2012-2013 Co-op Academy / If I Can't Dance I Don't Want To Be Part of your Revolution presents 'Occupation Evacuation Transmission'

Emma Hedditch and students participating in DAI -project Occupation, Evacuation, Transmission ( Arnhem, 2013)

tag: Arnhem

Framework: Ian White. Tutorials: Ian White, Jimmy Robert and Emma Hedditch. Guests Yael Davids, Anik Fournier, Cecilia Dino, Matthew Lutz-Kinoy, Teresa María Díaz Nerio.

Co-ordination Tanja Baudoin (IICD).

Participants: Abner Preis, Anneke Ingwersen, Mariana Zamarbide, Kim Schonewille, Louis Liu, Momu & No Es, Sarah Jones, Silvia Ulloa, Sofia Ocana Urwitz, Tommie Soro.

Introduction

Appropriation is the claiming of one thing for the purpose of another. It is a play between invisibility and making seen, hovering between a special kind of nothing and something quite specific. Broadly, we could think of it as the application of any kind of copying in artistic practice. But of course, this already raises a whole set of questions: What do we choose to appropriate? Why? What do we know about the thing chosen? What do we want to know about it? Does it too have a resistance, an agency? What of it remains? What kind of copying takes place? What are the implications here for an idea of authorship? Are these questions dependent upon each other? Are the answers to them dependent upon who, or what, and where is being addressed? Appropriation in practice and theory is often discussed in relation to a specifically North American art history. What is our relation to this history? Is that a question about our relationship to one another? How or what is ours?

Using the resources that our own work and that of others provides, Occupation Evacuation Transmission assumes the model of a research group to explore ways in which such questions might be answered through a performance-based mode of enquiry. It is conceived as a cumulative process that is lead by questions rather than devised from answers. It seeks to generate itself and establish an insistent collection that is both of and for use, in and of time; of works, or materials, or strategies that might be both presented and subject to new kinds of application. Perhaps it asks an even broader question about the nature of performance itself, as the product or the producer of something like an architecture of recognition and transmission.

Initially, each workshop will combine something to be appropriated (drawn from a variety of different types of material including our own work) with a strategy of appropriation and a theoretical context e.g. artworks, images, objects, films, text, movement subject to interpretation, translation, copying, re-presentation, remediation, decolonisation etc. The accumulation of these experiences then shape the direction of project and provide a framework for a public presentation in September 2013.