“The meta-condition of the production system calls for reconsideration, but just as much attention should be allocated to the need to de-sync one’s own desire to that of the capitalist machinery, which operates on an affective level, and to delink the need to individuality whose desire is constantly modulated by capitalist affectivity. In this sense, the community may truly become a ‘coming community’ if they place premium not on production, but question reproduction on a collective level.” 

– Researcher and writer You Mi in her text “Modes of Organization, Caring and Thinking”, report on COOP SUMMIT 2018.

WE ARE ABSOLUTELY THRILLED TO ANNOUNCE COOP SUMMIT 2019

(scroll for the introductions to each specific presentation) 

For June 28 and June 29, the Dutch Art Institute a.k.a. DAI Roaming Academy a.k.a. DAI Art Praxis invites you to perambulate the city of Cagliari as part of the COOP SUMMIT, DAI’s annual two-day walking event around the outcome of the year-long enquiry by the COOP study groups, positioned at the heart of the DAI’s curriculum. In the academic year 2018-2019 the COOPs have called for active participation of both students and tutors in collective and collaborative, imaginative, un-disciplined trajectories.

After energetic landings in St. Erme, Epen, Arnhem, Cagliari, Dessau and Berlin DAI’s soft spaceship will now be returning to Sardinia, where we will wind up a prolific year of study and conviviality and share our findings. In close collaboration with Luca Carboni (DAI, 2018) who recently moved back to his native city where he is linking his praxis as designer, artist and writer with questions regarding contemporary Sardinian ideas of identity and landscape, DAI will be presenting COOP SUMMIT 2019 followed by Roaming Assembly #25, accommodated by institutional and less institutional hosts in and around the city of Cagliari.

Friday, June 28

10:00 – 12:00 - Eurasia Underground Library

Location: Giardini Pubblici, Largo Dessì, 09123 Cagliari

Meeting point: 200m straight forward after entering the gate (big central tree).

12:00 - 13:00 - Communal lunch by Il Rifugio dei Sapori*

Location: Ex Manifattura Tabacchi (room 113)

13:30 – 15:30 - Peekaboo - Looking Askance at Issues of Childhood Connected to Nation

Location: ExArt Cagliari

15:30 – 17:30 - Fare niente da qualcosa: improvvisare, pubblicare, resistere!

Location: Controra - Oreri Iniziativa Editoriale

18:00 - 19:00 - Communal dinner by Il Rifugio dei Sapori*

Location: Ex Manifattura Tabacchi (room 113)

19:00 – 21:00 - Go there I don't know where, bring something I don't know what

Location: Ex Manifattura Tabacchi (Room 201 & front yard)

Saturday, June 29 

10:00 – 12:00 - Untitled (Orificially Yours)

Location: Sala Mostre Temporanee, Cittadella dei Musei

12:15 - 13:15 - Communal lunch by Il Rifugio dei Sapori*

Location: Ex Manifattura Tabacchi (room 113)

14:00 – 16:00 - reading evaporated tears

Location: Parco Naturale Regionale Molentargius-Saline 

Bus departure: 13:45

Location: Front gate of Ex Manifattura Tabacchi

16:00 – 18:00 - Botanic_X

Location: Orto Botanico dell'Università di Cagliari

18:30 - 19:30 - Communal dinner by Il Rifugio dei Sapori*

Location: Ex Manifattura Tabacchi (room 113)

Following the two COOP SUMMIT days, DAI will continue its public program in Calgiari on Sunday June 30, with Roaming Assembly#25 ~ RADIO MUTINY ~ convened by iLiana Fokianaki, where you are equally welcome !

PRACTICALITIES

Admission is free ~ but please join our facebook event. ~

If you wish to join any of our communal meals, please feel free to contact Nikos Doulos and make a reservation by the 26th of June. Lunch costs: 5,00 euros; Dinner costs: 10,00 euros (to be settled by cash on spot). Feel free to join the event on FB.

*Il Rifugio dei Sapori is a restaurant based on the respect for natural resources and the environment. Thanks to a close-knit network of local farmers, it offers a sophisticated and ever-changing menu with strictly seasonal products, expanding the awareness of nature's rhythms and proposing a responsible model of consumption.

PROGRAM (in order of appearance)

1. Unmapping Eurasia

Sepideh Behrouzian, Matthieu Blond, Giorgos Gripeos, Lukas Malte Hoffmann, Irati Irulegi, Francisco Mojica, Yen Noh, Lea Rüegg, Zoe Scoglio, Duruo Wang, Matthew Wang & tutors: Binna Choi and You Mi. Partner: Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons

Study group Unmapping Eurasia presents

Eurasia Underground Library: There’s no Eurasia here where Eurasia is now

Eurasia Underground Library is a variable collection of knowledge in unlimited form and formation transmitted through a number of self-trained librarians for studying, negating, reconstructing and extending the existing narratives and archives of Eurasia as a historical, geopolitical and geological space.

Keywords: landmass, geography, geopolitics, cartography, navigation, epigraph, anthropocene, capitalocene, de-bipolar world, polar bears, Russia- Eurasianism, Siberia, Belt and Road, CIS, pax-Mongolia, the commons, belly button, optics, antler, horse, nomadoogy, kurgan, Fuxi and Nüwa, Altai, Semey, origin, myth, phonology, cosmology, Kai singer, Hundun (‘chaos’), spiral, hexagon, indexicality, Yi Sang, witches, fart, visa …

Date: June 28

Time: 10:00 – 12:00

Location: Peripatetics through the city’s remote parts (point of departure tba)

2. Peekaboo - Looking Askance at Issues of Childhood Connected to Nation

Olivia Abächerli, Ciprian Burete, Teresa Distelberger, Jose Iglesias Ga-Arenal, Gayatri Kodikal, Sofia Montenegro, Hannah O’Flynn, Hasan Özgür Top, Leeron Tur-Kaspa & tutors: María Berríos, Tina Gverović, Ruth Noack. Partner: Nivola Museum in Orani

To look askance is to look with suspicion at the connections and frictions in the production of "child" and "nations" unpacked through the performative glance of Erica Burman's Child as Method. So far working in a series of in-house pop up exhibitions through our landings in various geographies, this COOP Study Group is set to make a nearly last stop in the town of Orani, Sardinia in partnership with and graciously hosted by Museo Nivola . Across student led workshops with children and adults from the town and the surrounding area, and a public pop up cinema screening program in collaboration with and the museum, the research as a currency of exchange within its participants will come to a closure. For its final chapter, Peekaboo - Looking Askance at Issues of Childhood Connected to Nation returns to Cagliari, to present pages out of their one-year journey in form of a portfolio exhibition, hosted at EXArt Cagliari.

Date: June 28

Time: 13:30 – 15:30

Location: ExArt Cagliari

3. Making Nothing Out of Something: Improvising writing and publishing in relation to practices of resistance

Sara Benaglia, Saskia Burggraaf, Dorothy Hunter, Flavia Palladino, Nine Postma, Wilf Speller & tutors: Jorinde Seijdel, Florian Göttke, Werker Collective (Rogier Delfos & Marc Roig Blesa). Partner: Open!

Study group Making Nothing Out of Something: Improvising writing and publishing in relation to practices of resistance presents

Fare niente da qualcosa: improvvisare, pubblicare, resistere! 

How can the collective task of writing enhance the singularity of our individual voices, as a social space where political desires can be improvised, embodied and shared? Improvisation as the core of a language for a community yet to come. A community of resistant bodies that perpetually claims its geographical infinitude, its unwritten histories, oppressed traditions, and bastard languages. 

As roaming, gentrifying, squatting, culturally entangled, privileged yet marginalised members of this study group, we take inspiration from activist movements, both historically and contemporary, to self-publish alternatives to the current techno capitalist cultural hegemony. How do we define our tools, methods and ethos to act out a queer possibility, deliberate on our current dislocated locality and post-colonial condition? How can we produce objects that operate as comrades and set the stage for a discussion that can narrate our protests? With Fare niente da qualcosa: improvvisare, pubblicare, resistere! we invite you to join us for a gathering, performance, reading, conversation and exhibition in which we aim to reflect and embody improvisation as ‘a movement, a dehiscence, a quickening’ (Fred Moten, The Universal Machine, Duke University Press, 2018) as a generative yet relational tool for a non-fascist future.

Date: June 28

Time: 15:30 – 17:30

Location: Controra - Oreri Iniziativa Editoriale

4. Curating Positions: Logics of Montage. In Between the Cinematic Apparatus and the Exhibition

Clara Amaral, Vita Buyvid, Livio Casanova, Sara Cattin, Raphael Daibert, Vinita Gatne, Maxime Gourdon, Dina Mohamed, Clara Saito, Ciaran Wood & tutors: Marwa Arsanios, Leon Filter, Leire Vergara. Partner: Bulegoa z/b

Study group Curating Positions: Logics of Montage. In Between the Cinematic Apparatus and the Exhibition presents

Go there I don't know where, bring something I don't know what

“Our body is not in space like things; it inhabits or haunts space. It applies itself to space like a hand to an instrument. And when we wish to move about, we do not move the body as we move an object (...) Visible and mobile, my body is a thing among things; it's caught in the fabric of the world, and its cohesion is that of a thing. But, because it moves itself and sees, it holds things in a circle around itself.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty

The privileging of a particular sense in the elaboration of a metaphysics is a well-known theme, and the sense that has been most privileged in Western thought has been ‘sight’. More broadly, there is a ‘hierarchy of the senses’ in classical, medieval, and early modern periods, which extols certain senses over others and sometimes promotes deliberate avoidance of sensory experience.

Practicing beyond the cinematic apparatus and inspired by the structure of a camera obscura, the year long research of the COOP group Curating Positions: Logics of Montage investigates the denial of the image as a way of allowing other senses, perspectives and feelings to arise. The final project takes the form of a durational performance manifested into different acts in addition to a satellite event in collaboration with the Cineteca Sarda.

Date: June 28

Time: 19:00 – 21:00

Location: Ex Manifattura Tabacchi (Room 201 & front yard)

5. The Immemorial Body: Betraying Carmelo Bene in Nine Acts

Joannie Baumgärtner, Julian Fricker, Marc Norbert Hörler, Anastasia McCammon, Eric Peter, Elien Ronse, Simon(e) van Saarloos, Karina Sarkissova, Zachary Schoenhut, Polly Wright & tutors: Sara Giannini, Geo Wyeth and Arnisa Zeqo. Partner: If I Can’t Dance I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution

Study group The Immemorial Body: Betraying Carmelo Bene in Nine Acts presents

Untitled (Orificially Yours) is the ninth act of the COOP “The Immemorial Body: Betraying Carmelo Bene in 9 Acts”

The artists and participants of Untitled (Orificially Yours) engage with a perforated and decentered exegesis of the work of Italian theatre maker, actor and writer Carmelo Bene (1937 – 2002). Instead of reacting to a presence, the participants to this COOP study group make contact with an absence. For Bene the act is forgetfulness of a script, a role, or a dramaturgy.   Accordingly, during 9 acts the artists and participants have been constantly forgetting about him. Both practically and theoretically, the group looks into the presence of what is not there, the refractions of a hole. Bene’s immemorial body channels other voices and the COOP invokes the spirits of artists such as Maria Lai, Chiara Fumai, William Pope.L, Ulises Carrión, Pauline Oliveros, and Saint Theresa. Through a collective practice that doesn’t cancel personal contributions, the participants have been researching the voice and the phoné, the oral-anal nexus, ecstatic and dis-identification tactics, negative mysticism, ephemeral evidences and gossip. 

Act 9 brings specific propositions for a “performative exhibition.” It activates scores, traces, performative gestures, soundtracks, characters and videos generated by a year of forgetfulness and betrayal. These activations do not aim at being a final act, rather they open up a hole, producing a conflation of temporalities as well as challenging notions of individual and collective identity.

Date: June 29

Time: 10:00 – 12:00

Location: Sala Mostre Temporanee, Cittadella dei Musei

6. AGENCY - Everyday practice and global power

Dayna Casey, Emma De Filippo, Jiatu Gu, Nilz Källgren, Martina Mächler, Konstantin Mitrokhov, Zoi Moutsokou & tutors: Nick Aikens, James Bridle, Navine G.Khan-Dossos. Partner: Van Abbemuseum

Study group AGENCY - Everyday practice and global power presents

reading evaporated tears

Dear seeker, what about our footprint? COOP Study Group Agency will take you on an informative bus ride leading to the protected wetlands area of Molentargius Saline, close to Cagliari. The former salt extraction site is now inhabited by many species of aquatic birds, which stop, winter and nest in this natural preservation zone. In the Parco delle Emozioni the group will offer tarot readings informed by our year's work and the DAI’s movements: collections and translations of distances, ecological impacts and narratives surrounding climate change.

Date: June 29

Time: 14:00 – 16:00

Location: Parco Naturale Regionale Molentargius-Saline 

7. Banquet X Climate Change and Speculative Gastronomy

Bethany Crawford, Lucie Draai, Francesca Hawker, Assem Hendawi, Risa Horn, Samantha McCulloch, Harun Morrison, Edel O’Reilly, Mandus Ridefelt, Jasmin Schädler & tutors: Bassam El Baroni, Aslak Aamot Kjaerulff, Bjarke Hvass Kure. Partner: Diakron

Study group Banquet X Climate Change and Speculative Gastronomy presents

Botanic_X

Climate change and an expanded idea of the culinary - not restricted to the preparation of food, its consumption, and its sensualisation - formed the two research areas on which this COOP Study Group revolved. Experiments with how to think climate futures from multiple times and places and the culinary from the perspectives, concerns, technologies, and politics of our now perennial post-climate change experience were conducted collaboratively and in group spirit. This event, our Botanic_X, brings together some of these experiments featuring sound, text, taste, movement and other strange fruits from the garden of a sweltering planet.

Date: June 29

Time: 16:00 – 18:00

Location: Orto Botanico dell'Università di Cagliari