Down The Rabbit Hole

Untranslatable Encounters

Aishwarya Kumar with N▲N▼ Doing All the Wrong Things the Wrong Way Doing All the Wrong Things the Wrong Way As part of the broader programme of The Wrong Biennale, Doing All the Wrong Things the Wrong Way is a podcast series that brings together artists and curators from Down The Rabbit Hole Pavilion, Antecâmara, and Institution(ings) to examine how emerging formats of artistic research, spatial affordance, and institutional reconfiguration critically unsettle conventional modes of exhibition-making. Episode #3: Untranslatable Encounters features multidisciplinary Brazilian artist N▲N▼ (pronounced: Nany) in conversation with Aishwarya Kumar. Moving across performance, ritual, language, and black feminist thought, the episode reflects on artistic practice as a site of refusal, opacity, and ongoing negotiation rather than resolution. Framed by the provocation that four decades after Sister Outsider, white feminist platitudes continue to circulate unchallenged, the conversation draws on Audre Lorde’s call for an “ample, spilling” feminism—one that centres anger, care, and lived contradiction as critical forces. The discussion unfolds along two trajectories in Nany’s most recent work: Orin Ifê, which engages ritual practices from the Ketu and Ngô regions to question the fragile boundary between performance and appropriation; and Reciprocation, an upcoming performance work that exposes the dramaturgical, technical, and ethical negotiations involved in making live work. By placing a completed work alongside one still in formation, the episode foregrounds process, vulnerability, and responsibility as central to artistic research. Situated within Down The Rabbit Hole Pavilion, the episode attends to untranslatability as method—where meaning emerges through proximity, repetition, and partial understanding, and where black histories are approached not as fixed narratives but as living, contested, and continuously remade.

Ashes From A Burning Life II

Aishwarya Kumar with Diane Giraud Doing All the Wrong Things the Wrong Way Doing All the Wrong Things the Wrong Way As part of the broader programme of The Wrong Biennale, Doing All the Wrong Things the Wrong Way is a podcast series that brings together artists and curators from Down The Rabbit Hole Pavilion, Antecâmara, and Institution(ings) to examine how emerging formats of artistic research, spatial affordance, and institutional reconfiguration critically unsettle conventional modes of exhibition-making. Episode #2: Ashes From A Burning Life II* features artist Diane Giraud in conversation from within her studio. A continuation of an article written for Artecapital in 2024, the episode engages with questions of memory, archiving, and obsolescence, approaching the archive not as a stable repository but as a mutable, generative, and often fragile system. The discussion unfolds through Giraud’s practice, which navigates the afterlives of images, technologies, and materials that persist at the edges of visibility and functionality. At its core, the conversation considers archiving as a temporal and material process rather than a preservational one. Giraud’s work treats digital artefacts, residual data, and obsolete media as sites of excavation, where meaning is produced through acts of retrieval, degradation, and reassembly. Memory emerges not as something to be secured against loss, but as something continuously rewritten through technological mediation and material decay. Situated in the studio as both site and methodology, the episode reflects on how artistic practice can operate as a form of digital archaeology—attentive to fragments, glitches, and discontinuities, and resistant to narratives of progress, optimisation, or permanence. Read Part 1 at https://www.artecapital.art/perspetiva-286 References Voltaire. Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne, ou examen de cet axiome : Tout est bien. 1756. Voltaire. Poem on the Lisbon Disaster, or Examination of the Axiom: All is Well. 1756.

Body as Architectural Space

Aishwarya Kumar and Suruchi Pawar with Guy Ben-Ary and Nathan Thompson Doing All the Wrong Things the Wrong Way As part of the broader programme of The Wrong Biennale, Doing All the Wrong Things the Wrong Way is a podcast series that brings together artists and curators from Down The Rabbit Hole Pavilion, Antecâmara, and Institution(ings) to examine how emerging formats of artistic research, spatial affordance, and institutional reconfiguration critically unsettle conventional modes of exhibition-making. Episode #1: Body as Architectural Space features Guy Ben-Ary and Nathan Thompson, in posthumous collaboration with Alvin Lucier, discussing their project Revivification, which forms the conceptual and methodological bedrock of Down The Rabbit Hole. The conversation unfolds around communication, creativity, and cognition in relation to artificial intelligence, while reflecting on Lucier’s longstanding engagement with resonance, duration, and the spatialisation of sound. At its core, Revivification proposes the body as an architectural condition rather than a bounded biological entity. The work centres on a large-scale installation—Lucier’s in-vitro brain—that, over time, learns how to play a sonic environment much like a musician learns to interpret a composition. In doing so, the project collapses distinctions between performer and space, instrument and architecture, life and afterlife, foregrounding time, learning, and resonance as architectural processes. The podcast is by Down The Rabbit Hole in partnership with Instituion(ing)s and Antecâmara.