COOP ~ Curating Positions: Location In Reverse- Care For a Place Through the Cinematic Lens from Month to Month
Seminar 7: August 2020
Since the 13th of March 2020, due to the sanitary emergency caused by the Coronavirus Pandemic “Curating Positions: Location In Reverse- Care For A Place Through The Cinematic Lens” decided to re-organize its study time meeting weekly every Friday. We have been working like this until July. For August, we are coming together in Amsterdam, however some of us will not be able to be present there, since the regulations for traveling are getting very strict in the latest days due to the bursting of the different focal points of contagion in several places from where we are traveling.
This session will be led by Marwa Arsanios and Leon Filter who will be present in Amsterdam and Leire Vergara who will be present remotely. The students working from Amsterdam are: Niccolo Masini, Sara Benaglia, Azul de Monte, Kari Rosenfeld. The students working remotely are: Zane Zajanckauska, Iva Kovac, Georgia Stellin, Dorothy Hunter, Zoi Moutsokou and Maxime Gourdon.
During DAI WEEK 6, we will concentrate on the production of our COOP final project and its presentation for the COOP SUMMIT that will take place in late September. Our time schedule will be from 10.00 to 18.00. Besides this, we will also gather some evenings for allowing further discussions and conceptual reviews of the work produced.
The working dynamics of the week will be divided in two different ways: one will be driven by a self-organised collective spirit from which the students will advance and finalise the common work developed through an ongoing collective methodology established in the latest months and the other will include intense feedback sessions with the tutors and at some point with Nikos Doulos who is in charge of the organisation of the COOP SUMMIT and who has an overall view of the event as a whole. The tutors will be all the time available for any enquire or support demanded by the students. Some face2faces will be also taking place during the week.
Time Schedule of the Week:
Monday 17th: Working at Jacuzzi
Arrival of the students. Working from afternoon (some at Jacuzzi and some remotely).
Tuesday 18th: Working at Jacuzzi
10.00-18.00: Students working at Jacuzzi until evening (some from the space and some remotely)
Nikos Doulos will be present in the space
Wednesday 19th: Working at RongWrong (Nikos Doulos will walk with the students to the space).
-11.00 Meeting with Nikos Doulos on the COOP SUMMIT
-12.00 Leon (at RongWrong) and Leire (remotely) join the meeting.
-12.00- 16.00 Collective Work
-16.00 Wrap up and final feedback session of the day with the tutors Leon, Marwa (from RongWrong) and Leire (remotely) together with Nikos (also from RongWrong). This feedback session will be dedicated to catching up on the state of being of the final project.
-16.00 Wrap up and final feedback session of the day with the tutors Leon, Marwa (from RongWrong) and Leire (remotely).
Thursday 20th: working at RongWrong
-10.00-16.00 Collective work
scheduled visits/feedbacks with Marwa, Leire, Leon
-16.00 Wrap up and final feedback session of the day with the tutors Leon, Marwa (from RongWrong) and Leire (remotely).
-f2f Azul (after dinner)
Friday 21st: Working at RongWrong
-10.00-16.00 Collective work
scheduled visits/feedbacks with Marwa, Leire, Leon
-16.00 Wrap up and final feedback session of the day with the tutors Leon, Marwa (from RongWrong) and Leire (remotely). This session will be also joined by Nikos Doulos.
Saturday 22nd working at RongWrong
-10.00-13.00: Internal presentation
-13.00-14.00: Further planning towards COOP SUMMIT
Further feedback sessions can be implemented in case of need.
Jacuzzi is a convergence of Amsterdam-based choreographers, who act as a fluid support structure for each other and a host body for a multitude of movement practices and performance related events. At Jacuzzi is a place where they members gather in order to share, reflect, problematise and imagine new conditions for art production in order to practice and celebrate their enthusiasm for the importance of dance. At our shared studio we de-habitualise, lie down, sweat, meditate, mediate the electrical signals of our nervous systems, process rhythms. We are bodies whose ideas are voiced in several tones and articulations. With a desire to build different modes of being and experiencing time together and differently. We are questions approached though bodies not answered by them. Jacuzzi is currently Juan Pablo Camara, Matthew Day, Tomislav Feller, Setareh Fatehi Irani, Noha Ramadan, Michele Rizzo, Maciej Sado, Clara Saito, Sigrid Stigsdattar Mathiassen, and Eva Susova.
RONGWRONG is a space for art and theory founded in 2011
by Arnisa Zeqo and Antonia Carrara, run together with Laurie Cluitmans and Vincent Verhoef. Far from the inscrutable logics of sterile art trades and cultural branding, Rongwrong supports and exhibits the work of both confidential and more rumored artists, and hosts an ongoing public program that welcomes art historians, as well as writers and poets, most of all art lovers.
Seminar 6: June & July 2020
Since the 13th of March 2020, due to the sanitary emergency caused by the Coronavirus Pandemic “Curating Positions: Location In Reverse- Care For A Place Through The Cinematic Lens” decided to re-organize its study time meeting weekly every Friday. During the months of June and July we have continue with this dynamic. Our time schedule for this weekly meeting has been from 10.00 to 14.00.
All of the sessions have been led by Marwa Arsanios, Leon Filter and Leire Vergara. During May and June our guest Clara Saito developed a workshop that took place every Friday during 5 weeks. The workshop developed through exercises that had to be executed 30 minutes prior to our class. The workshop consisted on the following exercises:
15th of May. Introduction: Clara Saito introduces the logics of the workhop that is aimed at creating a different awareness while experiencing subtle shifts in the body, playing with finding space or loosing space in between joints, muscles, bones and/or organs and the effects and consequences of these micro-changes. In times of distancing, we will play with different means to exchange these experiences. One of them will be texting our sensations and observe if through these texts a mode of communications is created that doesn’t rely on ideas and thinking but exists as a sort of displaced body language. The second mode of exchange would be through drawing these sensations, imagining the colours and shapes and locations of these inner happenings.
22nd May. Magnetic hands: Create a ball of energy in between your hands. You can create this sensation by making circular movements with your hand being one above the other. After some minutes and you start to feel the warmth between your hands, you can start to pull slowly pull away your hands from each other and feel the games of attraction and repulsion between them.
29th May. Mirror (chaos magic): This is an exercise to train magicians to become magicians. It has to do with focus and attention. It is said that if you concentrate on your own image for a long period of time you can start to see your reflection moving by itself. Observe and allow things to happen. It is not about believing or not but allowing the different possibilities.
5th June. Shaking (Osho kundalini mediation): Stand and find a calm place. Observe the vibrations happening already inside of you and allow them to become a shaking. It doesn’t come through will or doing but again through giving place and allowing the shaking to happen and to grow. Some suggestions from Osho for this meditation: “If you are doing the Kundalini Meditation, allow the shaking – don't do it! Stand silently, feel it coming, and when your body starts a little trembling, help it, but don't do it! Enjoy it, feel blissful about it, allow it, receive it, welcome it, but don't will it. “If you force, it will become an exercise, a physical exercise of the body. Then the shaking will be there, but just on the surface. It will not penetrate you. You will remain solid, stone-like, rock-like within. You will remain the manipulator, the doer, and the body will just be following. The body is not the question, you are the question.
“When I say shake, I mean your solidity, your rocklike being should shake to the very foundations, so it becomes liquid, fluid, melts, flows. And when the rocklike being becomes liquid your body will follow. Then there is no shaker, only shaking; then nobody is doing it, it is simply happening. Then the doer is not. “Enjoy it, but don't will it. And remember, whenever you will a thing you cannot enjoy it. They are reverse, opposites; they never meet. If you will a thing you cannot enjoy it, if you enjoy it you cannot will it”. “If you shake your body rightly for fifteen minutes, with total feeling, then all the repressed energy will begin to manifest and flow.”
12th June. Drop the brain into the belly and ass (2nd chakra and movement research by Ria Higler// Fanny Sosa theorizing twerking): Start from a place of calm. Relax your belly and start to breathe from this place. Give space to the hips and pelvic bones and let the movements be initiated from this place. Ria says: “Relaxing the belly and being more present in it can be a challenge. It is my experience that the torso, the area above the respiratory system diaphragm, is more often present and felt, and that the lower regions are more obscure, or related to obscurity. Let us dive into this obscurity and start discovering, recognizing and appreciating the qualities of feeling that it contains.” “Let the movement of breathing expand in the belly, to experience it as a space, and gradually become more sensitive and receptive to feeling the qualities in that space. Start by moving the pelvis with relaxed muscles and a sense of weight, while remaining attentive to the space that is embraced by the pelvic bones. Relax the lower back. Always initiate movement from the pelvis. Let the movement ripple through the whole body, towards the hands, feet and head, and out into space. Drop in the belly, obscurity. Start with breathing in the belly, find space in the hips.
19th June. Listen to the inner happenings and micro-changes already existing inside of yourself: Allow yourself to follow these already existing movements to create a small dance. Tips: If you have pain in one session don’t force anything. Just slowly let the movement go and skip to the scanning part. The main task in each exercise is about listening/ giving awareness to different micro-movements in the body, allowing yourself to believe in the movement (concretely if there is a spasm, or tired muscle or even a smaller movement, to give place to that) and allowing that movement to exist. Videos and recordings to for last 3 were supplied by the artist.
Our weekly class has had the following schedule:
June 5th:
General study, going through the materials provided, exercises and discussing common matters related to the final project.
Student-led by Kari Rosenfeld
Feedback to Kari’s student-led
BREAK-
Discussion on the Final Project
Presentation of proposals for the Final Project
Open discussion
June 12th:
General study, going through the materials provided, exercises and discussing common matters related to the final project.
Discussion on the Final Project
Presentation of proposals for the Final Project
Open discussion
June 19th:
General study, going through the materials provided, exercises and discussing common matters related to the final project.
Discussion on the Final Project
Presentation of proposals for the Final Project
Open discussion
June 26th:
General study, going through the materials provided, exercises and discussing common matters related to the final project.
Final feedback session with Clara Saito on the exercises of her workshop.
July 3rd:
General study, going through the materials provided, exercises and discussing common matters related to the final project.
Student-led by Zane Zajančkauska
Feedback to Zane’s student-led
BREAK-
Discussion on the Final Project
Presentation of proposals for the Final Project
Open discussion
July 10th:
General study, going through the materials provided, exercises and discussing common matters related to the final project.
Student-led by Azul De Monte
Feedback to Azul’s student-led
BREAK-
Discussion on the Final Project
Presentation of proposals for the Final Project
Open discussion
July 17th:
Final Project production time
July 24th:
Final Project production time
July 31st:
Final Project production time
Final Project Production Time (collective)
During the months of June and July the students have developed a self-organised space for production. This has been following the dynamics of chain of contributions that they are putting together on an online platform open for the occasion on Are.na. These materials are growing and will be the base for the final project production. Each student has dedicated each week 6 hours to the production of each contribution.
Face to Faces (June & July)
Besides our weekly gathering, we have been doing intense face to faces during March and April, which have been conceived as virtual “studio visits” where students can test with the tutors, projects and ideas that they want to carry out for their kitchen presentations, student-led sessions or beyond.
Calendar:
During the months of June and July all students have got three intensive face to faces (one with each tutor lasting between 1h and 30mins and 2h). The tutors have also been available to be contacted for further support.
June 2020
Leon Marwa Leire
Week Thursday 1-7: Azul Zoi Sara/Iva
Week 8-14 Kari/Georgia Zane/Niccolo Azul/Maxime
Week 15-21 Zoi Kari Dorothy
Week 22-28 Iva Sara Georgia
July 2020:
Leon Marwa Leire
Week 29-5 Sara Georgia Zoi
Week 6-12 Dorothy/Zane Iva/Maxime Niccolo
Week 13-19 Niccolo Azul Kari
Week 20-26 Maxime Dorothy Zane
Seminar 5: May 2020
Since the 13th of March 2020, after having to leave Tunis in the middle of DAI Week 3 due to the sanitary emergency caused by to the Coronavirus Pandemic our coop “Curating Positions: Location In Reverse- Care For A Place Through The Cinematic Lens” has decided to re-organize its study time. During the months of April and May we have been meeting weekly every Friday from 10.00 to 14.00 to find a new rhythm of studying that is suitable to our current living conditions. In order to reach this new mode of studying, we also met in March to bring into common ways and methodologies of working together.
All of these sessions have been and will be led by Marwa Arsanios, Leon Filter and Leire Vergara. We also hosted several guests such as Louis Henderson, Kodwo Eshun and Clara Saito and several students have been able to present their student-led sessions. Beyond the online format, we have also been practicing exercises related to the Listening Group, the student led-sessions and the special sessions proposed by our guests.
We have carried on with the Listening Group, an initiative by Leon Filter that started in 2017 and that has been specifically thought in relation to the materials and exercises that we are working with in the coop. The Listening Group which was a collective practice that involved walking has been readapted to the new conditions of living, which in fact varied from one person to the other person, as we are all located in different places with very different restrictions and levels of confinement.
Besides our weekly gathering, we have been doing intense (two hours) face to faces during March and April, which have been conceived as virtual “studio visits” where students can test with the tutors, projects and ideas that they want to carry out for their kitchen presentations, student-led sessions or beyond.
APRIL 3rd: 10:00 - 13:00
General study, going through the materials provided, exercises and discussing personal and common matters.
Discussion on the reformulation of the Listening Group and the new dynamics of studying within confinement.
APRIL 10th: 10:00 - 13:00
General study, going through the materials provided, exercises and discussing personal and common matters.
Discussion on the reformulation of the Listening Group and the new dynamics of studying within confinement.
APRIL 17th: 10:00 - 13:00
General study, going through the materials provided, exercises and discussing personal and common matters.
Reactivation of the Listening Group and planning of collaboratively producing responses in pairs to the readings.
Readings:
-Lucia Farinati & Claudia Firth, “The Force of Listening”, chapter 4: Collective listening or Listening and collectivity, Errant body press: Doormats, Berlin 2017.
-Jon Mikel Euba, “Writing Out Loud”, chapter locationscouting. Publishers: DAI and If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution, 2016.
-Kaja Silverman, „The Acoustic Mirror“, chapter 5. Disembodying The Female Voice: Irigarary, Experimental Feminist Cinema and Femininity, Indiana University Press, 1988.
-Audre Lorde, „Poetry is Not a Luxury“, in: „Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches“ 1984.
Readers:
APRIL 24th: 10:00 - 13:00
General study, going through the materials provided, exercises and discussing personal and common matters.
Student-led session by Zoi Moutsokou
MAY 1st: 10:00 - 14:00
General study, going through the materials provided, exercises and discussing personal and common matters.
Student-led session by Maxime Gourdon
Student-led session by Georgia Stellin
MAY 8th: 10:00 - 14:00
Guest session by Louis Henderson and Kodwo Eshun: As part of an ongoing conversation, Louis Henderson and Kodwo Eshun will discuss the film Handsworth Songs as a mixtape of varied musical influences from the 1980s as a way to open up an idea of what "Dub Cinema" could be.
Handsworth Songs is a richly-layered documentary representing the hopes and dreams of post-war black British people in the light of the civil disturbances of the 1980s. It engages with Britain’s colonial past, public and private memories, and the struggles of race and class. The title refers to the riots in Handsworth, Birmingham during September 1985. The soundtrack of Handsworth Songs is informed by reggae, punk and industrial music.
Henderson and Eshun will discuss the role that the BAFC played in the formation of a black industrial post-punk culture in the UK in the 1980s by bringing the film and its sound/image-tracks into relation with the music of groups and deejays such as Jah Shaka, Test Department, Throbbing Gristle, Mark Stewart and the Maffia and The Pop Group. They will discuss the film as an industrial-dub collage made in resistance to the racist police state of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain.
MAY 15th: 10:00 - 14:00
Guest session by Clara Saito: A proposition to do a set of very simple weekly exercises for a month. They slightly alternate daily bodily experiences and creating a different awareness while experiencing subtle shifts in the body. As well as playing with finding space or loosing space in between joints, muscles, bones and/or organs and the effects and consequences of these micro-changes.
In times of distancing, we will play with different means to exchange these experiences. One of them will be to text our sensations and observe, if through these texts a mode of communication is created that doesn’t rely on ideas or rationality but proposes a sort of displaced body language. The second proposition of exchange would be through drawing these sensations, imagining the colors and shapes and locations of these inner happenings.
The session will be followed by general study, going through the materials provided and the Listening Group responses produced, exercises and discussing personal and common matters.
MAY 22nd: 10:00 - 14:00
General study, going through the materials provided, exercises and discussing personal and common matters.
Student-led session by Niccolo Massini.
MAY 29th: 10:00 - 14:00
General study, going through the materials provided, exercises and discussing personal and common matters.
Student-led session by Sara Benaglia/Zane Zajanckauska
F2F meetings overview (April and May):
During the months of April and May all students have got three intensive (two hours) face to faces (one with each tutor). The tutors have also been available to be contacted for further support.
Seminar 3 & 4: 10 - 17 March 2020
Session three of “Curating Positions: Location In Reverse- Care For A Place Through The Cinematic Lens” will be led by Marwa Arsanios and Leire Vergara and will have Essia Jaibi, Jalila Baccar, Manel Souissi and others as guests.
We will also continue with the Listening Group, an initiative by Leon Filter that started in 2017 and that has been specifically thought in relation to the materials and exercises we will work with in the session.
March 10th
20.00-22.00: Evening screening and discussion towards our convention in Tunis.
March 11th
10:30 – 18:00: Preparation for our convention in Tunis and visiting some cine clubs in the city.
As part of the preparation for our convention we will watch together some film materials: a film proposed by Kari Rosenfelt and La Chambre (1972) by Chantal Akerman and The Silences of the Palace (1995) by Moufida Tlatli. Tunisian film investigates issues of gender, class and sexuality in the Arab world through the lives of two generations of women at a prince's palace. Seen through the eyes of an attractive young wedding singer, it exposes the sexual and social servitude of a group of women in an elaborate palace during the French Protectorate in Tunisia. Tlatli wrote the film in response to her own mother's sudden severe illness and her subsequent realization of how little she knew about her life.
Moufida Tlatli is a Tunisian film director. She was the first Arab woman to direct a full feature-length film (The Silence of the Palace) in the Arab World.
Please! Watch in advance at home The Silences of the Palace by Moufida Tlatli to open the discussion on the convention we are organizing in the city of Tunis.
20.00-22.00: Screening: Sisters! (2011) by Petra Bauer
Sisters! is a collaborative project between Swedish artist Petra Bauer and the Southall Black Sisters (SBS) – the radical, pioneering London-based feminist organization who since 1979 have politically engaged in the contemporary social and political conditions of black and minority women.
The resulting film Sisters! Is not “about” the Southall Black Sisters, but a two-way project between Bauer and the staff at the organization. It documents one week in the life of SBS, taking its daily activities as a springboard for a visual discussion on feminism, politics and aesthetics in today’s society.”
Petra Bauer works as an artist and filmmaker. She is concerned with the question of film as a political practice, and sees it as a space where social and political negotiations can take place. Recent exhibitions include: Soon Enough: art in action, Tensta Konsthall (2018); Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More, Riga Biennial (2018): Show Me Your Archive and I Will Tell You Who is in Power, KIOSK, Ghent (2017); Women in Struggles, on tour to different Folkets Hus (People’s Houses) in Sweden (2016–17); A Story within a Story, Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art (2015); and All the World’s Futures, 56th Venice Biennale (2015). Petra is an initiator of the feminist platform k.ö.k (Kvinnor könskar kollektivitet – Women Desire Collectivity).
March 12th
10:30 – 18.00: Convention with Essia Jaibi, Jalila Baccar and others
We will be coming together with theater makers, actors and filmmakers dealing with feminists and women’s histories through their work. We will enter the history and the contemporaneity of cultural production in the city from their stories and politics.
20.00-22.00: Screening of Nostalgia for the Light by Patricio Guzmán
Nostalgia for the Light is a documentary released in 2010 by Patricio Guzmán to address the lasting impacts of Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile. Guzmán focuses on the similarities between astronomers researching humanity’s past, in an astronomical sense, and the struggle of many Chilean women who still search, after decades, for the remains of their relatives executed during the dictatorship.
Patricio Guzmán is a Chilean documentary film director. He is internationally renowned for films such as The Battle of Chile and Salvador Allende.
March 13th
10:00- 13:00: Location scouting in the city of Tunis with the Listening Group. In this occasion we will do two listening groups together and then we will have a longer conversation back in Sidi Bou Said
Session 3 Listening Group led by Zoe Moutsokou and Niccolò Masini with readers Clara Amaral and Jon Mikel Euba.
Readings:
- Lucia Farinati & Claudia Firth, “The Force of Listening”, chapter 4: Collective listening or Listening and collectivity, Errant body press: Doormats, Berlin 2017.
-Jon Mikel Euba, “Writing Out Loud”, chapter locationscouting. Publishers: DAI and If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution, 2016.
Session 4 Listening Group led by Iva Kovač and Kari Rosenfelt with readers Görkem Yalim and Ruth Noack
Readings:
-Kaja Silverman, „The acoustic mirror“, chapter 5. Disembodying The Female Voice: Irigarary, Experimental Feminist Cinema and Femininity, Indiana University Press, 1988.
--Ruth Noack, “Events take place“
Clara Amaral graduated from the Dutch Art Institute (DAI) in 2019 and School for New Dance Development (SNDO) in Amsterdam in 2013.
Her work Do you remember that time we were together and danced this or that dance? premiered in Julidans Festival in 2017 and was presented in Veem House for Performance, Amsterdam; Something Raw at Frascati Theatre, Amsterdam; Circular Festival in Vila do Conde; Temps D’Images in Lisbon; Chambres D’O in Ostende, Belgium and in Teatro Municipal do Porto, Rivoli, Portugal. Her last work, In our eyes, a cascade premiered in November 2018 in Bâtard Festival in Brussels and afterwards was presented in Veem House for Performance in Amsterdam and in Far festival in Nyon, Switzerland. Her texts have been published in the Theaterkrant, Theatermaker and in Contemporary Cruising.
Jon Mikel Euba is an artist based in Bilbao. His work is grounded in drawing, as a procedure, and sculpture, as a program resolved in diverse media. Since the late 90s, he completed a number of residencies in Arteleku, San Sebastián, (1994-1995), Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin (2000-2001), Re:location Academy in Luxembourg (2004), Platform Garanti in Istanbul (2005) and Vrije Ruimten Zuidas in Amsterdam (2008), where he developed a particular system of production through an 'economical technique' which has guided his practice since. This search, which he also considers a form of resistance, requires processes that involve other people, in which Euba plays the role of a mediator or filter.
From 2006 on, continuing his performative work in other media, he developed a series of performances whose result condensed in the Re:horse series at MUSAC in León (2006), Flacc in Genk (2006), Festival a/d Werf in Utrecht, De Appel (Lecture on Re: horse) (2008), in Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam (2009) in Amsterdam, Project Arts Centre in Dublin (2009) El Farol Auditorium in Valparaiso (2010), and in Transcoding Re: horse at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2010), for which he developed a didactic approach for different participants with whom he collaborates.
In 2010 he, Txomin Badiola and Sergio Prego devised the experimental pedagogical project “Primer Proforma 2010. 30 Exercises, 40 days, 8 hours a day”. In 2015 together with Itziar Okariz, Asier Mendizabal and Sergio Prego carried out the school project Kalostra in San Sebastian. He has been core tutor of Action Unites, Words Divide (On Praxis, An Unstated Theory) II in the Dutch Art Institute in Arnhem during three years.
In 2017 he published Writing Out Loud that brings together the transcriptions of eight lectures created by Euba during the course Action unites, words divide (On praxis, an unstated theory) at the Dutch Art Institute across the academic year 2014 – 2015. The resulting texts sit within a larger writing-centred project by the artist, which he has been pursuing for almost a decade, with the aim of defining a form of praxis that could evolve into a technical theory.
Baha Görkem Yalım (1987, Izmir) is a visual artist. After having worked as an engineer, Yalım completed their BA in Fine Arts at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam, receiving the award in the Thesis category. Additionally, they completed an Honours Degree in Art and Research at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and University of Amsterdam and received their MA in Art Praxis at the Dutch Art Institute (DAI). Yalım’s exploration, not only of contents but also of the use of artistic media, is in constant flux - refusing to crystallise in a particular form. Yalım employs video, sculpture, and performance sometimes in variations and sometimes as folds of the same. Their practice at times crosses the borders of a writer, educator, and curator. Although the range of subjects that they touch upon is varied, some notions appear with recurrent energy, such as the poetically changed vertical/horizontal allegory, which functions as an oblique critique on modernity and patriarchy. Objecthood and history -with a particular interest in the concept of keepsake- are also often thematised. Their work is often accompanied by texts that are in the crossing of poetry, fiction, and academic reflection.
Ruth Noack trained as a visual artist and art historian, she has worked as author, art critic, university lecturer and exhibition maker since the 1990s.
Noack was curator of documenta 12 (2007). Exhibitions include Scenes of a Theory (1995), Things We Don’t Understand (2000), The Government (2005) and Not Dressed for Conquering – Ines Doujak’s Loomshuttles/Warpaths (2012). Notes on Crisis, Currency and Consumption (2015) was the first of a series of ten essay-exhibitions on issues of contemporary life. Next will be Sleeping with a Vengeance − Dreaming of a Life and Fragments and Compounds.
Head of the Curating Contemporary Art Program, Royal College of Art, London (2012-13), she acted as Research Leader for the EU-project MeLa - European Museums in an age of migrations. Noack was Šaloun professor at the Academy of Fine Arts, Prague (2013-14) and lead the Gwangju Biennale International Curator Course in 2014. Since 2015, she is responsible for one of the DAI Roaming Academy trajectories. As per October 2019 Ruth Noack will be building up a new cultural center for Whitman-Walker Health in Washington DC.
16.00-19.00: Sound debate (The debate will be recorded in order to make it arrive to the readers of the session 3 and 4 of the Listening Group and for our archive).
20.00-22: Screening of Too Early Too Late (1982) by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet
“If there is an actor in Too Early, Too Late, it is the landscape. This actor has a text to recite: History (the peasants who resist, the land which remains), of which it is the living witness. The actor performs with a certain amount of talent: the cloud that passes, a breaking loose of birds, a bouquet of trees bent by the wind, a break in the clouds; this is what the landscape’s performance consists of. This kind of performing is meteorological. One hasn’t seen anything like it for quite some time. Since the silent period, to be precise.”
Serge Daney, Cinemeteorology, Libération, 1982
Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet were a duo of filmmakers who worked between 1963 and 2006. Their films are noted for their rigorous, intellectually stimulating style and radical politics.
March 14th
10:00- 13:00: Student led sessions by Georgia Stellin and Maxime Gourdon followed by feedback
13.00- 14.00: lunch
14.00- 17.00: Student led sessions by Niccolò Masini and Zoe Moutsokou followed by feedback
17.00- 19.00: Teaching by Marwa Arsanios and Leire Vergara on the materials sent to read during the DAI WEEKS and the material screened so far.
20.00- 22.00: Screening of News From Home (1977) by Chantal Ackerman
Letters from Chantal Akerman’s mother are read over a series of elegantly composed shots of 1976 New York, where our (unseen) filmmaker and protagonist has relocated. Akerman’s unforgettable time capsule of the city is also a gorgeous meditation on urban alienation and personal and familial disconnection.
Chantal Akerman was a Belgian film director, screenwriter artist and film professor at the City College of New York.
March 15th
10.00 - 13.00: Meeting Manel Souissi from the confederation of Cinema Clubs in the city of Tunis. We will continue with some derives and scouting location in the city of Tunis.
13.00- 14.00: Lunch
15.00- 19.00: Teaching by Marwa Arsanios and Leire Vergara on the materials sent to read during the DAI WEEKS and the material screened so far. This time will be employed also to speculate on the final project.
March 16th
10:00- 18:00: Time for the Final project
20.00 - 22.00: Screening to be confirmed of Tunisian films by Leyla Bouzid and Moufida Tlatli.
March 17th
10.00- 18.00: Face to face with everybody
20.00-22.00: Screening of films by Mohamed Khan
Bibliography for the week:
-Pier Paolo Pasolini Appunti per un’ Orestiade Africana (Notes Towards an African Orestes, 1970)
-Trinh T. Minh ha Viet Given Name Nam (1989)
-Chantal Akerman La Chambre (1972)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AGakyb3eBU
-Kaja Silverman: 5th Chapter “Disembodying the Female Voice: Irigaray, Experimental Feminist Cinema and Femininity in The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema”
-Andrea A. Lunsford and Gloria Anzaldua: Interview “Towards a Mestiza Rhetoric: Gloria Anzaldúa on Composition and Postcoloniality”
-Gloria Anzaldúa: “Let us Be the Healing Of the Wound: The Coyolxauhqui Imperative-la sombra y el sueño”
Seminar 2: 26 - 29 January 2020
Session two of “Curating Positions: Location In Reverse- Care For A Place Through The Cinematic Lens” will be led by Marwa Arsanios and Leire Vergara and will count with Wendelien van Oldenborgh and Ricardo Liong a Kong as guests.
During this second session, we will continue with the Listening Group, an initiative by Leon Filter that started in 2017 and that has been specifically thought in relation to the materials and exercises we will work with in the session.
Sunday, January 26:
20.00-22.00: Screening of the following films and materials:
-Reassemblage by Trinh T. Minh-ha (1983) Duration: 39,37 minutes
Women are the focus but not the object of Trinh T. Minh-ha’s influential first film, a complex visual study of the women of rural Senegal. Through a complicity of interaction between film and spectator, Reassemblage reflects on documentary filmmaking and the ethnographic representation of cultures.
-Après la Reprise, la Prise Wendelien van Oldenborgh (2009) Duration: 16 minutes
This analogue slide work takes as its point of departure conditions of work and more specifically the changing nature of this, which is having its effect on the contemporary “self”. Manual labour, women and production of culture meet in this piece, which is made in collaboration with two women who were former assembly line workers of one of the Levi’s jeans factories in Belgium which closed in 1998, leaving all of its (female) workers unemployed. Many of them had spent their whole working life with Levi’s. A group of these women had found new roles as actresses after putting forward their experience in a theatre production. For this slide piece, they share their story with students of the Royal Technical Atheneum Mechelen.
-Supposing I love you Wendelien van Oldenborgh (2011) Duration: 13 minutes
The work brings the voice of the Swiss-Egyptian philosopher and theologian Tarq Ramadan into exchange with a group of five young adults of various origin from Belgium and the Netherlands. Against the backdrop of a de Stijl-inspired broadcast building designed by Piet Elling, the Dutch architect and friend of Gerrit Rietveld, the work is set up as a polyphonic mini-tragedy. Unrehearsed forms of performance and speech, stemming from private experience, form the building blocks of the ‘drama’.
Wendelien van Oldenborgh will be present during the screening so she will introduce her works and take questions afterwards.
Monday, January 27:
- 10.00-13.00: Session with Wendelien van Oldenborgh. The artist will share with the group her way of working and she will connect it to Trinh T. Minh-ha’s articulation of the idea of the political: “The distinction offered in: ‘making a political film’ or ‘writing and making films politically’ that helps to widen the scope of the political. She will share different works during the session to introduce her ideas around the role of sound and text in her filmic work and the different methodologies employed in working with specific locations. Her session will also comprise an exercise thought for the COOP.
14.00- 16.00: Session with Wendelien van Oldenborgh continues.
Please, read for Wendelien van Oldenborgh session the following text:
16.00-19.00: Teaching by Marwa Arsanios and Leire Vergara on the materials sent to read during DAI WEEKS.
20.00-22.00: Session with Ricardo Liong-A-Kong. Ricardo has been invited to do several contributions to the COOP along the year. This will be his first presentation:
“One will always return to where one's birth cord is buried.' When you are born you are delivered in this world, on its soil. The soil in which we sow (seeds) for fruits, flowers, vegetables. The soil that will produce your food. If we move away from our (buried) birth cord, can we take soil and seeds with us to our new location?”
Ricardo Liong-A-Kong will show seeds he collected in Suriname, and talk about their names, what plants they will become. Furthermore, he will show some of his artist's books in connection to 'soil of Suriname'.
Ricardo Liong-A-Kong: Although he loves gardens, plants and trees, he doesn't consider himself as a gardener. Being in nature, a garden, working in/on it or just sitting there and contemplating is one of Ricardo's favorite 'activities'. Meanwhile trying to find out the why and how plants grow, more in the artistic way than the scientific way. Learning what they are used for, what they are called (in Surinamese and Dutch), how to grow them. And finding a way to use this in his artistic work.
Tuesday, January 28:
10.00-13.00: Student led session by Dorothy Hunter, Iva Kovac and Azul Monte
14.00-15.00: Session 2 Listening Group with readers Yen Noh and Vinita Gatne
Texts include: Kaja Silverman - Chapter two of "The Acoustic Mirror" and Bell Hooks, „choosing the margin as a space of radical openness“ from „women, knowledge and reality - explorations in feminist philosophy“ ed. by Ann Garry and Marilyn Pearsall
Biography of readers
Vinita Gatne (Mumbai,1988) is an artist working on sculptural installations. By weaving narratives through her installations, Vinita attempts to forefront multiple facets aspirations which otherwise are either ignored or mediated in globally standardized information systems. These interests bud from her prior training in architecture which steered her to be involved in several urban studies with a view to understand the impacts of large-scale development projects.
Yen Noh (Daegu, 1983) studied at Dutch Art Institute and the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. Her work investigates intimate histories of trauma, upheaval, and freedom during the Japanese colonisation of Korea, unearthing and recreating radical practices of everyday anarchy by those whose history is overlooked and unthought by an imperial/national project. She currently researches the Korean poet and architect Yi Sang and the Japanese art group MAVO as challenging comparatist histories that present non-Western avant-gardes as particular, local and derivative versions of a “universal” historical avant-garde originating from the West.
15.00-16.30: Sound Debate (The debate will be recorded in order to make it arrive to the readers of the session 2 of the Listening Group and for our archive).
16.30-19.00: Group feedback to the student led sessions and discussion towards the project in Tunis
20.00-22.00: Screening proposed by Kari Rosenfelt and discussion towards the project in Tunis continues.
Wednesday, January 29:
10.00-13.00: face 2 faces.
Bibliography for the week:
- Lucy Lippard's "On not having seen the Bilbao Guggenheim" from Learning from the Bilbao Guggenheim
- Chapter two of Kaja Silverman's "The Acoustic Mirror"
- Chapter one of Trinh T Minh-ha's "Women, Natice, Other"
- Natasha Myers' "How to Grow Liveable Worlds, Ten not so Easy Steps"
https://www.academia.edu/40441118/How_to_grow_livable_worlds_Ten_not-so-easy_steps_published_version_
-Wendelien van Oldenborgh “Asset as Set: Filmmaking in Relation to a Certain Realness of Site”
Seminar 1: 1-4 December 2019
Seminar one of “Curating Positions: Location In Reverse- Care For A Place Through The Cinematic Lens” will be led by Marwa Arsanios and Leire Vergara who will introduce their positions - through their practices - regarding notions of care for a place, care for knowledge and care for the land. The introductions will set the basis of the conceptual space for the COOP study group.
The participant students will also be asked to introduce their practice in regards to the thematic of the study group.
During this first session, we will start with the Listening Group, an initiative by Leon Filter that started in 2017 and that has been specifically thought in relation to the materials and exercises we will work with in the session.
Sunday, December 1:
19.30-20.15: Screening of the film Scuola Senza Fine by Adriana Monti (1983) Duration: 36 minutes
Between 1979 and 1983, Monti worked on a film with a group of women, most of them housewives, who in 1976 had taken the “150 Hours” course in Affori, Milan. The “150 hours” course is the name that received the contractual improvement that the Italian workers coming from the steel and automobile sector gained in 1973. This agreement extended soon to other industrial sectors and even to the unemployed and adults in general which finally gave access to many women and housewives to the course. Adriana Monti filmed a group of women that after completing the course and being awarded with the diploma decided to continue studying and formed with the help of the teacher a study group. Monti filmed the group between 1979 and 1981 and worked on the edition until 1983 in collaboration with the participants.
20.15-22.00: Round of weird questions among the participant students and the tutors.
Monday, December 2:
10.00-11.30: Presentation by Leire Vergara (care for a space: Bulegoa z/b). An introduction to the organisation behind this COOP in relation to the text Maria Puig de la Bellacasa: “Matters of Care in Technoscience: Assembling Neglected Things” in Social Studies of Science 2011 41: 85 or as an extended version in Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds University of Minnesota Press, 2017 pp. 27-69
11.30-13.00: Introduction to the Convention of Women Farmers and Ecological Feminists, an initiative by Marwa Arsanios for Biennale Warszawa 2019 in relation to Eve Tuck’s and Marcia McKenzie text “Relational Validity and the “Where” of Inquiry: Place and Land in Qualitative Research” in Qualitative Inquiry 1-6 2015)
14.00-15.00: Session 1 Listening Group with readers Karolin Meunier and Valentina Curandi. Texts include:
-The Script of the film Scuola senza fine translated by Fausta Daldini Einhorn; -Introduction to the script of the film Scuola senza fine, translated by Giovanna Ascelle, Scuola senza fine by Adriana Monti;
-Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa University of Minnesota Press, 2017;
-On Earth we are briefly Gorgeous, Ocean Vuong, Jonathan Cape, 2019
Karolin Meunier : Karolin Meunier is an artist and writer from Berlin and teaches at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. She is a member of the publishing house and book shop B_Books in Berlin. Her performance, text and video works observe how access to individual experience is accomplished through cultural and standardized practices like translation processes, conversations, or learning methods. The artist book A Commentary on "Vai Pure" by Carla Lonzi will be published with B_Books/Archive Books in 2020.
Valentina Curandi : I a practitioner with an experimental approach to text-based research, performance and publishing. I develop performative work that focuses on the material-symbolic setup of the sexed and contracted willful subject, inquiring the socio- historic-economical conditions affecting the relationship of women to mortality. My theoretical and artistic research on feminist political economy and contract theory inquires the normalizing effect of legal regulations and devices on the everyday management of my reproductive bonds and obligations. The work Kate (2016 - ongoing) - a proposition of bequeathment of the body of my artistic work to the school I attended for my Master (Dutch Art Institute) - stretches the field of operation of the device of last will and testament’s legal language, extending it from the field of private transactions to the public-ness of a series of scripted performative acts.
15.00-16.30: Sound Debate (The debate will be recorded in order to make it arrive to the readers of the session 1 of the Listening Group).
16.30- 16.45: short break
17.00-18.00: Presentation by Leire Vergara (care for a location). Brief introduction to her PhD research “Dispositifs of Touching: A Curatorial Study on the Plazas of Sovereignty” (read in 2017 within the framework of Curatorial/Knowledge at Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths College University of London)
20.00-22.00: Screening of How is Afraid of Ideology? by Marwa Arsanios Video 57 minutes.
As an introduction, standing on a stony path, director Marwa Arsanios faces the camera and wonders: “What does it mean to belong to a place? What does it mean to “be here”? What does the word “nature” encompass? What does it imply when we say “we”? These political questions arise from experiments conducted by women in three war-torn places. First, in the mountains of Kurdistan, in early 2017, the guerrilla led by the Kurdish women’s autonomist movement invites us to experience and consider space, plants, survival, ecology and economic battles in a different way. The process, so we are told, ensues from practical concerns: how do you set up an organic food production cycle? When does a tree need to be cut down? Then in Jinwar, literally the “place of women”, a village in Rojava, Northern Syria, built by women for the exclusive use of women. And finally, in a cooperative in the Bekaa Valley, near the Syrian border, which has become a sanctuary-like community for refugees. In these communities, the issue of the reappropriation of the land and means of production and subsistence is paramount, and it creates a different landscape. These three eco-feminist strategies at work bring about self-governance, and the creation and transmission of knowledge. These fragile yet so precious experiments are like pages in an herbarium, featuring carefully collected and hand-drawn plants, arranged in the film like silent, up-front manifestos. (Nicolas Feodoroff)
Tuesday, December 3:
10.00-13.00: Presentations by the participant students (open face to face)
14.00-18.00: Presentations by the participant students (open face to face)
20.00-22.00: Open discussion: Listening to a place (a new methodology to develop as part of this COOP, proposals for a collective project in Tunis)
Wednesday, December 4:
10.00-13.00: Introduction to the methodologies of the COOP (Listening Group, Sound Debates, Performative Screenings, Listening to a place…) for the different students-led parts, chronicles… Distribution of the different students-led parts across the year.