Niranthea

Film with German subtitles

16:00

Talk with Marco Donnarumma (in German with DGS interpretation)

16:30

Film with English subtitles

17:00

Talk with Marco Donnarumma (in English)

17:30

Free entry

At CTM 2024, Marco Donnarumma will be presenting several modules of his long-term project, I Am Your Body, that investigates deafness, sound, and (artificial) intelligence through participatory research driven by and with d/Deaf and hard-of-hearing people. Expanding on his performance work »Ex Silens« that is shown within CTM’s concert programme, Donnarumma will present a short film, Niranthea, which was created during a first phase of the project, at Pact Zollverein. The film will be screened twice, first with German, then English subtitles. Following each screening, Donnarumma will give a short talk and Q&A. DGS German sign-language interpretation will be available during the German-language talk and discussion.

Niranthea (2023) is a hybrid short film combining documentary, audiovisual synaesthesia, and AI hearing algorithms to tackle the notions of deafhood, prosthesis, and cyborg. It offers a poetic reflection on the unlearning of normative conceptions of sound and body technology through the unscripted ideas, thoughts, and experiences of a group of six d/Deaf and hard-of-hearing people. The dialogues were filmed after five months of communal research, during which the group had engaged in regular conversations and research sessions mediated by artist Marco Donnarumma – himself late-deafened.

Niranthea is an acronym of the letters found in the first names of the members of the working group, Adriane, Ann-Catrin, Mara, Martin, Wojciech. Through their different voices, Niranthea becomes a multiform identity, a pluripotent and plurisensitive body of perception. The knowledge embodied by Niranthea strives to describe an incredibly wide range of sonic experiences that do not have anything to do with »hearing« as most commonly intended. Such experiences go well beyond the dominating audist understanding of sound perception and thus inevitably trigger urgent questions on the relationship between sites of power and disabled bodies, self-empowerment, misunderstanding, and the role of technology in this ecology.

Donnarumma’s long-term focus on body technologies and AI prostheses is significantly renewed and expanded here. Whereas traditionally, cyborg art and posthuman art offer conceptual, idealised or hyperboled perspectives on what a cyborg body really means, this work breaks with that tradition by confronting the real life experience of those using – or, importantly, choosing not to use – those very prostheses; people who live with them inside their bodies as an ambiguous mark of both their own identity and the isolation they are subjected to by the hearing world.

Event Access

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Marco Donnarumma – Concept, artistic direction, video editing, AI and sound design, workshop methods & mediation
Wojciech Czernia, Adriane Große, Ann-Catrin Gruber, Martin Holst, Mara Matzke – Cast, thoughts and ideas
Leiche (Marco Donnarumma) – Music: excerpts from the forthcoming album “Annihilating Despair”, mastered by Daniele Antezza at Dadub Studio
Daniele Lucchini – Cinematography Essen
Andrea Familari – Light design Essen
Margherita Pevere, Marco Donnarumma – Cinematography Iceland
Elisa-Marie Mischewski – German Sign language translator
Kotryna Slapsinskaite – Dialogues moderation and production

A production by Marco Donnarumma. Co-produced by PACT Zollverein and with scientific support by the Intelligent Instruments Lab at the Iceland University of Arts in Reykjavík. Funded by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia as a Medienkunstfellow.