2021 ~ Meditations#9 ~ Veronica Valentini

The following meditation by Veronica Valentini was commissioned by the Dutch Art Institute at the occassion of COOP SUMMIT 2021 when 5 COOP study groups forged their collaborative research with into an assemblage of public happenings at Santuari de Lluc, on the Spanish island Mallorca. Photo-documentation: Baha Görkem Yalim.  

QUEER KINSHIP SCHOOL ~ making alliance with mountains, berries, dough, water, waves, radio,  gossip & ghosts

Monday 4th October

From social networks to kinship networks

Getting to my destination took longer than I thought it would. Despite being relatively close to the island of Majorca, the route from home to arrival took as long as the length of the longest Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger outage recorded since 2008, marking the outward journey. A social media blackout that accompanied me along, late at night, from the social networks of the web to the kinship networks of the Dutch Art Institute at the Sanctuary of Lluc.

Wild summit

On awakening, the light lit the curtain of the spectacular mountains that surrounded us, whose sinuous silhouettes I had only glimpsed from the taxi the night before. Nestled in the landscape of the Serra de Tramuntana, the Sanctuary of Lluc is an impressive religious complex and place of pilgrimage that attracts thousands of faithful and curious tourists who visit the monastery every year, as well as hikers and cyclists exploring its surroundings. And this year, it is the location of the first 'post-pandemic' in-person (with mask) COOP SUMMIT, the annual multi-form event based on the issues addressed by the five groups that make up the DAI's body of studies/curricula, marking the end of one year and the beginning of a new one.

We are the village

Engaging with the locals is not an option because we are the village with our farmaciola, the town council, the bakery, the school, the church, and the temporary users of this site along with other strangers we share the building with. During one of the communal lunches sitting on the rocks, DAI’s director Gabriëlle Schleijpen - mind, body and soul of this organic and human structure carefully built each time with her fabulous and experienced team, told me that the idea is to return to the island, and that this trip is also about establishing/finding connections with the place, to be used for a next encounter.

Feminist pedagogy

For those who are not familiar with it, the DAI is an Arnhem-registered ArtEZ University master's degree programme that for some years now has been opting for mobility, becoming a roaming academy moving from one place to another on a (near) monthly basis. Apart from the more obvious ecological criticism, both environmental and individual, that could be leveled at the school for choosing to be mobile (and taking flights), what we are interested in is what it produces through its methodology. And the new students seem to know it. Asking those present for the introductory week what they expected from the DAI, the answers were: “brain food”, “non centered ego practice/career/project”, “experimenting with something I never did before that is not my thing but I could try it”,”no competition”, “feminist approach”, “feeling that I’m part of something special”, “being with others because the university gives you the infrastructure, but then you don’t need to engage with it”... through experimental theory courses, practical investigations, and transdisciplinary assemblies with the most intrepid institutions, artists, and theorists engaged with anti-racist, decolonial and ecofeminist thought and action. DAI provides all of that.

Undercommons

Although it possesses the minimum characteristics of a university by ensuring that students are accredited for their studies, the DAI practices what Stefano Harney and Fred Moten call the 'undercommons' by planning radical forms of sociality and collectivity. In a world where even the common seems to be absorbed by dominant politics, starting with the case study of the neoliberalisation of the university institution, The Undercommons. Fugitive Planning and Black Study’s authors propose an alternative to traditional notions of critique and resistance. In other words, a dislocated, underground and fugitive way of being in the world in common, a "continuous experiment" that lives in the "dissonance" between "the most adventurous aesthetics" that must be practiced together, in "coalition". In short, a way that seems to permeate study groups as much as it does public presentation.

Tuesday 5th  

The day program starts with Roving Assemblage: Anything Ghosts by Curating Positions: Bodies and Antibodies in Cinema study group (tutored by Marwa Arsanios, Leon Filter and Leire Vergara in partnership with Bulgeoa z/b Bilbao), which reflects on the way cinema has represented the body, mainly one to the detriment of other voiceless presences. While entering the canopy, the students distribute a printed image that serves to reach one of the four sub groups: protest (centered on the dynamics of time and disappearance embodied by the figure of the very sad llorona), parade (focusing on how to disguise, influence and make ourselves part of an anti-system), guided tour (that leads to the discovery of a place through instructions to be discovered collectively), ritual (which materializes through the sharing of objects). During the walk, the groups overlap, creating continuous disharmonic correspondences. The coexistence of other bodies distracts attention from the individual experience of reacting to the different stimuli and situations offered by the emergence of elements that escape the first glance or first listening. With the involvement of artists such as Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz, Kodwo Eshun and Louis Henderson, who throughout the year have contributed to investigating, among other things, the practices of resistance in black and queer culture archives, one of the possible readings of this coop revolves around the function of sound in cinema and its relationship to subcultures–sound interrupts the linearity of the main story as black diasporas challenge identity hegemony. 

At the end of the performative walking an echo reverberated into me and brought me to the next co-op.

The echo waves. After music, walking and listening to a story about Damascus and others linked to water, we were transported to a spot immersed in nature where the sound has reached the point of maximum rarefaction. It is a radio program with a delay effect. The radio programme is the main medium of the COOP ReSituating and ReCalibrating Hostipitality study group entitled HOS(TI)PITALITY WAVE (held by Akinbode Akinbiyi and Kamila Metwaly for SAVVY Contemporary). Emphasizing the ambiguous relationship between host and guest since one can be a guest or a parasite, or both, this coop asks us how to rethink the notion of hospitality today, and what our relationship with other cultures would look like. And radio was chosen for its participatory formats, and for the barriers broken between the acts of transmission and reception. Similar to Harney and Morton who, with undercommons, reject the idea that music only begins the moment the musician picks up the instrument and insist on the need to listen to the noise that is there, that we are already producing, to embrace that noise and to refuse the offers we receive to turn it into music. Another mode of hospitality investigated during the year is Tina Campt's Listening to Images proposal on the intersection of hospitality with the visual and sound domains.

The first day ends with a multimedia performance of a swimming pool. COOP study group On Tradition - Future Ancestors: let rhythm be your guiding light presents I Wish I Were in the Pool With You Right Now (tutored by Snejanka Mihaylova and Rory Pilgrim for If I Can't Dance I Don't Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution), asking how we can relate to tradition and imagine ourselves as future ancestors to realize a possible future despite the times we live in. It does so by using water, a complex platform for life forms and knowledge processes, as a means of critically rethinking tradition from a deep ecological perspective. The fluidity of water suggests the possibility of reshaping our understanding of static (historical) identities and regenerating together.

The same night I felt that the multiple experiences were vanishing, delved into one another, and transforming into something else.

Wednesday 6th

The Canopy is the starting point also for the COOP study group Reframing Climate Colonialism: Pleasuring the Radical Imagination titled withering worms wander, wording worlding warning, weather winds wait (Ama Josephine Budge, Clementine Edwards, Ying Que, CJC Working Group for Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons). The whole work of the group starts with the analysis of the document ClimateJusticeCode, which was created to think about the relationship between cultural spaces and the crisis of the environment, as well as its relation to other issues such as colonialism, patriarchy and the relationship amongst different cultures. The result is an extraordinary work in symbiosis and dialogue with the host environment.  A cynical game of exclusion, musical chairs, a station focusing on ways of organizing in times when there are fewer resources than expected, slowly directs us all to the botanical garden of the sanctuary and to the different stations that investigate different perspectives criticizing the exploitation and destruction brought about by climate colonialism: among others, eye-catching spicy flavoured candies or sensual berries that come our way (and not vice versa); the land that is surprisingly hostile to us; the workshop on the safety nets built by the institution, but also those built in turn by the student body; storytelling and self-fiction writing workshop to think about messages that are reproduced from generation to generation; handcraft as a pre-capitalist practice not bound by the logic of the current system. This work, according to Haraway, tackles the complex game of how to live well (and die well) in coexistence with a planet that is going to shit and requires multiple symbioses between the different species that inhabit it, a mutual interdependence that it outlines as a path to follow, full of complicities but not exempt from conflicts.

The summit ends with the study group COOP CHUSMA 2.0: A Coalition of Gossips with PR৲NSE of the WH❀❀LE (tutored by Julia Morandeira Arrizabalaga, Francesc Ruiz, iLiana Fokianaki for State of Concept), which during the year investigated the re-appropriation of the insult - chusma, or other derogatory terms, gossip, as queer resistance. This co-op constitutes a kind of house of chusma to make kin, and to not die away. In the culture of the ball, houses were a substitute for family, at a time when being black, hispanic, homosexual or transgender meant being left to one's own devices. In Witches, Witch-hunting and Women that, gossips were a woman’s network of support. Esteban and Federici are brought together to imagine life otherwise: through an intersectional feminist collective practice.

Love is the message

COOP Summit doesn’t have a binary outcome (passed or failed).The gentle atmosphere generated by DAI’s community does not allow judgment but only generous horizontal sharing and live experimentation with others without importance given to who they are or whether they are students, artists, theoreticians, team, etc. Kinship with the material world and alliances with black and queer communities seem to be recurrent in this year’s journey - condensed in two days, marked by the pandemic. If I close my eyes I can see and hear the images of the different locations where the groups guided us, and relive them: a slow walk with various presences, a multi-sound delayed radio program, a fresh and wet performance, an unexpected, multi-layered, and amazing plant opera, a theatrical show with weird and eccentric creatures on the rocks dissolving themselves into a larger collective, loud and joyful, dancing all together... “Oh I... I want to be with you everywhere (Wanna be with you everywhere)”.