2023 COOP SUMMIT: six study groups forge their research into an assemblage of happenings in Nida
The Dutch Art Institute (DAI) brings students, tutors and facilitators together to study at the intersection of art and theory. Through performance, making, reading, writing, voicing, listening, organising, curating and conviviality we try to learn how we can live and work together without reproducing violences of the past and the present.
Formal art education promises to emancipate the meritorious individual, but its neo-liberal and technocratic infrastructures are set to protect the privileges conditional for becoming "successful" in an unjust world. Without owning the means that could potentially enable us to fully escape this predicament, the DAI continues to work both under and on the radar, stretching the system's boundaries:
- as Roaming Academy: wandering school without walls, floor or roof ~ temporarily rooting there, where we are generously invited to study and share, where we are welcomed as friends, as kin.
- as COOP convenor: we acknowledge that the truly transformative work in art education is done outside of the University; since many years we have therefore been inviting and commissioning non-academic art institutions and collectives which we admire for their thoughtful ethics, resilient self-imagination, poetic politics, political poetics and interdependent acting in the world, to curate and guide transdisciplinary, collaborative research trajectories. COOP study groups are bringing makers & thinkers, artists, organizers, writers and curators together around pertinent questions.
Without forcing them to give up on any idiosyncrasies, we asked all the brilliant bodies and souls that chose to inhabit DAI 2022-2023, to become more than the sum of their parts, to join forces within that tough process called COOPeration.
COOP SUMMIT 2023: the publicly presented outcome of the year-long enquiry by 6 study groups positioned at the heart of the DAI’s curriculum. June 16 & 17 upcoming, they will forge their findings in an assemblage of happenings.
PRESENTATIONS FRIDAY 16 JUNE (in order of appearance):
*COOP study group 2022-2023 Long Time No See: Forming a new art economy of the commons presents
Cure for the Itch
and invites you to multi-station crossings in a space of fracture and dissonance informed by a collaborative study on play and economics; their failures embraced while reflecting on (im)possibilities of gathering, on seeking answers in the endless forest.
*COOP study group UNRAVELING THE (UNDER-)DEVELOPMENT COMPLEX presents
Li Li Ko Ko Fəstival of 100 Centers
and questions stereotypes of what is celebratory, normal or deviant, comforting or threatening, developed or underdeveloped and welcomes you to an aggregated procession, substituting the paralysis of imaginations with prefigurative echoes of the societies we want to cultivate.
*COOP study group FOREST AS IMAGE AND INFRASTRUCTURE Exploited, Assembled, Constructed, Protected, Cared for – Projections, Relations, Definitions – Forest Operational Images presents
COULD A SOUND PERSIST - UNDER SANDS - UNSEEN?
and invites you to a multimedia performance/rehearsal: a looped window of a secret forest and an invitation to bifurcate and become roots through whispers and prophetic sounds as we draw on dust with our pointed tails.
PRESENTATIONS SATURDAY 17 JUNE (in order of appearance):
*COOP study group On Tradition - Future Ancestors 3: The Mother, The Archival and The Symbolic Order presents
My mother composed me as I now compose her
and summons an immersive space of painted scores, of movement as language and of symbols upended and renewed; brining notations and rhythms of the vast multiplicitous ways we are part of families.
*COOP study group Curating Positions: A cut through the screen presents
Evergreening the Cut [towards and beyond film's photosynthesis]
and invites you to a speculative conference built on interrupted film screenings, encouraging a celebration of imperfections and the recognition of the stories embedded in objects, more-than-human agents and their relations.
* COOP study group Publishing Practices: Textauralities, Oralitures, Corpoliteracies presents
NIGHTTIME SCREAMING/DAYTIME WHISPERING ~ A Creational Story in Four Acts
a play (combining verbal and non-verbal languages enacted on a tower, seen as a vertical mirage and an antenna of tumultuous timelines unfolding) which invites you to explore the tower’s creation myths and the notion of publishing.
ROAMING ACADEMY ON THE CURONIAN SPIT
In the academic year 2022-2023, the 6 COOP study groups have assembled in St.Erme (France), Arnhem (Netherlands), Santa Marina Salina (Italy) and Nida (Lithuania), during each of our regular DAI Confluences. To share research, to probe and to debate what is (not) to be done in order to develop a group work that honours the input and specificity of participants, places and public spaces.
For COOP SUMMIT 2023 we return to Neringa, where our activities will be hosted by Nida Art Colony of the Vilnius Academy of Arts (NAC VAA), Nida's Community House and the extraordinary dunes and forests of the Curonian Spit, at 15 minutes distance of the eerie Russian border.
Should you happen to be around in Lithuania, we will be absolutely thrilled, it goes without words, to welcome you in our midst!
To those mourning that they will not be able to join us, we are delighted to convey that Tautvydas Urbelis, will attend the 2 day-long gathering and write a meditation, later to be published on our website.
TIME LINE ~ please return here for updates!
Friday, June 16
15:00 - 16:30 ~ Cure for the Itch
Location: Parking Lot – Taikos 41, 55.301203, 20.987084
17:00 – 18:30 ~ Li Li Ko Ko Fəstival of 100 Centers
Multiple departure locations near the Nida beachside: 55°18'09.7"N 20°58'33.5"E / 55°18'05.6"N 20°58'41.5"E / 55°18'03.7"N 20°58'46.9"E
19:15 - 20:30 ~ COULD A SOUND PERSIST - UNDER SANDS - UNSEEN?
Starting location: Parking Lot next to Football Court at Neringa Forest, 55.312868, 20.990414
21:30 - 23:00 ~ DINNER prepared by Marla Nábožna, Alicja Jurasińska (Soma Food Kitchen) & Tomek Pawłowski-Jarmołajew.
Location: Griuvėsiai, Nidos-Smiltynės pl. 9, 93125 Nida
Saturday, June 17
15:00 - 16:00 ~ My mother composed me as I now compose her
Location: Nida Art Colony (NAC VAA), E. A. Jonušo g. 3, 93127 Nida
17:00 – 19:00 ~ Evergreening the Cut [towards and beyond film's photosynthesis]
Location: Nida's Community House, Taikos g. 17, 93123 Nida
20:00 - 21:30 ~ DINNER prepared by Marla Nábožna, Alicja Jurasińska (Soma Food Kitchen) & Tomek Pawłowski-Jarmołajew.
Location: Nida Art Colony (NAC VAA), E. A. Jonušo g. 3, 93127 Nida
22:30 - 23:30 ~ NIGHTTIME SCREAMING/DAYTIME WHISPERING ~ A Creational Story in Four Acts
Location: Nida Art Colony (NAC VAA), E. A. Jonušo g. 3, 93127 Nida
DINNER INVITATION
You are welcome to join us for our communal vegetarian dinners prepared by our precious chefs Marla Nábožna, Alicja Jurasińska (Soma Food Kitchen) & Tomek Pawłowski-Jarmołajew.
RESERVE your seat with Kaste Šeškevičiūte till June 15th.
Payment of 10 euro per seat per day to take place on location by cash (kindly asked to provide the exact amount).
DAI Crew, making it all possible:
For PRESS & SOCIAL MEDIA acquires: COOP's Education Team Leader Nikos Doulos (present on the ground).
Production leader facilities | technical support: Peter Sattler (present on the ground), assisted by Marika Vanderkraats (present on the ground).
Communication design: Lauren Alexander (remote) & Hanna Rullmann (remote).
Photo documentation: Baha Görkem Yalım (present on the ground).
Hospitality & logistics: Kastė Šeškevičiūte (present on the ground) & Jacq van der Spek (remote) assisted by Vinita Gatne (remote) and Hemminkways (remote).
Framework and partnerships: artistic director and head of program Gabriëlle Schleijpen (present on the ground), assisted by bookkeeper Corine van der Wal (remote).
DAI wishes to express its huge gratitude to Egija Inzule, the visionary director of NAC, as well as to NAC's staff ~ without their committed assistance we would be nowhere. We are furthermore honoured by the hospitality of the Vilnius Academy of the Arts and of all other hosting partner organisations in Nida.
