Seminar 6: June 2020 (diluted between June & July)

Dear Chusma,

Please find below the work plan for the upcoming and final months together. 

Gearing towards our final collective work, we are going to distribute the June/July session throughout 10 weeks + a 5 day-to-night live meeting in August. The idea is to form a Chusma Band to then compose a music record, a radio or tv program, or whatever comes from the process.

The distributed 10 weeks work plan is articulated through 2 exercises:

A) Sharing Materials

• Inspiration Chusma Band Reference: every week, one of you will share a material that contributes as a personal reference, a textural feeling, and ambience to the idea of a Chusma Band. An inspirational reference that helps you imagine or define chusmeria, which can take the form of any type of reference, idea, image, song, poem, text, podcasts, radio show, collage, drawing…. It can also be a collection of materials, like the Weekly Packet in Cuba: a curated selection of videoclips, a photograph, a poem, a dance… The aim here is to create a collaged-collective-textural-referential archive (of songs, images, film scenes, live performances, etc…) to embrace our band. 

i.e. the youtube fragment we shared on Almodovar’s film Labyrinth of Passions it an example, because of the drag-trash-punk band that Almodovar and MacNamara formed at that time (with songs “Suck it to me” or “I want to be mom”), or the glam-trash of the flirting scene. We find these are elements, gestures, textures that we could use in the creation of the band, and are also an important reference for both of us in our possible definition of chusma. 

The only limitation is that the reading, watching, listening… should not exceed 20 mins. It needs to something dynamic, that engages the group week by week in a sharing network, but does not become something heavy. 

• Student Led Session: for those of you who haven’t done a student led session, you need to do one. This is up to you to decide what/how/when; but again, it shouldn’t be long. We are proposing a standard format of a 20 mins creation of yours: a text or video or audio made by you, or a series of exercises you give to the group, an online talk or gathering, a yoga session, etc. If you need to extend the time of your intervention, it is possible, but should be too long. i.e. Vita wanted to do a student led session on wine at PAF; we could meet online, following her instructions to get a wine, listen her for 20 mins, and then discuss.

Your contribution should feed a chusmic term + short description to the Glossary (more below): i.e. Simon(e): BodyBuilding, Hannah: Politics of Shine, Ian: BDSM

Materials should be sent no later than Friday each week (>> Calendar).

B) Chusma Band

According to your interests + skills, you will take up a role in the creation of the band. In groups of 3, you will create something regarding your area that will be shared with the group every two weeks. All the creations (song writing, program scripting, beat producing, video making, music making…) should be intended to compose the Band’s production. To be assigned in roles and paired up in groups, please fill in this questionnaire before this Friday: https://ageopcs.typeform.com/to/Aab4sR

Work with the Chusma Band creations will be divided in 3 phases:

1) Pre (June-July): Script & Narrative / Lyrics / Dramaturgy / Music Composition / Costume design / Stage Design

2) Live (5-9 August): Singing / Performance / Music Playing / Production

3) Post (end of August): Edition / Design / Promotion

As the project is being defined on the way, we are going to focus now in Phase 1 groups:

SCRIPT & NARRATIVE

What is the story of this band?

This group goal is to invent and define the arching narrative: imagine a background biography and story of the band (i.e. who are we, where do we come from, why do we form a band, etc) and articulate the narrative of the project (i.e. depending if its a radio live show or a tv show or a concert, imagine the narrative order of each chapter / scene / etc.)

: Julian, Francisco, Marc, Hannah, Clara,

LYRICS

What does this band sing and tell?

Independently of the final format, there are going to be some musical moments that need lyrics to be singed and performed. 

: Simon(e), Marc, Miguel

MUSIC COMPOSITION

What is the sound, tone and rhythm of this band? 

Composing the music to the songs  & music scapes of the project. Includes creating beats, composing the pieces, orchestrating the live music performance.

: Miguel, Giorgos, Ian, Francisco

DRAMATURGY

How does this band move?

Articulating and ideating a performance script for the band and its show. 

: Julian, Zach, Simon(e)

STAGE DESIGN

What is the natural habitat of this band? What textures does it like?

Designing the space of performance of the band

: Vita, Clara, Ian, Giorgos

OUTFIT DESIGN

What does the band wear? What is the skin of the band? 

Costume and outfit design for all

: Hannah, Vita, Zach

We have 6 sub-groups and each of you is in 2 groups. This means also that the working logic is not anymore consecutive (one group after the other) but synchronic: all groups work at the same time, each one on their specific mission, but open to contamination / feedback / collaboration. 

Each subgroup is responsible and accountable for their contribution: they are open to the feedback of the whole group, but they are in charge of their proposition. The structure is nevertheless thought to allow for cross-pollination and interdependence throughout all sub-groups and creations, although the autonomy of the subgroups is also respected; it’s rather a contaminated autonomy of an exquisite cadaver or monstrous body. It goes without saying that no one is obliged to do something that they do not want and we can all object to the proposition of a group if we collectively decide to do it.

Fridays then are moments in which each group presents their work to the others, and receive the feedback —sort of like a kitchen. We are proposing the timing of 16h-17h30 to meet online. The basic structure ghouls be: 30 mins presentation max + 1 hour debate. For each presentation, 2 moderators will be assigned. 

GLOSSARY

The glossary is thought as a navigating device for our Band. The terms should anchor its performance and production:

https://pad.riseup.net/p/-Xd9UJR5Dd5rWiLE3FXr-keep

CALENDAR

The distributed work plan should spread in 11 weeks, from the 8th of June to August 21st. 

The live meeting should be focused on coming together to finalise the collective production. We are proposing to meet on August 5-9. The place is to be determined, depending on the resources we will need and what DAI can help us out with. 

Materials and collaborations should be send before each Friday.

Week 1: Friday 12th June, 16h-17.30h

Sharing material + glossary: Simon(e) 

Week 2: Friday 19th June, 16h-17.30h

SCRIPT & NARRATIVE present background story

Sharing material + glossary: Hannah 

Week 3: Friday 26th June, 16h-17.30h

Sharing material + glossary: Ian 

Week 4: Friday 3rd July, 16h-17.30h

LYRICS present first writing

DRAMATURGY present first ideas

Sharing material + personal contribution + glossary: Zach 

Week 5: Friday 10th July, 16h-17.30h

Sharing material + personal contribution + glossary: Francisco

Week 6: Friday 17th July, 16h-17.30h

MUSIC COMPOSITION presents first creations

SCRIPT & NARRATIVE present show narrative

Sharing material + personal contribution + glossary:  Vita

Week 7: Friday 24th July, 16h-17.30h

Sharing material + personal contribution + glossary:  Marc

Week 8: Friday 31st July, 16h-17.30h

STAGE DESIGN present sketches

OUTFIT DESIGN present sketches

Sharing material + personal contribution + glossary:  Giorgos

Week 10: Friday 14th August, 16h-17.30h

Sharing material + personal contribution + glossary:  Clara + Miguel

Week 11: Friday 21st August, 16h-17.30h

Sharing material + personal contribution + glossary:  Julian

BIBLIOGRAPHY & FILMOGRAPHY

• Sara Ahmed, Queer Vandalism; José Esteban Muñoz, Latina Performance and queer world making or Chusmería at the end of the century; Johnson Ray Johnson; Glitterfesto; intro de the meaning of style  de Dick Hebdige o the functioning of subcultures.
• Les Garçons Sauvages, bertrand mandico (trigger warning: there is a rape scene) ; all of almodovar’s 80s filmography; the documentary on The Cockettes….

Seminar 5: May 2020

After Tunis, we devoted the end of March and all of April to provide individual face2face (average time 2 hours) with each student in the group. Moreover a series of group discussions were organised to discuss collectively how to proceed with the online format.

On Sunday 19th of April (11h-13h), we had the seminar on Gossip with iLiana Fokianaki. In preparation for it, we read chapter 5 “On the meaning of Gossip” of Witch-hunt and Women by Silvia Federici and “Witch Hunt” by Hannah Black. The discussion surveyed the two positions stated in these texts. On one hand, the position of a Marxist Feminist that rejects the whole meaning of gossip as an act of talking behind closed doors and spreading rumours: because it is a patriarchal construction. Federici offers a historical tracing of the word which before meant women solidarity and friendship. On Black’s text you have the proposition of an artist of gossip as a secret language and act of resistance. It's two different positions. The one could be thought in the words of Lorde: you cannot dismantle the master's house with the master's tools. The second can be thought through the idea of breaking power from within and re-appropriation.

WORKSHOP WITH THE INSTITUTE OF PORNO STUDIES

13, 14 15 and 21 May from 8.30 to 11.30 pm.

The Institute of Porno Studies was born out of the need to analyse and experiment critically with the explicit representation of sexuality, in the multiplicity of possibilities in which it is presented, omitting the prohibitionist versions that considers sexuality a taboo. The Institute proposes itself as a laboratory of experimentation and learning, as a space for the production of thought and a place for the exercise of practices between the visual and the spiritual.

In this workshop, the Institute of Porno Studies wants to unfold a journey from different incursions into the muddy, dirty and contagious, building a discursive conglomerate around pornography that will lead us to an online performance in CAM4.  

WEDNESDAY, MAY 13th from 8.30 to 11.30 pm

Presentation of the Institute of Porn Studies and the workshop by Ona Bros, Lucía Egaña and Francesc Ruiz.

PORNOGRAPHIC MUDDY EXERCISES PART 1

The materiality of mud, from its malleable state, liquid, solid, cracked, dusty, etc, will serve us to propose a series of sensorial exercises where we will rethink notions of body, gaze, genitalia, dirt, disease and contagion.

THURSDAY, MAY 14th from 8.30 to 11.30 pm

PORNOGRAPHIC MUDDY EXERCISES PART 2

FRIDAY, MAY 15th from 8.30 to 11.30 pm

PORNOGRAPHIC INTERVENTIONS ON THE PORN NET

The mud and the different operations carried out with it in the previous sessions will work as a technological interface through which we will think of different ways to enter and disrupt the pornographic continuum of cybersex platforms.

We will collectively think on what kind of interventions make sense to do, on cruising, virality and on the different ways in which we can piggyback these platforms as artistic and pornographic communication tools.

THURSDAY, MAY 21st from 8.30 to 11.30 pm

PERFORMANCES IN CAM 4

This session is conceived as a program of interventions within the CAM4 cybersex website. Each participant will develop a performance from the ideas extracted from the workshop. At the end we will make a collective analysis of the results.

Technical issues:

MUD

Each student will need approximately 4 kilos of clay and some space in front of the computer that allows them to model. We recommend also to have some plastic or film with which to cover the surface you are working on and the devices you’re going to use (keyboard, mouse and mobile phone), some rags or paper to dry your hands and a nearby bowl containing water so that you can wet the clay and your hands. Some working clothes will also be very helpful.

CAM4

We ask you to open an account on the cam4 platform and check if you can connect and broadcast from it.  During the first days we will advise you if you have problems to open it.

Seminar 3 & 4: 10 - 17 March 2020

For this double COOP week, the Chusma group will explore issues of contagion and gossip; forms of reading and inscription, the circulation of culture and the information architectures it produces, from music genres to comic; loudness, humour, camp, and the different coalitions that can derive from all of it. This exploration will be conducted through a series of practical exercises and discussions, approaching the week together as one, open-ended experimentation: to create a newsstand, a kiosque, in which different magazines, newspapers, images, videos, maybe gestures, and sounds, songs and words are combined and recombined together to allow forms of reading and creating meaning.

TUESDAY 10 - COOP TRANSITION, with Francesc

Comics and local press reading.

WEDNESDAY 11, with Francesc 

An introduction to the recent history of Arab comic books will be the starting point to talk about censorship and the many ways to avoid it. We will imagine tangential and alternative ways of distribution, we will focus on an expanded idea of the street newsstand as a space and time for dissemination of illicit  content, a mutable transformist informational architecture capable of blooming explosively in the most unusual places... and disappear without leaving any trace.

(Some references: Danny the Street, Garbage Pail Kids trade cards,  Fregolí, Transformers Franchise, Distribuidora La Polilla, ….)

Ian Nolan Student led session on bondage, practices of care and permission in BDSM

Second Stain Contest. In this new iteration we will work on contagion and strategies and tactics to stain others. This could be an adaptation or continuation of Ian’s workshop; do you have to make an agreement to stain another person? How can we stain with care?

THURSDAY 12, day out with Francesc

We will visit markets, second hand bookshops, street newsstands, looking for inspiration for our informational architectures. We will try to collect experiences to add to our chusmaesque newsstand, printed matter debris, Arab camp, tourist oriented kitsch on the search of our chusmaesque double in the Tunisian context.

In the evening we will start to share ideas on how we can collectively build our newsstand.

FRIDAY 13, with Francesc and Julia

In the morning we will continue discussing and building models for our chusma distribution ad will prepare a first presentation of ideas to show and welcome Julia.

In the afternoon, Francisco Mojica will lead a session on the use of the synthesizer in Soft Cell

We will end the day with a karaoke of trash synth tunes that derive from the previous session.

SATURDAY 14, with Francesc, Julia and iLiana

Day out devoted to work on the research,  production and making of the newstand.

In the afternoon, we will have a get together to work together on our Chusma Lexicon. 

Film night: a collective commented screening of Paris is Burning 

SUNDAY 15, with Francesc, Julia and iLiana

Julia will make an introduction to social choreographies, and we will devote the discussions of this day to reading gestures, poses and other grammars that are naturalised in our bodies. Also to the figure of Caliban, and the strategies of linguistic and monstrous resistance.

Zach Schoenhut will lead a session on Reading.

We will end with Beauty Salon on Keratin politics —hair, nails, and more; or the synesthetics politics of smell and the hammam; or continue our litter and glitter research.

MONDAY 16, with Julia and iLiana

Day out devoted to work on the research, production and making of the newstand.

In the afternoon, iLiana will introduce her research on gossip as a form of female comradeship, and will start a discussion on dirty talk and rumours.

Film night: Les Garçons Sauvages, by Bertrand Mandico

TUESDAY 17, with iLiana

Day to make the newsstand WORK!

We will have a get together to work together on our Chusma Lexicon. And wrap up the week, to plan next weeks ahead.

Film night, to be proposed by the group or Night out wrap up and celebrate and chill.

Seminar 2: 26 - 29 January 2020

During our Epen encounter, we will delve into the excesses of muddy neo-baroque poetry and the possibilities of social choreographies. Julia will be joined by artist, ex-DAI and baroque priestess Mercedes Azpilicueta as tutor for a day + transition.  

Sunday evening

We will devote this COOP transition to briefly present our work in relation to the intentions of the following days, and introduce —softly— the poems by Néstor Perlongher that we have translated as working materials for the following days.

Monday 

This whole day will be centered in working on the visceral, sculptural and textural dimensions of language hosted at the heart of the Latinamerican neo-baroque and muddy baroque movements. 

In the morning, we will discuss the texts The Baroquification and Sandy Beaches and Muddy Delta by Néstor Perlongher in dialogue with the harsh context of repressive necropolitics and general violence that ravaged South America in the 70-90s. We will take some time to explore the cultural practices that emerged during that time, in which the body —abject, precarious, excessive, and collective— become a rather verbose matter.

In the afternoon, we will take the discussion into practice, through exercises of metonymic description, textural-textual surfaces, ecstasy and dementia declamation, “muddying” and intoxicating sense(s), accents and other forms of corrupting one’s own language. All these exercises will take the residues, remainders or leftovers of your own practice as working materials.  

In the night, depending on the energy, we will either watch a film relating to Perlongher’s historical context, or continue with some corporal exercises from the afternoon in a softer way. This will also be the time for Face2Face.

Tuesday

Mercedes will leave Tuesday morning, and after a decompression walk through Epen, Julia will take the discussion from the potentials of abjection found in the cannibal the trope, through the figure of Caliban, to the articulation of social choreophies (forms of experimentation in the field of aesthetics that generate hitherto unforeseen social representations and ways of life) and the foundation of the night studies.

The afternoon will host a Beauty Salon session centered on the politics of shine and diffraction and queer bodybuilding, organised by Hannah O’Flynn and Simon(e) Van Sarloos.

At night we will watch Tongues untied by Marlon Riggs, and will have some time for Face2Face.

Wednesday

This last morning we will gather to wrap up the previous days and plan future actions ahead.

This is a tentative schedule, which can be susceptible of being altered along the way according to the group’s work, energy and mood. Decompression walks in the woods can take me place in any slot at any given time. 

A manifesto, as mood attuning for our next date: Pedro Lemebel, I Speak for my Difference / Hablo por mi diferencia : http://cordite.org.au/poetry/notheme4/manifesto-i-speak-for-my-difference/

Seminar 1: 1-4 December 2019

Together with tutors Julia Morandeira and Francesc Ruiz, this first week will be devoted to setting up the horizon of desire, of possibility and action of this COOP: how to constitute a chusma group and a dirty editorial. To do so, we will delve into the methodological potentials that José Esteban Muñoz foresaw in the chusmería, namely “a tactical refusal to keep things pristine and binarized, a willful mistmaching of striped and floral print genres, and a loud defiance of a rather fixed order”. In relation to this and the editorial, we will explore through a set of chusmaesque trashy workshops what Francesc has termed “disturbing distribution” by contaminating and threatening different systems of communication and distribution that operate around us. 

Sunday night

This short COOP transition will be dedicated to introductions amongst group members and tutors. We will also share the constellation of topics that we tentatively plan to work on throughout the year.

Monday / Tuesday mornings: BEAUTY SALON

The Beauty Salon will be a fixed recurring space in our COOP’s seminars, aimed at tuning in the tone and the conceptual framework of each seminar week while we engage in collective activities related to pleasure as activism, self-fashioning and style, glamour and excess, or hair and nails — all of them understood as sites of resistance, care, resignification and fantasy. A series of texts will be read aloud while other activities are undertaken.

For this week, we will be reading extracts of José Esteban Muñoz Cruising Utopia, Michael Warner’s Fear of a queer planet, Judith Halberstam’s writings on wildness, Deborah Cowen “Rough Trade? Sex, Death, and the Queer Nature of Circulation” from the The Deadly Life of Logistics, Zoe Angelis and Blake Gutt’s Stains and adrienne maree brown’s Pleasure Activism; films and clips will also be screened, and we will be sharing a series of comics with all the group.

It is a moment of sharing references, materials, gossip, collective speculation; of setting an ambiance and mood. We are also entertaining the idea of doing the second Beauty Salon in the heated swimming pool, if the group is ok with it and the space allows it.

Monday / Tuesday afternoons: DIRTY PLACES WORKSHOP

Waste, rubbish, weeds, garbage, litter. This part of our study group will take us to pay attention to those circuits, systems and infrastructures that invisibilise our waste, garbage, what we excrete. Organised through drifts and walks, the purpose of this activity is to identify the cracks in those systems, the places where regulations cannot be applied or where their application is denied or neglected. When the sanitised control fails, all those things that were opaque emerge, bringing a lot of information with them. The purpose here is to identify the opaque channels, to be able to reproduce the cracks. A small sabotage or a little obstruction in the system could produce a temporary overflow, a leak, that we would understand as a publication.

After a visual introduction to the ideas around dirty places, infrastructure, distribution and disruption, we will work on the fantasy of sabotaging Nieuwvliet systems and distribution circuits, identifying the better spots to make public, to publish, what it is usually opaque or invisible in the area.  We will explore the surroundings of our location and will collectively create a plan to turn Nieuwvliet into a different place —for better or for worse. All this work will be done by making maps, drawings, collages, models and some “printing” actions.

Monday night: FIRST STAIN CONTEST

This night activity will consist in an award-like ceremony celebrating the power of stains to transmit ideas and feelings, social constructs and affective economies. Every contestant will carry a stain on its body, clothes, etc. accompanied with a narrative making reference to a real or fictitious event in which the stain is involved. The stain can be real or fake. We will create different award categories based on the feelings that each stain presentation generates: shame, fun, attraction, disgust...

Tuesday night: STICKY LETTERS 

Inspired by early mail art and the work of Ray Johnson, this activity wants to initiate an organised network of individuals interested in micro sabotaging the postal service, as well as the COOPs and the larger DAI structure. The network members will use the postal systems to communicate and plan different disruptions: addressing messages to the workers, testing the limits of the system and its standards and by making the sending of every single letter a possibility to affect and infect other letters.

Wednesday morning

We will take this final morning to decompress, evaluate the experience and plan ahead the next seminar week.

All COOP members should bring their make-up and any other self-fashioning tool at hand for the Beauty Salon and the First Stain contest, as well as any “sticky” communication element. Bring your swimsuits. Two readings are recommended: Latina Performance and Queer Worldmaking; or, Chusmería at the End of the Twentieth Century by José Esteban Muñoz and Jack Halberstam Wildness, Loss, Death which we will share by mail. 

OST for this first seminar: Evelyn Cornejo, La chusma inconsciente

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Tcs0ClHkTU

“Somos los mal hablados, los mal pensados, los mal vestidos, los mal portados...”

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