COOP Academy ~ Realty from Month to Month
Seminar 7
The coming April session in Barcelona will be devoted to finalising the collective upshot of our study group, in all its aesthetic, discursive and logistical aspects. Beyond our group endeavour, we will also be hosting Georgia Alexandri, of Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Recent work by Alexandri, who has a background in critical geography, offers a comparative take on urban redevelopment and gentrification in Greece and Spain, and has played a key role in our collective discussions and research.
Seminar 6
This month dirty hands and clothes and final tactical inquiries on foot will see our processes and research start to turn into material. On Monday night we will finalise all the materials of this week to be produced. On Tuesday we will split into three parts - a practical real-estate investigation, a script-development process, and a factory production tour. Wednesday is dedicated to making within the workshops at the Rietveld. Thursday leaves room for planning towards Barcelona.
Seminar 5
It’s time to take a deep breath and make sense of all the input accumulated thus far. The February session will be devoted to recaps, and, even more importantly, to plotting the path ahead. By means of brainstorming sessions and smaller working groups, a first road map will be devised, leading up to the collective upshot planned for May/June.
Seminar 4
This month’s session will be devoted entirely to on-site research in Athens. The group will forgo the January DAI trip to Thessaloniki, opting instead to devote all our energy and time to assembling materials, references and content for the end-of-year collective project.
Seminar 3
CONDITIONS OF PRODUCTION: Artisthoods in Neighbourhoods
Tutors: Rachel and Katya
This session considers artworld production conditions that inform our complicity with the “Creative City.” We will develop literacy in and historical comprehension of processes of financialization, as well as the late address of housing value and its changing historical position within the critique of political economy. In what way can more materialist understandings of artisthood be put into dialogue with material understandings of the neighborhood’s production and dispossession? How does the
emerging urban environment further cement these as art’s expanded ‘working conditions’, tracing a vicious cycle, and necessitating plotting moves beyond it?
Further discussion: What conditions do you imagine or wish to work under? How could those conditions come about, through what means, methods, potential collectivities and – perhaps – institutions?
Readings:
Sarah Keenan, ‘Subversive Property: Reshaping malleable spaces of belonging’ in Social and Legal Studies 2010 19(4) 423-439
Manuel B. Aalbers, Ch 2 ‘Centering Housing in Political Economy’ and Ch 8, The Twenty-First Century Housing Question’ in The Financialization of Housing: A political economy approach, Routledge, 2016.
Seminar 2
The November session is devoted to the idea of “scapegoating”. We survey theories and practices capturing collective psychodynamic entanglements of ‘Culture’, subjectification and ‘utility’ between artisthoods and neighbourhoods. This alongside individual meetings, screenings and a fine tuning of our collective research premises.
Seminar 1: 23-26 October 2017
The October meeting will be hosted by Tirdad Zolghadr, along with guest tutor Roel Griffioen. We’ll begin with an introduction to basic terminologies, historical developments, case studies. What are the fundamental debates, criteria, best case scenarios to be prioritized over the coming year? A game plan will be plotted out subdividing student’s respective roles, both individually and in groups.
A second part of the October time window will be devoted to initial one-to-one meetings, allowing for some time alongside, to delve into readings and preliminary research.
Finally, on the afternoon of October 26 we’ll be joined by writer and researcher Roel Griffioen, who will introduce us to the key role of state policy, and to racialized subtexts of gentrification by means of the example of the Netherlands. On the evening of the 26th, we will treat ourselves to a screening of Alles Flex? by Abel Heijkamp & Julij Borštnik (75 min), first of the four-part documentary series “The Future of Work”.