THE FACTORY ~ ON GUESTING
A workshop in preparation of Roaming Assembly#15: ON GUESTING
Led by Matthijs de Bruijne , iLiana Fokianaki, Cecilia Vallejos with DAI participants.
Saturday September 23 ~ 14:00 - 21:00
Location: Oude Kraan 26, 6811LK Arnhem
Call for participants: please contact Peter Sattler
In light of DAI’s decision to become a roaming school and abandon the restricting and protecting walls of the educational art institution, the first Assembly of the new academic year of DAI, aims to generate new tropes of performing the role of the guest. It wishes to do so both from the position of guest and that of a host, trying to avoid the often empty and ghost-like cultural interactions that we observe in contemporary art realities.
Initial questions :
What formulates an “in equal terms” experience of guest-host? How does the notion of familiarity affect the dynamics of guest/host? What does in fact translate into proper hospitality? From the mega-exhibition to the short curatorial and artistic research trip, what does it mean to land in an unfamiliar place? How does one approach a new place as a guest, when a cultural worker? Through the perspective of art, how can we enact and perform our practice when we occupy the roles of the guest/host? When does our practice begin or stop being beneficial to others -and should we care? How quickly and easily can we translate others experiences and histories into our own? And in fact can we? On the other hand, do societal ecologies accept art infiltrators easily?
Aim:
The aim of the workshop is to enable the participants to focus on the interaction between host and guest into specific scenarios. For every scenario there will be a number of ‘hypothetical’ conditions given to the participants. These conditions will be facilitated by Matthijs, Cecilia and iLiana proposing different cases between host-guest. More specifically these ‘hypothetical’ conditions are related to our own experiences as cultural workers. Particular cases will be discussed, and these cases present particularities in the form each of us acted as guests or hosts in each of these working situations. But these examples are indications for finding more abstract and definitive ‘hypothetical’ conditions in the coming days.
Groups of guests and hosts:
The exercise will consist in making different groups to interact with each other. One group of participants is playing the guests and they will act like as the artists, the curators or the art historians. They will have to define their purpose and their plan for visiting the group of hosts. What do they want from them? How are they going to achieve this through a certain strategy? And also what are these guests giving to the hosts?
From its part, the group hosting will assume roles such as inhabitants of a neighbourhood, curator of a city, workers of an enterprise. They will have to define their identity as well specify their position inside the given conditions. Who are they exactly? What can they give to their guests? What do they want to take from this exchange? They will have the same amount of time to organize themselves and to write down this information on paper.
First encounter:
The group visiting comes to the hosting group. The guests propose their plan and the hosts discuss with them how to respond to it. This is the first interaction both group will have for about 15 minutes.
Second encounter:
The guests come to host once more and go further on the realization of their plan. The hosts contribute depending on the how the guests proceed (10 minutes).
The aim of this part is to detect possible problems, possibilities or limitations in all the steps made so far. Writing this down on a big paper.
Wrapping up the interactions:
Then each group will draw a conclusion of these two interactions separately. The intention here is to look back on the things that worked best and the things that didn’t.
Result:
We invite the students of DAI to question the current debates that surround the act of arriving to a place, by becoming active agents in formulating and drafting their own protocol of guesting. In a sort of a manifesto, the protocol will address the proactive and also preventive aspect of guesting: instead of expecting or being told of how to behave as guests, we invite you to think, debate, discuss, contour and decide how do they wish to perform guesting.
This proposition can be thought of an artwork in itself. The protocol will directly influence the presentations of the following Assembly ( the next day, Sunday September 24)