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Refamiliarization: Day 3

Workshops
01 Oct, 2021

Refamiliarization: Day 3

Friday, October 1, 2021

Bread Symphony Workshop, Katya Rozanova, Ashley Lewis, Emily Saltz, and Max Horwich

The artists behind Bread Symphony, an installation work that reflects on the sonic aesthetics of the bread fermentation process, will lead participants in a collective aural performance in which we knead dough, break bread, and generate sounds that will contribute to the project’s future formations.

About Refamiliarization

A century ago, Viktor Shklovsky introduced the concept of “defamiliarization” to describe art’s revolutionary potential. Facing a world beset by habituation, automatism, and alienation, he proclaims that art “exists so that one may recover the sensation of life.”

The COVID-19 pandemic has effected a thoroughgoing sense of defamiliarization — even the most quotidian habits have become strange. It has awakened a reflexivity in our relations to the objects of everyday life, making us more aware of the clothes we wear when leaving the house. Simultaneously, though, the domestic sphere has become the site for further habituation to technologies that imperceptibly extract value from our every utterance and gesture. While some seemingly intractable institutional norms may have been temporarily interrupted, others have been fortified. A sustained moment of emergency, the pandemic obliges us to assess what must be recast and resisted and what, if anything, may be recovered with care.


Refamiliarization brings together works of art — from performances and installations, to videos and sculptures — that speculate on and give form to new versions of what could be “familiar.”

You can read more about the series at the Refamiliarizaton home page here. You can also check out the Refamiliarization website here.

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