Residency 2019/2020
In 2019, the Residency Grant of the Leuphana Arts Program was awarded to the Austrian artist Johanna Binder. During the course of the year, Binder will be involved in the University in various formats and will develop her project together with scientists and students of the Leuphana.
Johanna Binder
JUNTO
During her residency at the LAP, Johanna Binder will work on her project “Junto”, a fictional documentary “about the egalitarian community of the Mamaira, whose unique characteristic is that they do not know any word for the personal pronoun “I”. In order to represent their own subject, the Mamaira rather use the personal pronoun “we”, which implies a strong collective thinking and a holistic social worldview and structure. Consequently, in the tribe of the Mamaira, the concept of the individual is manifested in a collective “we”, which is reflected in social egalitarian structures of daily life and traditional rites.” (Johanna Binder in her project draft)
The production of the movie is precisely bound to the development of a couple’s dance, which is to be developed during the year of her residency. The dance is based “neither on gender roles (man – woman in the sense of a heteronormative version), nor on hierarchical structures (polarized leading and being led and thus a regulated relationship between passivity and activity) (….) The active and passive parts rather alterate in a fluidity resulting from a high degree of mindfulness and empathy between the two dancing partners. This couple’s dance called “Junto” thus offsets hierarchies and role assignments found in standardized couple dances and aims at a melding of the dancers into a collective identity.” (ebd.)
VITA
Johanna Binder (*1985 in Salzburg/Austria) studied painting and animation film at the University of Applied Arts Vienna from 2007 to 2013 and was a scholar at the Van Eyck Academy Maastricht from 2016 to 2017.
Her works as well as collaborative and/or participatory projects were shown, among others, in the Galerie 5020, Salzburg/Austria (2018), the 2nd Tiflis Triennial, Tiflis/Georgia (2015), the NPAK/ACCEA, Yerevan/Armenia (2014), the Studio Tommaseo, Trieste/Italy (2014) and the Krinzinger Projekte, Vienna/Austria (2013). Numerous Residency programs led the artist, for example, to Cali/Colombia (Lugar a Dudas, 2018), Beijing/China (Land Salzburg 2017), Istanbul/Turkey (Federal Ministry of Arts and Culture, 2015), Klaipeda/Lithuania (Klaipeda Culture Communication Centre, 2015) and Virginia/USA (City of Salzburg, 2014).
In 2017, Binder was granted, among others, the Annual Scholarship of the Land Salzburg, the Recognition Prize of the Red Carpet Arts Award in 2014, as well as the Young European Artist Trieste Contemporanea Award in 2013.