COOP ~ The Word and the Wound from Day to Day
Seminar 3: 24 - 26 April 2024
Dear All, in our gathering we will make time for thinking about the summit. We are aiming to formulate a proposal at the end of our working sessions that gives us some guidance for the next few months. We will also think alongside the potentiality of the daily practice within the context of the final presentation, productive contradictions and artistic positions, how the research of the group relates to the final outcome. Face to face meetings with Snejanka and Frederique are scheduled (including but not limited to midterm evaluations) and presentations of creative assignments that are emerging from our conversation on the summit are planned. Looking forward to meeting you in Essaouira and to continuing our work! Frederique and Snejanka
Wednesday 24 April
10.00-11:00 Warm up vocal training
11:15- 13:00 Thinking-in-assembly: summit
Lunch Break
14:00 - 17:00 Thinking-in-assembly: location
Dinner break
Evening program curated by the group: listening, reading, exchange of sources.
There is also an invitation from Assembling Land to join them in the evening for a Palestine teach-out: What is the Future of Art?
Thursday 25 April
10.00- 13:00 Time allocated for assignment, face to face & midterm evaluation meetings
Lunch Break
14:00 - 17:00 Time allocated for assignment, face to face & midterm evaluation meetings
Dinner break
Evening program curated by the group: listening, reading, exchange of sources
Friday 26 April
10.00-11:00 Warm up training
11:15- 13:00 Thinking-in-assembly: proposal for summit
Lunch Break
14:00 - 17:00 Presentations
Dinner break
Evening
Feedback and planning for the next session
Seminar 2: 5 - 8 March 2024
In our second gathering we will make time for voice. The voice, both as practice of singing individually and in a group, but as well as pre-given connection and correlation to be discovered, wondered, accepted, shared or kept secret. In our first gathering, we made the discovery of how listening can be subtle and at the same time a very precise bond, and how practicing attention as a simple exercise can elevate the conversation and bring to the surface complexities that go beyond rationalization. We also discovered the pleasure of sharing spontaneous gestures like arranging the space, being bodies in the space while doing simple exercises like vocalization together, or sharing words and intentions and creating a social choreography. All this we aim to continue doing in our next gathering, while encouraging your participation and propositions. Listening will remain the main bonding among our diverse and irreducible perspectives.
Moved by the experience of our first gathering, we felt that inviting Lisa Montan would resonate with your practices and the way we’ve been working together as a group. Lisa is a film composer with versatile artistic sensibilities, and proposes to conduct a workshop called Singing for peace, a practice (and upcoming book) she is currently working on while elaborating and collecting the vivid testimony of her own singing tutor and asking questions about listening, voice, preservation, and future. During the two day workshop, Lisa will share with us her recent discoveries in forms of practical exercises in singing.
Face to face meetings with Snejanka and Frederique are scheduled for the third day. Presentations in which we share our in-between practice and reserve time for our plan for the coming period are scheduled for the fourth day. We are also keeping in mind our desire to travel around the area.
5th March 2024
10.00-10.10 Introduction by Snejanka and Frederique of Lisa Monten
10.10-13:00 Singing for peace, workshop by Lisa Montan
Lunch Break
14:00 - 17:00 Singing for peace, workshop by Lisa Montan
Dinner break
Screening of Eyal Sivan’s IZKOR, slaves of memory 1990. After the invitation of COOP Curating Positions.
6th March 2024
10.00- 13:00 Singing for peace, workshop by Lisa Montan
Lunch Break
14:00 - 17:00 Singing for peace, workshop by Lisa Montan
Dinner break
Evening
Our evening continues with group listening sessions and communal sharing of sources.
7th March 2024
10.00- 13:00 Time allocated for assignment & face to face meetings
Lunch Break
14:00 - 17:00 Time allocated for assignment & face to face meetings
Evening
Our evening continues with group listening sessions and communal sharing of sources.
8th March 2024
10.00- 13:00 Presentations
Lunch Break
14:00 - 16:00 Presentations
16:00- 17:00 Feedback and planning for the next session
Dinner break
More information for our guest can be found in her biography on the website
https://dutchartinstitute.eu/page/21334/lisa-montan.
Looking forward to meeting you!
Frederique and Snejanka
Seminar 1: 23 - 26 January 2024
In our first gathering we will make time for both individual and collective tasks from which we hope to form a concrete idea about how we want to approach our working together during the year. We will start the study group with a day dedicated to presenting our practices to each other, so we get to know (aspects of) each other’s work. We will continue with a thinking-in-assembly where we will practice both thinking and listening. This is our group laboratory for sharing inspirations, sources and extending our own cultural references based on the background of personal experiences. We will take time during the week also to get to know the place we are hosted in, the landscape and the cultural complexities that inform the hosting institution. Also face to face meetings are going to be scheduled with both Snejanka and Frederique.
* presenting practices- How the form of ‘work’ can be viewed in connection to what we do in our daily life. What is an artistic practice? How actually do we initiate a process of creation? Where do we find the cracks of pleasure, salvation, and relief in the invisible and complex textures of our practice? How do we form a practice, and how are we formed by practice also looking at our daily life?
(The World/The Work)
* thinking-in-assembly- is a training that does not simply mean an exercise of different subjects expressing their thoughts. Thinking-in-assembly is a psycho-physical process. It begins from an inner and rather individual impulse, and cannot be simply identified with thoughts. Thought here must be conceived entirely in relation to listening to another “in the flesh.” In thinking-in-assembly we do not have a discourse; the process is one of a search for words. This search is made up of gaps, silences, of everything that lies submerged in the body. All our body is to be a part of thinking. In this process, one has to make the tools you need; you do not use tools that are already available. The performative aspect of thinking emerges when the voice operates as a link between different spheres in the formation of the self. The performative aspect of thinking does not lie in performing in front of an audience, or in our being a thinking subject, or in speaking out loud, or in drawing out the formation of thoughts that I am voicing – this is a very narrow spectacularization of theoretical labor. The performative rather occurs when I am listening, and in my recognition that in the process of listening a transformative process takes place within me. “The task of the voice is therefore to be a pathway, or better, a pivotal joint between body and world,” as Adraina Cavarero[1] writes in For More Than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression. And from all this labor of listening, another way of thinking emerges, and, even more importantly, another way of practicing it.
* Each of our gatherings is thematic and reflects both words? on the title of our study group, extending synonymously from the original title and on different methodologies of thinking that sees relationship between thinking, listening, performance and body.
Themes can grow organically from the process of thinking-in-assembly itself.
The first theme we suggest is, mirroring the notion of “wound “, the dignity of pain. We are proposing as initial material to begin our conversation a short biographical account on practice written by Agota Kristof, The Illiterate[2]. (you will find in attach)
* Our thinking-in assembly is not necessarily to be viewed as a theoretical seminar. All forms of responses are valid, and we do not concentrate on discourse and literacy even when the practice of learning is put at the center. We are exercising attention, listening, and learning in a collective environment and all forms of linguistic and anti-linguistic approaches are welcomed.
Programme
Tuesday 23 January
10.30-11.00 Introduction by Snejanka and Frederique
11.00-13:00 Presentations
Lunch Break
14:00 - 17:00 Presentations
Dinner break
In the evening we continue with presentations if needed, and with a more informal gathering where we reflect on the day and put some basics for the work next day.
Wednesday 24 January
10.30- 13:00 Thinking-in-assembly#1
Lunch Break
14:00 - 17:00 Thinking-in-assembly#2- a walk
Dinner break
Evening
Listening to music (25’)
Thursday 25 January
10.30- 13:00 Time allocated for assignment & face to face meetings
Lunch Break
14:00 - 17:00 Presentations
Dinner break
Evening
Listening to music (25’) and time allocated for assignment
Friday 26 January
10.30- 13:00 Presentations
Lunch Break
14:00 - 16:00 Presentations
16:00- 17:00 Feedback and planning for the next session
Dinner break
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[1] Adriana Cavarero, For More Than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression, trans. Paul A. Kottman (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005).
[2] Kristof Agota, The Illiterate (click to access the document)