long-term collaboration with the independent art collective Rosa Stern Space.
On 4th–6th August 2023 the Singer-Zahariev Foundation hosted the first trial of “Counter Codex”, a long-term collaboration with the independent art collective Rosa Stern Space (Munich), which will develop over a three-year residency program.
Annually curated by Rosa Stern Space, this project seeks to connect diverse cultural workers from Germany and Bulgaria, bringing bilateral tandems together during a two-week residency at the “Counter Codex” program aims to conceive a new set of transcultural tools to dissect and recontextualise societal tropes and aesthetical imaginations.
The participants will analyse and record the theme of mystification and demystification.
The teams’ focus is on textuality as a core conceptual method and the entanglement between both countries’ language and script spectrums.
The annual free-form entries will be collected and presented both physically and digitally. An additional open call for thematic contributions will be issued worldwide to achieve a broader contextualisation and international outreach. After three years, the growing collection of entries will be published as a print edition and presented in a bilateral exhibition in Germany and Bulgaria.
Natalia Jordanova and Constanze Metzel built the first tandem for the three-day test run, exploring and framing the envisioned artistic and theoretical prospects, curatorially advised by Rosanna Marie Pondorf. Together they developed various strands that will be expanded in the future. With the help of AI as a tool, a mood board was created on Miro, which captures the various thoughts and concepts on the wide-ranging topic. This was simultaneously printed out in analogue and soaked in wax, thus picking up on old techniques from the long history of codexes. Natalia Jordanova developed a German-Bulgarian fairy tale with AI and left marked stones in the garden with German and Bulgarian folk wisdom. Constanze Metzel dealt with the ground plan of the estate and created a critical mapping that functions both site-specifically and content-related. Until the next residency in summer 2024, the experiences of the test run will be evaluated and an interactive homepage will be created to present the project.
