We are absolutely thrilled to announce COOP SUMMIT 2018:

For the final two months of its 2018-2019 trajectory the DAI-spaceship will drop anchor in Athens where so many of our extraordinary alumni and friends are based. Between May 11 and July 2, 2018 our Planetary Campus and 'State of Concept', our main partner in Athens, will merge programs. Beginning with the exhibition 'A Case Of Perpetual No' of artist and DAI alumna Yota Ioannidou which we co-produced, followed, on June 3, by the presentation of our symposium, Roaming Assembly#22 Eurasian Steps and, from June 29 till July 1, by our 'Graduation Acts', both DAI events will unfold in-and outside of Ioannidou’s ductile, user-friendly installation. But we will not limit our activities to only one space; after a year of study and intensive gatherings in Arnhem, Cologne, Heemskerk, Oldebroek, Thessaloniki, Epen and Barcelona, the participants in our seven COOP study-groups will disperse over the city of Athens. The outcome of their year-long inquiry will be shared with the public at a variety of settings, generously accommodated by institutional and less institutional Athenian hosts. You are warmly invited to join our seven study groups at any of the following locations:

June 1

09:30 A-Dash, Asklipiou 74, 114 71 Athens (starting point communal walk)

13:00 Hot Wheels, Patision 41, Athens 104 33

15:15 Circuits & Currents Project Space of the Athens School of Fine Arts, Navarchou Notara 13 and Tositsa, Athens 106 83

18:00 Yellow Brick, Eptapirgiou 7, Nea Ionia 142 31 Athens

June 2 

10:15 POLIS ART CAFE, Pesmazoglou 5 (Stoa Tou Vivliou), Athens 10559

14:15 [SHARP] Circuits & Currents Project Space of the Athens School of Fine Arts, Navarchou Notara 13 and Tositsa, Athens 106 83 

17:00  Mikrokosmos Cinema, Syngrou Av. 106, 117 41 Athens 

Contact person for COOP SUMMIT 2018 is senior coordinator Nikos Doulos.

PROGRAM

1.Curating Positions: Practising Organisation Under Present Conditions

Marwa Arsanios, Emily Pethick, Leire Vergara and students Areumnari Ee, Leon Filter, Irati Irulegui, Yen Noh, Ellen Nunes, Eric Peter, Karina Sarkissova and Polly Wright. Partner: The Showroom, London. 

Study group Curating Positions presents

ʻislandthinking: How to Co-Op(erate)?ʼ

Through practising organisation, a group of eight curators, artists and researchers has worked towards a commonality of interests and intentions. But how to find unity when members stem from various educational and cultural backgrounds? And how to practice this unified organisation in a roaming context—in places yet unknown? Via diverse practices arisen from a year of get-togethers, they’ve come to the structure of ‘islandthinking’ as a means to collaborate through collective knowledge.

‘islandthinking’ is a concept to be approached in poetic, social, geographical or organisational terms. Archipelagos consist of multiple islands, which in their turn can be understood in an absolute, atmospheric and socio-political sense: as structures of some mass surrounded by another mass, as climatological, or as communities distinct from the mass. ‘islandthinking’ brings these different readings together as a metaphor for interconnectedness of different notions whilst simultaneously maintaining individuality. Dependency is a great strength in this web of interrelations too. Think of boat routes between islands for example, where one often has to cross through specific islands to access others.

Athens will see the first public programme of ‘islandthinking’ consisting of lectures, workshops, walking routes, printed matter, a video screening and a radio broadcast. The programme culminates in a group-led walk on June 1.

A-Dash, Asklipiou 74, 114 71 Athens

Date: June 1

Time: 09.30h

Feel free to join, we gather at 09.15h and will start our communal walk at 09.30h. 

Click here for FB-event.

2.OPERA CORRUPTION. On Tricks, Tricksters and Charms

Frederique Bergholtz, Pauline Curnier Jardin, Sara Giannini and students Clementine Edwards, Lukas Hoffmann, Tirza Kater, Rabea Ridlhammer, Clara Saito, Giorgos Tsiongas and Wilfred Tomescu. Partner: If I Can't Dance I Don't Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution. 

Study group Opera Corruption: On Tricks, Tricksters and Charms presents the premier of the film:

'A Piece of Dada', 

Through opera and its many contradictions, this COOP group has engaged corruption as an interstitial zone of friction between the sexual, the economical, the political, and the aesthetic sphere. A total work of exaggeration, traditional opera brings on stage the drama of desire and power. It is not a chance, philosophers Slavoj Žižek and Mladen Dolar observe, that opera dies in Europe with the invention of psychoanalysis; as if after Freud opera would no longer be possible. Throughout the year the group has looked and experienced the operatic voice as the locus of articulation and de-articulation of the collective unconscious, as the voice of the unspeakable. The interconnectedness of opera and corruption has enabled them to question the formation of social and individual identity, the political role of the mask, the intricacy of realness and fiction.

A Piece of Dada is a collective film project which was triggered by the themes and practices that they have explored with their study group through an experimental methodology of production. The movie has been written, filmed, and acted by Clementine Edwards, Lukas Hoffmann, Tirza Kater, Rabea Ridlhammer, Clara Saito, Giorgos Tsiongas and Wilfred Tomescu with the support of Pauline Curnier Jardin and Sara Giannini.

'In a city torn apart by a mad scramble for celebrity, Lady Dada seemingly has it all. The enigmatic performance artist lures her audience by ingesting vast amounts of money in her spectacular shows promising fame and unbound pleasure. While the public is captivated by her special gift, she has no bigger fan than Madame Gram - a glamorous but unhinged opera tycoon who is hell-bent on convincing Dada to be the star of her ‘Popera’. But Dada has a dirty secret. She doesn’t just eat the dollar bills - she shits them too. Via the underground sewer system, her faeces are funding the avant-garde revolution, who will topple the Opera regime once and for all. Or so she thinks…'

Location: Mikrokosmos Cinema, Syngrou Av. 106, 117 41 Athens 

Date: June 2 

Time: 17.00h 

Click here for FB-event.

3.Practicing Articulation, Articulating Practice

Nick Aikens, Annie Fletcher, Navine G. Khan-Dossos and students Olivia Abächerli, Jonathan Baumgärtner, Ciprian Burete, Lucie Draai, Elien Ronse, Zoe Scoglio and Maya Watanabe. Partner: Van Abbe Museum

Study group Practicing Articulation, Articulating Practice presents:

'How it Comes to Matter'.

The word articulation has a productive double meaning in English. Its first is to speak forth, to put into words, to articulate something. Stuart Hall calls this a ‘languag-ing or expressing’. Angela Davis would call it ‘finding the words you do not yet have’. However, articulation also means the linking of different elements to create a new unity. Hall famously uses the example of an articulated lorry which joins the cab and the trailer to create the lorry. The two parts, he says, are made to become one through a specific linkage. ‘How it Comes to Matter' can be seen as an articulation in both senses of the word. It shows seven artists ‘finding words’ they do not yet have. But it is also what Hall describes as a moment of ‘arbitrary closure’ - a coming together of theories, forms and ideas before they spin out and reform into new configurations.

As a study group over the past eight months the participants have been asking and re-asking themselves foundational questions about their work: What constitutes a practice? How are different ideas, positions, emotions and politics articulated within that practice? What are the structures underlying their articulation that inform, dictate or resist the practice? How do we bring these articulations into the world? Comprising an ambitious constellation of moving image, installation, drawing, performance and reading groups, ‘How It Comes to Matter’ sees seven distinct but interrelated propositions consider the specific type of knowledge production art practice gives rise to - and why, and how, that matters.

Location: Hot Wheels, Patision (28is Oktovriou) 41, Athens 104 33

Date: June 1

Time: 13.00h 

4.Proximity Aesthetics: Constructing New Ecologies of Practice

Bassam El Baroni, Diakron, Luke Pendrell and students Bethany Crawford, Vinita Gatne, Sunghoon Kim, Olga Micińska, Sofia Montenegro, Edel O’Reilly, Floris Visser, Duruo Wang and Ciarán Wood. Partner: Werkplaats Typografie.

The Proximity Aesthetics COOP has been engaged with possibilities, methodologies, and approaches that aim at transforming the notion of artistic research into that of contributory research. Which is to say that the types of research and practice the group has been delving into are the ones not only concerned with studying or looking at socio-technical change, but with the possibility of actual active intervention and causation of change processes. Such approaches require a revaluation and rethinking of the proximity-relation between art practice, artistic competencies, and research on the one hand and a plethora of issues concerning institutional infrastructures, financialisation, site specificity, and the adjoining of life, art, and technology on the other.

Can we connect and embed artistic practices into specific fields in new ways that understand the concerns and issues around traditional forms of socially engaged art practice and seek to transform them?

To this end, the group has organized an online platform for its research. The website exemplifies the process of thinking through the proximity of various adjacent and intersectional fields and sites of practice, research, impact and industry, using debates, close-readings, deep listening, and speculative discourse. The online platform operates as a pool of content including podcasts of talks and discussions by tutors and guests of the programme and includes a dynamic composite of participants’ individual entry points to a wider discussion around proximity aesthetics in the format of texts, interviews and moving image. This online platform has been built and conceptualised in partnership with Luca Napoli of Werkplaats Typografie. In Athens, the group will launch the website through a series of presentations by members of the group and invited guests (TBA).

Location: POLIS ART CAFE, Pesmazoglou 5 (Stoa Tou Vivliou), Athens 10559

Date: June 2

Time: 10.15h

5.Realty

Rachel O’Reilly, Katya Sander, Tirdad Zolghadr and students Anna Bitkina, Matthieu Blond, Stephan Blumenschein, Luca Carboni, Sara Cattin, Samantha McCulloch, Dina Mohamed and Nina Støttrup Larsen.

For the past year, REALTY has focused on the role of Contemporary Art in recent histories of urban development and gentrification. To ground their analytics they have studied specific conditions in the Netherlands and Athens. Here, they meet stark and grisly examples of art’s power effects today, as well as its inefficacies. What are our own conditions and responsibilities and how do we address them in our own practices and educational programs?

REALTY presents a research drama that re-arranges the current projections of a student body. A group of Roamers have become blurry, some have dissolved. Who or what forces are responsible? Protagonists include the Friend, Contemporary Art, Real Estate, Locality, and the Brick, among others. Beyond symptoms and logistical corrections, can the politicisation of practices and management emerge?

Location: Circuits & Currents Project Space of the Athens School of Fine Arts, Navarchou Notara 13 and Tositsa, Athens 106 83 

Date: June 2 

Time: 14.15h  SHARP! [during the play doors will be closed] 

6.Sleeping with a Vengeance, Dreaming of a Life

María Berríos, Tina Gverović, Ruth Noack and students Clara Amaral, Alaa Abu Asad, Livio Casanova, Ulufer Çelik, Agata Cieślak, Teresa Distelberger, Sanne Kabalt, Leeron Tur-Kaspa, Baha Görkem Yalım and participating guest-artists Florencia Almirón, Matthijs de Bruijne, Anna Daučíková, Ines Doujak, Nikos Doulos, Gangart, Alejandra Riera, Annette Ruenzler, Jürgen Stollhans, Isabelle Sully and Simon Wachsmuth.

For its final output, COOP study group "Sleeping with a Vengeance, Dreaming of a Life” joins a group show curated by Ruth Noack, generously hosted by Vasiliki Sifostratoudaki of Yellow Brick/Athina, in order to start understanding how we might share agency in a future politics of sleep. The curatorial model of the exhibition series is based on a much needed ecology of scale. Starting with a modest budget and working with the smallest of institutions, the first exhibitions are conceived as sketches to be fleshed out and gaining momentum over the next couple of years. Next to being funded by the DAI, the exhibition is supported by ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen) and will migrate in a slightly changed constellation to lítost/Prague in August/September and Institute for Provocation/Beijing in October.

Location: Yellow Brick, Eptapirgiou 7, Nea Ionia 142 31 Athens

Date: June 1

Time: 18.00h 

Click here for FB-event.

7.Topologies of Touch

Florian Göttke, Marianna Maruyama, Jorinde Seijdel and students Alejandro Cerón, Anja Khersonska, Mónica Lacerda, Pitchaya Ngamcharoen, Aldo Ramos, Jasmin Schädler and Ines Schärer. Partner: Open!

Location: Circuits & Currents Project Space of the Athens School of Fine Arts, Navarchou Notara and Tositsa 13, Athens 106 83

Date: June 1

Time: 15.15h

Click here for FB-event.

About: COOP study groups 

COOP study groups are at the heart of the DAI's curriculum and ask for active participation in & productive contributions to, curated, collaborative, un-disciplined, art research trajectories. They bring makers, researchers, scholars, writers, activists and curators together around well-defined and relevant questions and topics. Each study group consists of 6-10 master students, teaming up with a tutorial unit, always consisting of a practising artist, next to a curator and a scholar. To see how the COOP study groups are embedded in our curriculum you are welcome to consult our 2017-2018 Syllabus.  

DAI wishes to thank all individual participants for their spirited contributions to this cooperative endeavor. Special thanks to our longstanding educational partners for their ongoing commitment:

 Werkplaats Typografie (Arnhem).

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