The Dutch Art Institute warmly invites you to Arnhem where 'Theater aan de Rijn' will host the 20th edition of our Roaming Assembly, this time curated by Ruth Noack, venerated member of our tutorial team.  

Between Subversion and Hallucination takes a close look at politics and language of sleep and dreaming. What can dream-life tell us about totalitarianism? How can we move beyond the contradiction of sleep and wakefulness? What does it mean to fall asleep at a protest site? Is there political subjectivity to be found in dreaming? What can we accomplish when we question the negative connotations of passivity and instead start hallucinating?

The symposium's tools of knowledge production will include diverse formats, such as lecture, performance, voicing, film-clip, music, reception and discussion.

Contributors:

John Barker
Anna Daučíková
Haytham el-Wardany
Anja Scheffer
Sharon Sliwinski
& curator Ruth Noack
with students of the DAI

Program, Sunday, March 18

Discussion by Sharon Sliwinski: “Dreaming in Dark Times”

Sigmund Freud famously described dreams as the “guardians of sleep,” and indeed, these night watchmen can help preserve the integrity of the mind, guarding over our capacity to articulate events in in our own terms. Drawing examples from Charlotte Beradt’s The Third Reich of Dreams, as well as more contemporary dreamers, Sliwinski's discussion will focus on how this psychological labour can be understood as one of our most potent tools of civil resistance. In dark times in particular, dreaming represents an integral form of thought and a crucial means to exercise our fundamental capacity to assign meaning to the world.

Performance by John Barker and DAI students: “STOP THE WORLD I WANNA GET OFF”

In this performance a poet, a preacher, a king and a Silicon Valley whizzkid will react or not react to a street sleeper in a sleeping bag. 

Anja Scheffer and students of DAI will be giving voice to excerpts from Charlotte Beradt’s book "The Third Reich of Dreams", 1966.  

A reading of "The Book of Sleep" by Haytham el-Wardany

The Book of Sleep by Haytham el-Wardany is a literary undertaking that cautiously seeks to approach sleep through inflecting the questions of identity, politics, and language. Ultimately the book seeks to complicate the narrative of sleep beyond its simple reduction to dreams and dismissive negative stigma.

See the video-documentation.

Practical information

When: March 18, 2018
Location: Theater aan de Rijn (public entrance is at Bartok Park, next to Feestaardvark).
Time: 13.30 - 18.30
Lectures and talks will be in English.

Admission is free ~ please join the event on facebook.

After a word of welcome by the DAI's director at 13.30 'Between Subversion and Hallucination' will unfurl until 18.30 after which drinks will be served in the theatre. If you also wish to join our communal DAI dinner (from 19:00 onward) at WALTER books , Looierstraat 43  in Arnhem, please be sure to make a reservation by Friday, March 16. Reservations can be made via Peter Sattler at peter@peterkristinn.com. Costs for the lovely dinner & one glass of wine: €10 - Payments (pin only) directly at WALTER books.

Planetary Campus is an innovative conceptual space (without walls) where the MA curriculum "DAI Art Praxis" meets with a wide variety of external parties. A welcoming space where we want to host a fleeting, "affective community", where we generously share art and research, where complexity can be embraced and intellectual intra-actions are fostered, aiming to endow our praxes, wherever they are operational. As an infrastructure Planetary Campus is the container for several activities initiated by the DAI.

One of them is the Roaming Assembly, a recurring public symposium scheduled to take place once a month, functioning as it were as the DAI-week's 'centerfold' event. This state-of-the-art speculative and hybrid program explores specific themes and topics of contemporary relevance to the thinking of art in the world today. 

Although closely interlinked with the DAI's curriculum, Roaming Assembly editions are not conceived as plain extensions of the regular DAI classes and seminars, but rather envisioned as sovereign happenings, designed to mobilize our bodies, our intelligences.

Initiator and curator-in-chief Planetary Campus: Gabriëlle Schleijpen

Interim coordinator Planetary Campus: Peter Sattler

Documentation: Silvia Ulloa; see our Video Archive 

Communication design: Lauren Alexander/Foundland

If you want to receive our DAI-BULLETIN on a monthly base you are welcome to register here.

Planetary Campus is generously supported by the Innovations Fund of the