2008-2009 The Office of Lost Gestures
In the academic year 2008-2009, If I Can’t Dance... has initiated, together with eleven art students of the Dutch Art Institute, The Office of Lost Gestures, a 7-month programme in which artists, theorists and curators meet, work and think together on the topic of ‘gesture’ and ‘masquerade’. Collaborating with the students of the MA Visual Arts in Dublin, the project with culminate in a 10-day performative art exhibition in the LAB, a contemporary art space in Dublin. In Dublin, the interventions of The Office of Lost Gestures run parallel with If I Can’t Dance...’s presentation of episode 3 of Masquerade in Project Art Centre.
Departing from Giorgio Agamben’s essay ‘On Gesture’, the students will look at gesture as an alternative way of understanding the way we produce, present and act in this world. According to Agamben, by the end of the nineteenth century, Western bourgeoisie had definitely lost its gestures and today therefore we have become obsessed by them. Exploring this obsession together with artists and thinkers of If I Can’t Dance... the students study the concept from different angles. The mask and the act of ‘masquerading’, a perpetual process of covering and recovering the self, has thus been of special interest, since it points to the performative, gestural dimension of our lives, to the artfulness of the everyday.
In seven sessions The Office of Lost Gestures will look at the potency of gesture through examining concepts such as archive, autobiography, camp, conversation, dancing and the styling of the self. Departing from gesture – and not from image, or representation – there has been a special interest in thinking about art and exhibitions as open-ended and in perpetual progress, not as fixed ends, but as moments of temporary arrest. Indeed, as Agamben says, “what characterizes gesture is that in it nothing is being produced or acted, but rather something is being endured and supported.” It is in this spirit that the students will work in the LAB art space in Dublin, not freezing their artistic practices but regarding them as “the prologue or the moulds for other absent works, representing only sketches or death masks”, as Agamben puts it.
The tutors in the programme are Frederique Bergholtz, Francesco Bernardelli, Rick Dolphijn, Annie Fletcher, Flora Lysen, Wendelien van Oldenborgh, Sarah Pierce, Dieter Roelstraete, Stefanie Seibold, Iris van der Tuin and Marta Zarzycka. The project is co-ordinated by Joris Lindhout.
The students are Buba Cvoric, Teresa Maria Diaz Nerio, Tvika Gutter, Rana Hamadeh, Seda Manavoglu, Barbara Philipp, Eva Schippers, James Skunca, Marina Tomic, Veridiana Zurita and Yen Yitzu.