Occupation / Evacuation / Transmission

From Month to Month | tag: Arnhem

May 30      

Face to face meetings with Matthew Lutz-Kinoy and Teresa María Díaz Nerio.

On Thursday night Matthew will present a running commentary to his work to all the DAI.

May 31

The following day, Lutz-Kinoy meets with students of Occupation Evacuation Transmission for a workshop that starts from an exercise of reading and giving voice to a series of poems by the poet Essex Hemphill. The students are encouraged to consider presence, duration and verbalization with voice and sounds. Inherent to this performance of enacting a voice will be the participation in the visibility and realization of minoritarian positions. Over the day together the focus will be on movement and the physicalization of response / reaction, and on occupying a space of influence where movements function as symbols and position us in a space that is riddled with the language of experience, judgment and recognition. You can find out more about Matthew's practice on his website: http://www.thewildandexcitinglifeofmatthewrobertlutzkinoyswebbasedspace.com/

 April 25 & 26

In April Jimmy Robert will be present at DAI. Students will work in small groups to develop a script/score from the combination of the texts they produced last month. They are asked to think about how the descriptions of each other's work they provided could become actions or a set of gestures, that can be articulated as a set of motions or dialogues (spoken text) or a combination of both. We will read two short texts: Freud's 'Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through' and a text on the work of Elaine Sturtevant, 'Inappropriate Appropriation' by Michael Lobel.

Jimmy Robert works with diverse media including photography, collages, objects, art books, short films and performance. In his explorations into the relationship between images and objects, Robert draws attention to the dynamics of different surfaces. Questions of identity and its representation are his main interest, and he uses a variety of references to literature, art and music to emphasise the fragility of the materials he uses. Influenced by the Nouveau Roman genre and particularly by the novels of Marguerite Duras, Robert chooses to blur the meaning of his works. This results in subtle transitions from space to surface, from an image to its concept and from a text to an idea. These transformations of space and content are always placed in relation to the artist's own body. In his performances Robert's body becomes a projection surface, where the tension between the portrayal and the content reveal the relationship between appropriation and alienation. 

March 21 & 22

In March tutor Jimmy Robert will meet with the students.

"Following on what happened with Emma Hedditch and elaborating from this point I would like to see how we could do some exercises with language/text/speech/gesture that take on the idea of appropriation where you left it at namely the appropriation of methodology and see if we could produce material from what you made with Emma which in turns could be the source or the starting point of if not a performance at least the illustration of your thought processes.

With this in view I would like you to read this text by Walter Benjamin on the task of the translator and think about how this relates to the idea of appropriation and affect. I would like you to think of this text as a way of interpreting things/Art. What is being translated when we look at a piece of work? Is interpretation the same as translating? How do we create meaning? And to which extent do we appropriate forms and languages to make sense of them for ourselves? These are a few of the questions I would like you to think about before we meet so that we could discuss them on Friday before we start some exercises.

We will do a series of exercises taken from the book of Augusto Boal (I strongly advise that you read about him before we meet) titled Games for actors and non-actors. These actions will be centered on the idea of appropriation through speech, text, language and movement.

Following this and what happened with Emma last time It would be necessary that each one of you writes a short text (max half a page) that describes their experience of one of the pieces that was shown during the last workshop, by this I mean write a short description of one work in any style, however creatively you may want; this may include a foreign language (as some of you may struggle with English). The rule is text as a starting point. Tanja will tell you which piece you will write about. The idea being here transformation, interpretation: taking further what you did with methodology by giving it another form. Each one of you will somehow 'perform'/read the text that they will bring on that day.

I will do a short presentation about Counter-relief (Kaai 2013) a piece that I recently presented at Kaai theater in Brussels in collaboration with Maria Hassabi and coincidentally (or not) initially performed with Emma as I think it relates in some ways to the subject of appropriation of methodology, authorship, and translation to contextualize a bit what I would like you to look at. The idea is not to have finished pieces but on the contrary to elaborate on the material and be able to present something a bit more elaborate in April with possible combinations and new associations." JR

February 21 & 22

In February tutor Emma Hedditch will meet with the students.

Thursday 21 February 19:30 - 20:30 A round table discussion with Jakob Jakobsen, Emma Hedditch, Gabrielle Schleijpen and all students.

Together with Henriette Heise, Emma Hedditch and Jakob Jakobsen founded the Copenhagen Free University as an alternative educational project outside the institutional system.The round table discussion takes place within the context of 'Roaming Academy' run by Renee Ridgway and 'Occupation Evacuation Transmisson', a course run by IICD and part of the Co-Op Academy at DAI.

January 17 & 18 

In January tutor Emma Hedditch will meet with the students. One on one meetings on Thursday and on Friday we'll start the day with a short introduction to her work, and then move on to a discussion of the texts we've read in preparation: one text by Emma Hedditch on the work of artist Adrian Piper, along with a video of Piper's performance Funk Lessons (1983), and a publication by Hedditch titled 'Coming to Have A Public Life?' from 2007. We then continue with a series of exercises, some physical, following the Viewpoints exercises that Yael Davids introduced last time, and some focused on writing as a generative effort.

"I want to begin our conversation immediately - to constitute an association, a representation of my interest in an identification with you and them, not to be seen as a static set of relations based only on the past associations or on an individual author or narrative. This being is the most accurate description of what role or part I think an 'I' could activate, here and now. For it is a social history and accumulative past that breaks into the present, not one that charts isolated instances, accounted for through abstract behaviour, summoning concrete institutions that back up, prop up what we might better articulate as a desired life."

Emma Hedditch (1972) is an Artist, and a volunteer for the Cinenova Working Group, a feminist film and video distributor based in London. Her work focuses on daily practice, culture and distribution of knowledge as political actions.

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.

November 29 & 30

Thursday: one on one meetings with Yael Davids and Tanja Baudoin

Friday: this week's meeting will be tutored by Yael Davids and is taking place at the headquarters of If I Can't Dance in Amsterdam. Yael will introduce the students to her practice and her ideas on appropriation as an act we perform in our daily life. We will explore appropriation as a manner of responding to situations where we are attempting to adjust and find a position, for instance in the case of immigration or disease. Through performative exercises the group will examine modes of appropriation in the body and in space.

November 1  & 2 

Thursday : one on one meetings with Tanja Baudoin and Vivian Ziherl

Friday: Frederique Bergholtz and Tanja Baudoin from If I Can't Dance will be outlining the programme for the coming months and begin exploring ideas around the notion of 'appropriation' and what it may mean to our own practices. Several case studies of artist practices will function as examples to help them speak about this field of research. They will read an essay by Isabelle Graw titled 'Dedication replacing appropriation: fascination, subversion, and dispossession in appropriation art' from the catalogue 'Louise Lawler and Others' from 2004. Students will contribute to the discussion by bringing something that communicates an idea of what appropriation is or might be, as a way to begin what may over the year grow into a 'collective collection' of materials.