DAI-bulletin 2009-2010 number six February 2010

This is the sixth issue of the monthly DAI-bulletin in the academic year 2009-2010, informing you about our program and about important dates and events.

Please note that:

- biographical information on our guests can be found on our website under ‘Faculty’ and ‘Guests
- all parts of the curriculum have to be attended by all students unless it is mentioned otherwise.

DAI-week February 15 – February 20

Instead of asking its master students to be present at the institute on a daily base the DAI offers an alternative educational environment: during one week per month (11 times per year) everyone who is involved in DAI stays in Enschede day and night and takes part in an intense program (consisting of lecture presentations, seminars, face to face conversations, projects, master classes, workshops etcetera) that lasts from early morning until late at night. During the DAI week, guest cooks prepare the afternoon and evening meals that staff, students and guests enjoy together. During the week students spend the night at one of the two DAI houses in the centre of Enschede. In between these so-called DAI-weeks all return to their daily practices - scattered over the Netherlands, or abroad.

DAI-CANTINA

This weeks’ cook is Tania Theodorou, who graduated from the photography Department of Gerrit Rietveld Academie in 2005. Since then she has worked with more diverse materials focusing mostly on installations that are informed by research into constructs of knowledge and archetypes yet infused with many intuitive aspects. Tania grew up in the south of Greece where her father had a restaurant, and taught her everything he knows. Since moving to Amsterdam she has cooked on and off in various kitchens, and catered for film sets and photo-shoots. www.taniatheodorou.com.

Lunch will be served Monday from 12:00-13:00, other days from 13:00-14:00, dinner daily from 18:30-19:30.

Monday February 15

THEORY PROGRAMME:

13:00–17:00 (space to be announced)
For all 1st year students

Plenary session with thesis mentor John Heymans

This month the group will discuss W.J.T. Mitchell’s text ‘What is an image'? once again. In the last month's session this text was introduced by the students Chiara Fumai & Emilio Moreno. Before this discussion John Heymans will contextualize Mitchell's text in a crash course lecture on the question:’ What is philosophy?'

13:00-17:00 (space to be announced)
For all 2nd year students

Plenary session with thesis mentor Alena Alexandrova

This month’ session will be on issues related to writing, such as referring to sources, developing a draft of a chapter. In the second half we will discuss Brian Holmes’ text "The Absent Rival: Radical Art in a Political Vacuum", from “Escape the Overcode". Activist Art in the Control Society, 2009, pp.158-172 .“ We will focus on issues as (the possibility of) activism and art in the context of network cultures.

19:30 (project room)
FOR ALL STUDENTS

Four Pathways through Chaos:
Felix Guattari and the Cartography of the Present
A lecture by Brian Holmes

How to map out the world we're living in? How to understand its grounds and black holes, the poetics that lead us beyond them and the abstract ideas that give life in society its concrete forms? Working with artists, social scientists and political movements, Felix Guattari traced a four-fold cartography of existence. The idea was not to create a unified or deterministic picture, but instead to explore radically different fields of experience, which are always unique to every individual and every group. Guattari asks us to pay attention to what moves, what strives to overcome its boundaries. The map can be frozen into a normalized balance assigning everyone their place in society as it is; but a change in one of the zones -- for example, in the artistic field of patterns, rhythms and poetics -- can set off transformations in all four dimensions. At stake is the process of becoming other, and the search for an articulation of collective speech.

Tuesday February 16

Starting 9:30
Face to face

meetings with Alena Alexandrova.

9:30–17:30 (project room)
For all students

Lecture-presentations

by DAI-students (in no particular order) Taf Hassam, Jimini Hignett, Sevgi Ortac, Veridiana Zurita, Eelco Wagenaar, Eva Olthof, Lauren Alexander and Vittoria Soddu.

Their 20–minute presentations will be reviewed on the spot by guest advisors Brian Holmes and Hans van Houwelingen.
The discussion will be moderated by Gabriëlle Schleijpen.

19:30 (project room)
For all students

‘A painting getting its kicks'
Lecture by Hugo Canoilas

In his evening presentation, that will use pictures and music and spoken words, Portuguese artist Hugo Canoilas will focus on the ties between the progressive art and music of the 1950s and 1960s, that tried to capture the changing spirit of the times. His interest concerns on the one hand, radical ideas with which artists and musicians worked, striving after, in Nietzschean terms, an Umwertung aller Werte (a transvaluation of all values).
On the other hand, Canoilas is also interested in the focus on instinctive elements by the same artists and musicians who introduced a new visceral or primitive feel, for example by making speed and sweat an integral part of their work. Canoilas' presentation is structured as a sort of road journey with at least 3 main stops:  Jackson Pollock and the unconscious; On the road with On Kawara, Ed Ruscha and Robert Rauschenberg and Helio Oiticica and Oswaldo de Andrade's anthropophagia.

Wednesday February 17

Today the DAI’s student body is spread over several parallel projects.

10:30-17:30 (space to be announced)

GOODTRIPBADTRIP.reloaded
Curated by Mark Kremer with contributions by John Heymans

Today: Collective Work. Further information will be given to the participants at the start of the day…

10:30-17:30 (space to be announced)

AFFECTIONATELY YOURS
Curated by If I Can't Dance, I Don't Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution, tutored by Phil Collins and Hito Steyerl and co-ordinated by Tanja Baudoin.

Aneta Szylak, director of the Wyspa Institute of Art (Gdansk, Poland), is visiting the DAI this week. She will be giving an informative talk about Wyspa, focusing on its history and current exhibition practice and on the artistic climate in Gdansk. Aneta Szylak is curator and art theorist, co-founder and director of the Wyspa Institute of Art in the former Gdansk Shipyard premises in Poland and Vice-President of the Wyspa Progress Foundation. The Wyspa Institute of Art combines the presentation of contemporary art with deliberations on the shape of social culture. 

Frederique Bergholtz and Maaike Gouwenberg will be present this week, as well as both tutors, Phil Collins and Hito Steyerl. In the afternoon we will brainstorm together about our trip to Wyspa in May.

10:30-17:30 (project room)

PLATFORM FOR (UN)SOLICITED RESEARCH AND ADVICE
Organised by Manifesta
Today with Denis Isaia
Also present: Florian Göttke

Denis Isaia’s presentation for the group is titled ‘Everybody is international in his present’.

The post 1989 dynamics, set by globalization to the arts, are the present, and those who wish to develop a critique have to face them. From the fall of the wall onward, the internationalization process has moved quickly to the point that it determines what today can be defined a super-site or a super-time of the art that articulates itself around a series of appointments less and less visible: biennials, talks, education.

The fact by itself is positive: the attention on the disciple has multiplied the possibilities for artists and operators who, in great part historically mobile and progressive, have found themselves at ease. The other face of the medal is the contradiction that emerges on the relationships between internationality and progressivism. The imprinted acceleration has determined reflections on the real that pass through the only possible eye under the following conditions: what belongs to the tourist and according to what he sees (the real) can be beautiful, good or bad, but it is inevitably outside, somewhere else and in another time. The negative result is a missed connection between singularity, liberty and territory...

19:30 (project room)
For all students

“The Empire of Senses”
Hito Steyerl

Hito Steyerl is tutor of the research project 'Affectionately Yours' that If I Can't Dance... is currently curating at the DAI, alongside tutor Phil Collins. In her lecture entitled 'The Empire of Senses', Hito Steyerl will address the following questions: what is a politics of affect? And how can it be changed? Contemporary politics are not merely aestheticised, but exercised as aesthetics. This Empire of Senses is built on shock and attraction, on desire and disgust, on hatred and hysteria, on feeling and fear. The power to trigger, channel, mediate and market those emotions is a characteristic of contemporary power as such. Contemporary news evokes a situation of constant exception, a crisis in permanence, a state of heightened alert and tension. The Empire of Senses, which traditionally had to be policed and repressed, has become the contemporary norm of perception.

Thursday February 18

Starting 9:30
Face to Face

meetings between individual DAI-students and individual guest advisorsPhil Collins, Hito Steyerl, Aneta Szylac, Denis Isaia, Hugo Canoilas, Frederique Bergholz, Maaike Gouwenberg, Florian Göttke, Mark Kremer andRenée Ridgway.

Delphine Bedel will arrange on-line meetings with the second year students during the day. A schedule for this will be announced during the week.

16:30-17:30
For all students

Studio Palaver

Studio Palaver is essentially a student led initiative that aims to create further communication and dialogue between the practicing artists of the institute. Through using the Studio-visit as a model, Studio Palaver initiates a series of Palaveresque meetings to take place during the DAI weeks. Together with one-on-one visits between the artists, the week includes a Studio Palaver Hour where five artists individually play host to a group of six artists. The idea is for the artist to treat this hour however he or she sees fit, encouraging creative responses and ways for using this hour in an investigative and “questionable” manner.

This month hosts are Frederik Gruyaerts, Alin Naidin, Isabele Oldak, Sevgi Ortac, Eva Olthof and Emilio Moreno.

17:30 (project space)
For participants of Negotiating Equity

A demonstration by Ricardo Liong-A-Kong on how to use the Negotiating Equity Word Press blog: sign-up as users, making a page, adding images, etc. and discussing what content would be appropriate for the site. Please prepare a title for your project and a short text of what you are working on, along with a few images formatted at no larger than 400 pixels wide.

19:30 (project room)
For 2nd Year students

Group meeting with Gabrielle Schleijpen

Friday February 19

11:00-21:00, at Casco, Nieuwe Kade 213-215, Utrecht

‘User’s Manual: The Grand Domestic Revolution’
Curated by Binna Choi/coordinator Yolande van der Heide

The Grand Domestic Revolution Seminar #4
Guest lecturers: Marina Vishmidt, Annette Krauss and Hilde Tuinstra
This seminar will be led by London based writer, researcher and editor Marina Vishmidt. Expanding on the feminist groundwork of The Grand Domestic Revolution, Vishmidt will focus on the feminist perspectives concerning (collective) domestic labour and women's organization. This seminar will take shape in form of round table discussion whereby she will share her knowledge as well as lend some insight to the students respective practices based on their previous proposals.
A semi- public lecture: Self-Negating Labour: A Spasmodic Chronology of Domestic Unwork and screening event will follow in the evening from 19.00- 21.00 and will be joined by DAI students from theNegotiating Equity” group led by Renée Ridgway.

The lecture will use domestic work as an optic to examine structural and political transformations in the social roles of work and art in the past several decades, starting with the exemplary case of Modernist design and its drive to rationalize the space of the kitchen. This will lead to a general analysis of how the escape from work, and the extension of work -- or the commodity- to all realms of social life, is central both to the development of capitalism and the politics that contest these developments, principally feminism, Marxism and the post-Marxist 'immaterial labour' discussion. The key role of the 'domestic labour' debates was to concretely analyze how any political revolution needs to start from the basic relations of day-to-day life, and abolish the distinctions between private and public, work and non-work that kept women in the 'domestic labour ghetto'. Politicised art practices too tried to overcome their separation from work, a separation that was grounded in a naturalized, boundless 'creativity' that ignored its social conditions of possibility. But 'work' is no longer central as a social identity, and those strategies are historical. Or are they? The proximity of domestic work to art will be proposed as both 'constitutive exceptions' to the law of value which can provide clues as to how non-capitalist social relations will need to start from the 'home' in order to think about whether we still need the division of labour, the existence of gender, the sacredness of the individual, and the borders between the political and the economic.

Starting 10:30, at Casco, Nieuwe Kade 213-215, Utrecht

Negotiating Equity
Organised by Renée Ridgway and contributors to n.e.w.s (http://northeastwestsouth.net)

First we will view and discuss the installation, ‘If You Lived Here Still’, an archive project by Martha Rosler. Organized as part of Casco’s year-long programme ‘User’s Manual: The Grand Domestic Revolution’, the years 1989-1991, artist Martha Rosler organized her project ‘If You Lived Here…’ at the Dia Art Foundation in New York City. ‘If You Lived Here…’ was a seminal group project on housing, homelessness and the systems and conditions underlying them such as gentrification, bureaucratic complicity or non-compliance and increasing privatisation of the public sector. It took a radical approach toward art and institutions of that time, in a mode that might be called cross disciplinary and “participatory”. The archive project by Martha Rosler at Casco, initiated by Anton Vidokle and first presented at e-flux’s New York space last autumn, provides an opportunity to revisit Rosler's undertaking and interrogate its legacy. Besides the archival materials that expose the organisational and research processes behind the project, more research documents that Rosler has assembled or solicited others to contribute over the last 20 years are installed for close reading at Casco. These also include new materials gathered in Utrecht. 

 

14:00-17:00
Leidsche Rijn, Utrecht

Frans-Willem Korsten will give us a guided tour on bikes of the phenomenon of Leidsche Rijn. Continuing his discourse on 'Reading the city' he presented last December, we will now venture outwards and into the city, thinking about putting tools such as narrativity, theatricality, lyric, spectaclicity and gamistry into practice. 'Leidsche Rijn, now Utrecht, has been and still is the biggest expansion project in Europe. In just a decade an entire city has been added to the already existing city body. Next to that, the city centre will see a radical renovation in the coming decade. In order to sense what this is (whilst remembering that it is a relatively small scale project in relation to the megacities that are being built in China as we write and speak), we will bike from the city centre to the newly built city parts and travel around there. The question at the back of our minds will be how to think of city limits. Have they become non-existent? What are the implications of this limitlessness? How can the urban landscape be transformed and what are its spaces for negotiating equity?’
19:00-21:00  Marina Vischmidt

Evening lecture with ‘User’s Manual: The Grand Domestic Revolution’ at CASCO. See ‘User’s Manual: The Grand Domestic Revolution’

10:30 at Werkplaats Typografie, Arnhem
For 2nd year students

Publications Project
With Delphine Bedel

The Publications Project is a collection of artists publications issued by the DAI and designed in collaboration with the designers from Werkplaats Typografie. The 2009-10 edition is directed by artist/curator Delphine Bedel. The Publications Project is an experimental research and production platform that aims to address the specific process of artist books production, from concept and design to distribution. Designers and artists are invited to team up in couples to develop one project, in close collaboration with an author. The format of this diverse collection can varies from magazine, essays, books, and artist editions to performance artefacts. Through very diverse perspectives the artists and designers reflect on publishing as a versatile medium. The limited editions are distributed through artist's performances, bookshops and artist book fairs.

Saturday February 20

11.00-15.00 at Casco, Nieuwe Kade 213-215, Utrecht

‘User’s Manual: The Grand Domestic Revolution’
Curated by Binna Choi/coordinator Yolande van der Heide

Annette Krauss and Hilde Tuinstra: Read In Reading action

Borrowing from the current GDR library, the collective read in action, led by Annette Krauss and Hilde Tuinstra, initiates instant reading sessions in someone else's home. Finding a home to read is a joint undertaking in trying to comprehend a text and its possible homes. This session will take shape in the form of collectively scanning the GDR library for a text and finding a home to read and share discussion.