bingenTV - Cluster Festival 2025
Sophie Seita and Naomi Woo
bingenTV is presented by Cluster Festival and Video Pool Media Arts Centre.
Working with video, textile, autofiction, and various installation processes, Sophie Seita’s and Naomi Woo’s exhibition pulls out and reroots the speculative potential of archives and queer history.
Developed in conversation with The Hildegard von Bingen Society for Gardening Companions, a queer-feminist collective originally founded by the German mediaeval mystic and musician Hildegard von Bingen in the 12th century and ‘propagated’ by the artists in 2020—the exhibition centres on a queer gardening talk show, bingenTV, supposedly shot in 1987 and never aired, until now.
Playful and flirty, this genre-bending talk show features a cast of queer characters real and fictional, past and present, in a whirlwind jaunt through space and time.
About the Artists
Sophie Seita
For about a decade, Sophie Seita (Germany, 1987) has worked with language as a sensuous, sculptural, and sonic material, translated and moulded into live performances, performative objects, publications, sound pieces, drawings, and textiles. Choreographed by language, their work often explores the sensorial pleasure of wild forms, new forms of embodiment, queer grammars of relationality, and the operations of power that reside within the materials and mediums we work with. Recent exhibitions, performances, talks, and workshops have found a home at Matt’s Gallery, Mimosa House, Café Oto, UP Projects, Flat Time House (all London), Rupert (Vilnius), Nottingham Contemporary, Index (Stockholm), Grand Union (Birmingham), Ruta del Castor (Mexico City), Kunsthalle Darmstadt, diffrakt (Berlin), Athens Experimental Lit and Performance Festival, TACO!, Goethe Institute, and elsewhere. Based in London, they often work internationally and collaboratively, most recently in the form of an alternative learning gathering on regenerating our agreement with water in Xochimilco, Mexico City, hosted by Ruta del Castor, with her queer-feminist project The Hildegard von Bingen Society for Gardening Companions, rooted in speculative approaches to archiving and community-oriented knowledge-sharing around ecology. She teaches in the Art Department at Goldsmiths, University of London, and recently held residencies at Akademie der Künste (Berlin), Studio Voltaire (London), and Brown University (Providence, Rhode Island).
Naomi Woo
Canadian conductor and pianist Naomi Woo is a widely sought-after symphonic and operatic conductor and the 2022 winner of the Canada Council’s prestigious Virginia Parker Prize. After a successful four-year tenure as assistant conductor of the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra she will join the Orchestre Métropolitain Montréal as Artistic Partner from the 2023-24 season and the Philadelphia Orchestra as assistant conductor for the 24-25 season. Highlights of her auspicious 23-24 season include conducting engagements with the Orchestre Métropolitain, Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, Toronto Symphony, Vancouver Symphony, and National Arts Center Orchestra; two appearances with the Illinois Symphony Orchestra, where she is a music director finalist; and an extensive tour of England leading English Touring Opera’s Cinderella. As an assistant/cover conductor Naomi works with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, Toronto Symphony, and Orchestre Métropolitain, and she conducts classical subscription concerts with the Orchestre Symphonique de Laval, Orchestre Symphonique de Trois-Rivières, Orchestre symphonique de la Côte-Nord, Symphony Nova Scotia, and the Thunder Bay Symphony. Engagements in previous seasons include the National Arts Centre Orchestra, Calgary Philharmonic, Ann Arbor Symphony, Orchestra NOW (New York), Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony, and Regina Symphony, and her debut at LSO St. Luke’s in London with the ensemble Tangram Sound. On the opera stage, she has conducted the Canadian premiere of Du Yun’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Angel’s Bone in Vancouver and the world premiere of Ellis Ludwig-Leone’s The Night Falls in New York City. In fall 2022, she assisted the world premiere of Oliver Leith’s opera Last Days at Royal Opera House Covent Garden. Naomi is a member of Tapestry Opera’s Women in Musical Leadership program and was chosen by her mentor Yannick Nézet-Séguin as a member of the Orchestre Métropolitain’s inaugural orchestral conducting academy. Naomi holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge, where she was a Gates Cambridge Scholar. She has also studied mathematics, philosophy, and music at Yale College, the Yale School of Music, and Université de Montréal.