As a scholarship holder of the Goethe-Institute in Kyoto, Japan, in 2019, Lea Letzel explored the culture and history of Japanese fireworks and, in the course of her research, came across the work of the chemist and fireworks designer Takeo Shimizu. Letzel was particularly fascinated by the fact that Shimizu brought the art of fireworks into conjunction with music: »Around 1956, Shimizu developed a notation system based on conventional Western musical notation. He called it ›Hanabi-Fu‹ - the fireworks score. Shimizu wanted to use this system to plan and document fireworks performances. He added small graphic additions to the notation, for example, to describe the different colours of effects.«

As part of the exhibition ›Inhabiting Basis‹ in autumn 2020 at the Frankfurt exhibition space, basis e.V. which is cooperation partner of the ›INHABIT‹ Artist in Residence Program of the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Lea Letzel performed her own arrangement of the fireworks score ›Hanabi-Fu‹ in collaboration with Akiko Ahrendt (violin), Florian Zwißler (analog synthesizer).

Als Teil der Ausstellung ›Inhabiting Basis‹ im Frankfurter Ausstellungsraum basis e.V. (Herbst 2020), die im Rahmen von ›INHABIT‹, dem Residenzprogrammm des Max Planck Instituts für empirische Ästhetik, stattfand, wurden die Feuerwerksnoten von Akiko Ahrendt (Geige), Florian Zwißler (analoge Synthesizer) und Lea Letzel (Pyrotechnik) zum Klingen gebracht.

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The Association for Black Art_ists e.V. was founded in June 2020 in Dortmund with the goal to empower local Black artists in Germany, the Netherlands and France. In her presentation Marny Garcia Mommertz will give an overview of the founding process and address the crucial question of the necessity of Black artistic space in Europe. Furthermore, she’ll also introduce the association’s first project ›Black Hair in The Hague: Conversations during the Pandemic‹, that founding members Princela Biyaa, Fayo Said and Marny Garcia Mommertz worked on during their PACT Guest Fellowships in 2020.

»About 8 years ago Ines Johnson-Spain started writing down her story. She visited Pankow, Togo, Benin and Mülheim to get answers she was denied for a long time. Answers to uncover the silence about her identity, her belonging and home.«

In cooperation with Alexis Rodríguez, Interkultur Ruhr and Internationales Frauenfilmfestival Dortmund | Köln, the Association for Black Art_ists is conceptualizing a day-long program around the film screening of ›Becoming Black‹, the autobiographical documentary by Ines Johnson-Spain. »We are aiming to create a space for Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPoC) to discuss what we can learn from Ines Johnson-Spain’s experiences on a personal and communal level. Her story is relevant to so many BIPoC living in the diaspora. What can returning and finding home mean to us? How can we refuse circles of silence and the fall into oblivion in a society that claims to have a commemorative culture? How do we find a sense of belonging?«

In response to the challenges and constraints of the Covid-19 pandemic, PACT has created 20 new Guest Fellowships alongside its established long-term Fellowship Programme. These fellowship awards are not project specific or commission based, but rather aimed principally at enabling the recipient artists to continue with their current work and research and to build new networks.