'Without You I’m Nothing' is a trilogy of events including performances, lectures, workshops and discussion at Somerset House Studios by 2018 Wysing residency artist Nastja Säde Rönkkö.

For the project, Rönkkö, will live and work in London without the Internet for six months. The intention of Rönkkö’s slow offline existence and the accompanying events is to actively research, create and test out new ways of connecting, communicating and being in a city, community and the society at the time of major changes in the ways we live, feel and function in the world.

The series of events is born out of a sensibility that we are at the end of the world as we know it: current ecological, political and technological narratives and histories are volatile and unstable. Environmental disasters, future of net neutrality, vanished species and looming nuclear disasters are no longer a part of science fiction writing or a post apocalyptic movie but a part of our reality. The three events investigate the possible ends of an era, its entangled histories, open-ended narratives and flux identities. The series of events aims to carefully glimpse into the possible futures of humankind and otherkind: the vital necessity for co-dependence and urgency to remember, preserve and act now.

The first of the three events, 'Humble Beginnings/Alternative Presents', takes place at Somerset House on 28 November from 18.45-20.45pm and investigates feminist and queer alternatives for contemporary digital culture. Emerging from the rapid changes of technological landscape and its effects on a variety of issues such as identity, gender, power and activism, there is an urgency to create effective methods towards equitable and unbiased society. Hopeful and uncertain, dark yet optimistic, we will ask what are the spaces and places that we need and want right now, and how these spaces can be created and sustained?

Invited participants Katriona Beales, Anna Bunting-Branch and Rebecca James will join Rönkkö to examine discourses and ideas around cyber-feminism, race and feminism, gender, privacy, online/offline healing practices and queering the social media. Through radical re-thinking and critical assessment of the on-going narratives, identities and possibilities presented to us, we will share methods and ideas on how to shape the digital and IRL realities into safe and nurturing havens. 

Rönkkö will host Middle Age / We Should Know Better on 31 January, from 18.45-20.45pm, as part of her residency at Somerset House Studios, London . In this event Sade Ronkko explores a redefinition of the meaning and functioning of technology, moving from something that only considers Western rational logic and knowledge as valuable and scientific, to something that includes other modes of knowing and being. Contributors include artist, writer and curator Tamar Clarke-Brown, Somerset House Studios associate Feminist Internet, Shira Jeczmien, founding editor of Screen Shot and Melody Patry Advocacy Director at Access Now. For more info on her residency click here.

For further information on the 31 January 2019 event click here.

For futher information on the 28 November 2018 event, click here.

The events are organised as a part of a residency titled '6 Months Without' by Nastja Säde Rönkkö, supported by Somerset House Studios, Wysing Arts Centre, The Finnish Institute in London and Alfred Kordelin Foundation.