2021- 2022 ~ COOP SUMMIT ~ collaborative research presentations in Bergamo & Milan.

Dear Friends,

August 26, 27 & 28 upcoming, the Dutch Art Institute (DAI) will present COOP SUMMIT 2022, our annual polymorphic event around the outcome of the year-long enquiry by our COOPs: topical study groups positioned at the heart of the DAI’s curriculum.

For the academic year 2021-2022 DAI commissioned 6 art institutions, admired by us for their political poetics and poetical politics, their resilient thinking, ethical self-imagination and interdependent acting in the world, namely:

Amsterdam: If I Can't Dance I Don't Want to Be Part Of Your Revolution

Arnhem: sonsbeek20-24

Athens: State of Concept

Berlin: SAVVY Contemporary

Bilbao: Bulegoa z/b

Utrecht: Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons

to convene, curate and guide inter-, trans- or non-disciplinary art research trajectories; bringing makers & thinkers, artists, writers and curators together around relevant questions and urgent topics of our time. The 6 COOPs gathered (in various places all over Europe, including Bergamo) for several days during each of our monthly DAI Weeks, to share research, to probe and to debate what is (not) to be done in order to develop a group work that honors the input and specificity of participants, places and public spaces. DAI now returns to the North of Italy where the COOPs will go public (unassumingly) on the grounds of the Citta Alta in Bergamo and in Milan.

August 26 & 27: we are again brilliantly teaming up with our alum and friend Sara Benaglia, the director of BACO (Base Arte Contemporanea Odierna) in Bergamo for a constellation of five COOP presentations activated at

BACO’s premises

Orto Botanico di Bergamo "Lorenzo Rota" - Sezione di Città Alta

Auditorium di Piazza Libertà

and beyond.

August 28: for the first time, all of DAI will touch base in Milan where we will be most generously hosted by our friend Chiara Figone and the team of Archive Sites at

ZERO…

to conclude the COOP SUMMIT 2022 with:

Roaming Assembly#30 presents sonsbeek Council#4,

A Blues For The Tired, Salty, Essential Worker,

an ongoing invocation convened by sonsbeek20→24

with COOP study group A Blues For Essential Workers' presence woven throughout.

Should you happen to be around in Bergamo and/or Milan, we will be absolutely thrilled, it goes without words, to welcome you in our midst! To those mourning that they will not be able to join us, we are delighted to convey that Zasha Colah, artistic co-director at Archive Milano/Berlin/Dakar, will attend the 3 day-long program and write a reflection, later to be published on our website.

With love,

Gabriëlle Schleijpen

she / her

artistic director / head of program

(Journeying with DAI leads to the accomplishment of an accredited MA in Art Praxis ~ under the auspices of ArtEZ University of the Arts ~ Arnhem)

Please scroll for the detailed time line and all practicalities.

For PRESS acquires please contact the COOPs senior co-ordinator Nikos Doulos

TIME LINE IN DETAIL

Friday, August 26

10:45 – 13:00 ~ Watering, Wandering: An Anthology of Echoes

Location: BACO, Via Arena, 9, 24129 Bergamo

17:00 – 18:30 ~ reprise, revise: (re)frame

Location: Auditorium di Piazza Libertà, Via Norberto Duzioni, 2, 24121 Bergamo

20:00 - 22:00 ~ Water Seeks Its Own Level

Location: BACO, Via Arena, 9, 24129 Bergamo

Saturday, August 27

11:00 – 13:00 ~ don’t forget that gut feeling

Location: Scaletta Colle Aperto, Orto Botanico di Bergamo "Lorenzo Rota"

Advised to wear long garments and comfortable shoes. Weather forecast predicts slight drizzle.

14:00 – 16:00 ~ Dima’s Bracelet. Songs, Prayers, Stories and Spells

Location: BACO, Via Arena, 9, 24129 Bergamo

Monday, August 28

13:00 - 20:00 ~ IN VOICE (featured at Roaming Assembly#30 presents sonsbeek Council#4, A Blues For The Tired, Salty, Essential Worker, an ongoing invocation convened by sonsbeek20→24 )

Location: ZERO..., Via Carlo Boncompagni 44, 20139, Milano

PRESENTATIONS (in order of appearance):

Watering, Wandering: An Anthology of Echoes.

Friday, August 26

COOP study group The Covent of the Care-full presents

Watering, Wandering: An Anthology of Echoes

Ecologies of knowledge need nourishing grounds, responsive spaces and caring structures to grow, manifest, reshape and make room for the not-yet.

Layer after layer, leaving traces, deconstructing static lines to redirect attention.

How are past efforts echoed in our own growth?

How can we learn from what is yet to come?

The Covent of the Careful invites you to enter a space of echoes and whispers, to trace un-known collective care in well-known structures. Let’s listen together to a past that has shaped the experiences we are sharing in the present.

What are the supplements we need for growth and degrowth?

How do we care for what has been left in our hands?

Shifting the sensory focus by moving from darkness into light, we offer you a manual to embrace what is around us, what has always been.

How can we remember what the body holds, but has forgotten along the way?

Listen, the knowledge is being whispered among us, more-than-human whispering.

Take a sip, listen with your tastebuds.

Drawing from the group's collective study over the past year focusing on genealogies of the politics and ethics of care, Watering, Wandering: An Anthology of Echoes will reflect on the relationship with more-than-human beings, and how to care for the stories that have been passed down to us in order to nourish the spaces that we share.

The Covent of the Care-full = iLiana Fokianaki, Laura Huertas Millan, Collective Rewilding (tutor team), Nagham Abu Assaf, Mara Ittel, Zuzana-Markéta Macková, David Přílučík, Maxima Smith, Max Vajt, Theresa Zwerschke (student participants). Partnering institution: State of Concept.

More information: here

Friday, August 26

COOP study group Curating Positions: Nostalgia for the light*: Struggles’ Reverberations in Cinema presents

reprise, revise: (re)frame

You are invited to attend this film screening. Think about a metronome. This event is open to the public. Rejoice in the frame. Emerge an act. Thanks. Refrain!

You are invited to attend this film screening. Think about a metronome. This event is open to the public. Rejoice in the frame. Emerge an act. Thanks. Refrain!

VIP cards will be available for pick-up at the VIP Desk upon arrival.

Over the past year Curating Positions has explored ways of collective film making, by dealing with questions about militantism, hacking, expanded cinema, documentary film, image making processes and collectivity. The film will reveal itself and act through the screen, the projection and the audience.

Curating Positions: Nostalgia for the light*: Struggles’ Reverberations in Cinema = Marwa Arsanios, Leon Filter, Leire Vergara (tutor team), Lucas Lugarinho Braga, Miyoung Chang, Laura Dubourjal, Elisa Giuliano, Maud Gyssels, velvet leigh, Chiara Pagano, Iga Świeściak, Lau ten Zeldam, Rhodé Visser (student participants). Partnering institution: Bulegoa z/b.

More information: here

Friday, August 26

COOP study group SOIL IS AN INSCRIBED BODY: on Agropoetics, Land Struggles and the Aesthetics of Sovereignty presents

Water Seeks Its Own Level

If you hold a stone

Hold it in your hand

If you feel the weight

You'll never be late

To understand

Caetano Veloso, "If You Hold A Stone".

*We thought every human thinks in our language, having to translate it into their language only when speaking out loud. When I say there is space between us, I don’t mean the void in between —no, in between us there is only a substance known as time. Time is an expression for blood (Hennes vener blev flod-flytande), which is always mistaken for water.*

Acknowledging the entanglements between histories and narratives, we see the Citta Alta as a carrier of the European fantasy of monumentality. Thinking about the encapsulated material, sonic, natural and architectural lineages codified within the landscape, we seek traces of deterritorialized histories of oppression. Through our embodied engagement with the city we search for the silenced links that decentralize the Western cosmo-conception asking it to become fluid; how to weave together our voices and amplify our differences in unison? How do we expel rigidity and enter a state of incompleteness as a constant questioning and negotiation of what grants permission to be real? Navigating the sedimented histories as the foundations of the city, we search for the geographical entry points that become portals activating counter-factual, fantastical and semi-fictional stories.

*So when you, a body like any other body, write your name next to mine, is it below, beside, counter, or are its characters raining onto the page in anticipation of mutual evaporation? 21st century tears multiply in despair of finding the pristine lake that pushed them into existence. A codified memory slides on the surface of a wave as a big round pearl balances between the bulls’ horns; Much more than a memory it has become a premonition of sorts: in hindsight it is an instruction. A promise I've been going back to, something you promised me, but never delivered. That doesn't mean I'm not still waiting. yesterdaytoday, tommorrowyesterday, todayesterday*

SOIL IS AN INSCRIBED BODY: on Agropoetics, Land Struggles and the Aesthetics of Sovereignty = Akinbode Akinbiyi, Sagal Farah, Billy Fowo (tutor team), Felix Bahret, Morena Buser, Orestis Giannoulis, Dakota Guo, Cornelia Isaksson, Hannah Jones, Ioli Kavakou, Rene Landspersky, Mirjam Steffen, Eli Witteman (student participants). Partnering institution: SAVVY Contemporary

More information: here

Saturday, August 27

COOP study group You fed me when I was hungry: Food Commons and Ecology of Belonging presents

don’t forget that gut feeling

Please don’t forget that gut feeling! Slurping, passing, sliding, swelling, sticking, oozing, shriveling, shifting daily gestures of invisible labor.

It is a gathering sport that reforms assemblages. We taste the time that lies in between reciting memories, gurgling figments and fragments. A woven wad of salivated confusion.

Contamination as collaboration. A hot mess preserving passion, cap snap ferment that troubling desire, that conflict, that illegible substance we were not able to pick up along the way.

I want to thank you for having me on your plate :) Symbols carried on the tongue, each distinct essence dissolved. Feed me something squares, something sweet, something bitter, something sour, something salty, something umami.

Don’t forget that gut feeling explores thematically the notion of the commons in regards to food production, consumption and waste within various contexts and through diverse materialities. Stemming from the group’s one-year study with a focus on the urban commons, the collective presentation is rooted in the paradox of resources’ abudance and scarcity, digestion and the notion of the garden in contextual varieties.

You fed me when I was hungry: Food Commons and Ecology of Belonging = Ying Que, Müge Yilmaz (tutor team) Bambi van Balen, Nash Caldera, Iliada Charalampous, Dandelion Eghosa, Emilia Kuryłowicz, Ioana Lupascu, Afrang Malekian, Maoyi (Peixuan Qiu), João Polido, Lacey Verhalen, Isabelle Weber, Lissy Willberg (student participants). Partnering institution: Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons with Travelling Farm Museum of Forgotten Skills

More information: here

Dima’s Bracelet. Songs, Prayers, Stories and Spells. Drawing credits: Gleb Maiboroda.

Saturday, August 27

COOP study group On Tradition - Future Ancestors 2: Rurality and Law presents

Dima’s Bracelet. Songs, Prayers, Stories and Spells

What does the silence pray for?

Bodies in birdsong weaving water, blood, stones, bones, forest, hair, soil and fles; tales of land and sea. Fragments of memories, places, and the forces that bind us, drifting between harmony to cacophony.

A sonic journey through space, singing histories of mysteries and the untranslatable with ancestors. One body with many instruments, transmitting to the unknowability of language, translation and the word. A song with no beginning or end, looping improvisations; transforming, and moulding.

Future Ancestors invites you to join us in the threading of songs, prayers, stories and spells.

On Tradition - Future Ancestors 2: Rurality and Law = Snejanka Mihaylova, Rory Pilgrim (tutor team), Pelumi Adejumo, Dylan Spencer-Davidson, Cristina Emmel, Iarlaith Ni Fheorais, Michael Fischer, Izaro Ieregi Gonzalez, Nadja Henß, Gleb Maiboroda, Adriana Leanza, Marilú Mapengo Namoda, Liza Rinkema Rapuš (student participants). Partnering institution: If I Can't Dance I Don't Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution.

More information: here

Sunday, August 28

COOP study group A Blues For Essential Workers presents

IN VOICE

COOP study group: A Blues For Essential Workers is a temporary collective of radio experimenters with a hang-out appreciation. We are a salad searching for a bowl to be tossed around in. We dream of sonic intimacy in the heart of pervasive storms from the cold shores of geographical particularities. We are workers, students, cultural practitioners, listeners and researchers here to parasite Parasite Radio.

We invite you to join our public program composed of broadcasting, performative actions, and spatial interventions. Hosted by Archive Sites in Milan, the programme is the culmination of a year-long inquiry on how our voices can relate to the essential worker. By raising questions that emerge from encounters with modes of labor and the social circumstances created by and as a result of them. The reverberations of these investigations are explored in settings of sonic intimacy that facilitate polyphonic understandings. As such, we will together shape a space to relate, to encounter and negotiate through dialogues, epilogues and catalogs.

The study group's presence is woven throughout Roaming Assembly#30 presents sonsbeek Council#4, A Blues For The Tired, Salty, Essential Worker, an ongoing invocation convened by sonsbeek20→24.

The study group consists of Derek MF Di Fabio (cleaner-and-other-mess-solver-also-artist), Jan-Pieter ‘t Hart (artworker and gig economist, former french frier), Till Langschied (artist, meme conoisseur and former sex shop employee), Vera Mühlebach (yet to become artworker, former temporary visual art specialist and bycicle courier), Ros Del Olmo (fruit grower and nighttime radio writer), Emmeli Person (producer, and well known sleeptalker) Alexandra Martens Serrano (artist, word puzzler, production assistant, techno sphynx, bar team), Ronja Sommer (soundallrounder-DJ-singer-technican-organizer, lifehacker), Marika Vandekraats (tarot reader, secretary and friend).

A Blues For Essential Workers = curatorial team sonsbeek20->24 (tutor team), Derek Di Fabio, Jan Pieter ‘t Hart, Till Langschied, Vera Mühlebach, Ros del Olmo, Emmeli Person, Alexandra Martens Serrano, Ronja Sommer, Marika Vandekraats (student participants). Partnering institution: sonsbeek20->24

More information: here