penguinstitute is a collective composed of multi-disciplinary artists Igigo Wu, Sophia Leitenmayer, Rio Usui, Linda Jiayun Gao-Lenders based in Vienna from Germany, Japan and Taiwan.
Rio Usui is an artist and curator whose practice explores the intersections of art and space science, as well as the materiality of exhibitions and the creation of platforms. Engaging with themes of Japanese identity, post-war and pop culture context. Usui navigates their position as a diaspora artist in Europe, researching and developing interactive and sustainable projects.
Working across Japan, Germany, and the United States, Usuiís projects range from pop-up exhibitions to institutional shows, fostering engagement with audiences and communities in diverse environments. Their curatorial projects include orbit jum jum jum (Seoul, 2024), Empty Shapes (Chicago, 2024), LE FILET (Tokyo, 2022), and Sample from ̄ mars (Tokyo, 2021), among others.
In her drawings and paintings, Rio Usui investigates scientific and imaginativephenomena, among which she searches for connecting elementsbetween fiction and reality. She explores how the human subconsciousreacts to transformed everyday objects. She is particularlyfascinated by how science fiction and cinematic representations of thepost-war period, despite their fictional
nature, are shaped in relation tohistorical facts and contemporary values, and continuously evolve inparallel with commonplace concepts and metaphors.
In addition to references to the manifold remakes of Godzilla (1954)- a film creature that can be read as a metaphor for Japans nucleardisasters - she creates new characters that serve as
tools and vesselsfor projection in coping with our own crises and challenges.
Fiction is an empty outline supported by the human subconscious.
When invisible connections and their forms appear in space,
fictions in the everyday subvert dimensions and appear in front of us as super-reality.
https://www.riousui.com/
https://www.riousui.com/orbit
https://www.instagram.com/orbit_platform/
Sophia Leitenmayer’s artistic practice operates at the intersections of sound, performance, object, and video, and is strongly influenced by collective and interdisciplinary working methods.
Their work focuses on extreme sonic experiences, prostheses, non-functioning
bodies, and questions of repair, transformation, and the conditions of different
forms of life. In their work, they explore how technical, social, and ecological systems are interwoven and how sound can serve as a medium to make these relationships tangible.
Currently, they are focusing, among other things, on the so-called "cemetery orbit” -
the growing ring of discarded satellites and space debris - which they conceive as a
speculative resonant space between technology, memory, and the future.
In addition to their artistic practice, Leitenmayer collaborates as a curator with Hyper Cultural Passengers in Hamburg as part of the Portjourneys network.
www.sophialeitenmayer.online
Linda Jiayun Gao-Lenders is a Chinese-German performer and sound artist. Their practice explores diasporic experience, transgenerational trauma and the politics of listening, drawing on personal archival material, interviews and collaborative formats. Working across performance, soundwalks, audio installations and lecture performances, they investigate how silenced memories reverberate in bodies, spaces and (inherited) languages.
They are a founding member of footnotes collective which explores public space as a site of collective imagination and intervention.
As part of the queer synthesizer collective sad sinʞ society they produce ambient/drone/noise soundscapes for film and performance.
Igigo Wu (Chun-Ju, Wu) is a Vienna based, multi-disci- plinary Taiwanese artist, whose works include video installations, paintings and performance.
Their works engage with the omnipresence of historical portals, entering ecosystems of micro memories and macro histories and investigation in military infrastructures in Europe and South-east Asia established during WWII. They further articulate the entanglements of imperial and colonial power embedded in between various forms of “bodies”. These colonial identity dilemmas circulate around the voids of unspoken stories, lingering in between the present and the past, like an untouchable yet ubiquitous shadow. They grapple with the question: How can paintings, along with the act of painting itself, though theatre, become an incarnation and activation of a political body into a social intervention? Further they envisions this practice as an enzyme to activate immersive, contemplative experiences that navigate the in-betweens: of individual and collective, body and space, memory and time, visibility and erasure.
common key words:
Diasporic story-telling
The afterlife of post-war infrastructure
science fiction - ruins of modernism architecture / post-war persistence (Tetsuro Yoshida, Ming-Yi, Wu)
collecitive memories embodied through the visual culture and materials from archives / metaphor and sublimation of human/nartural desaster
(kanagawa fighterplane manufacture, Yokosuka Naval Air Technical Arsenal 横須賀海軍工廠, 高座海軍工廠 Kouza Naval Arsenal, Raiden Fighterplane)
黄金町 AIR 参加申込書
interest for residency:
extension of last project "Three River Pieces" created in Yokohama in 2024:
The work consists of three river pieces: one for the Ōoka River, one for the Katabira River and one for the Tsurumi River, which flow through the city of Yokohama.
It’s an acoustic monument that shows the sensitive connection between places and bodies of water - these rivers are crossed by important transport lines, flow to the harbour and have a significant historical background.
https://sophialeitenmayer.online/three-river-pieces/
滞在中の活動予定 Activities planned during residency:
I want to continue with soundfishing and tuning with the Japanese waters by using Hydrophone and Saxophone. And I want to create an orchestra of individuals practicing music at the riversides. I want to get in contact and bring them closer to create a sonic public environment that shows the interconnected purposes of musicians and people taking public space to be and express.
Participatory Walks
f_r_iction in the space be_tween
performative audio walk I public space, Hamburg I Linda Jiayun Gao-Lenders and Janis Jirotka I in collaboration with LICHTHOF Theatre I 2023
notes of a sleepless cicada
site-specific soundwalk
Becoming Stickiness: Protocols for Survival, Spring Stretch Festival, Vienna, AT, 2026
invited to:
Internationales Frauen*Theaterfestival, September 2023, Frankfurt (M)
Theatermaschine, July 2023, Gießen
SONOHR Radio & Podcast Festival, February 2024, Bern (CH)
Funk am See Festival, August 2024, Luzern (CH)
Nebenton, July 2025, Operahouse Wuppertal
«wissen - savoir - sapere - know(-ledges)» conference of the Swiss Association for Gender Studies, September 2025,University of Basel (CH)
What waits underground before it sings? What frequencies travel through soil, through root systems and the compressed memory of a place?
How do we move through the city, with which body depending on gender, social class, age, race. In what relation to the people I meet in public space do I stand and which factors influence whether I feel safe. Who can feel safe, where?
super-fiction
超・虚構
Gaze at the moon
月を見つめる
super-fiction keywords:
fiction,
natural - human disaster
radioactivity - nuclear - pre/post WW2
science fiction - tokusatsu 特撮 - Godzilla ゴジラ
figure of fiction, collective memories, traumas,
relics, mark
archive
forgotten footage, photography, sounds, written words
scrap and build スクラップアンドビルド
constraction-deconstraction
modern architecture, modernism, bauhaus, secession, tetsuro yoshida,
storytelling
narrative
archive narrative
visual narrative, visual material,
fantasy, reality, realistic fantasy, fantastic reality
who was working for it? infrastructure - civils, function - building the
city,
memories,
collective figure,
building as skin,
collective skin - social skin
I smell the radioactive substance...