2024 COOP SUMMIT: five study groups forge their collaborative research into an assemblage of public happenings in Essaouira
Sea urchins exist in oceans all over the world, usually along coastlines. They have been around for at least 488 million years; 117 million year old fossils have been found in Morocco's Atlas Mountains. Sea urchins have no eyes. Yet they detect light, chemical changes in the water, and other creatures nearby. Each of their pointy spines acts as a sensual receptor splayed out in all directions of the sun. You might think that the sea urchin remains in one place all the time, but this is one of nature’s deceptions. Sea urchins move on their hundreds of tubal feet, which stick to rocks and sand. Those feet provide stability and control. As they progress, their mouth (on the underbelly) collects food off the surfaces they pass. Aristotle described the jaw apparatus of the sea urchin as resembling a “lantern.” Scientists hundreds of years later adopted the term “Aristotle’s lantern” as the official name for the sea urchin’s mouthpiece, and the name has stuck until now. Fishermen in Essaouira's port cherish the culinary critter with the mighty mouth for its market value: prickly gold. But the pivotal impact of Aristotle's lantern on the marine ecosystem is priceless: sea urchins feed on dead organisms and help to recycle materials into usable energy for other organisms.*
DAI returns to oceanic Essaouira and re-connects with echinoderms and all other living creatures (including the humans of all creeds) that inhabit the shores and streets of this affable, amazing town of winds, smells, colors and chimes of freedom flashing within its pluriverse of sounds and voices, musics and memories.
Here DAI's COOP's annual 'grand finale' - a thoughtful intra-action between students, tutors, guests, and the public will be performed against the mournful backdrop of our world on fire.
At the DAI we try to learn how we can live and work together without reproducing violences of past and present. We do this by means of performance, making, reading, writing, voicing, listening, organising, curating and conviviality.
We do this as a Roaming Academy: temporarily rooting there, where we are welcomed as friends by friends.
We do this also as a COOP convenor: acknowledging since many years that a lot of truly transformative work in art education is done outside the confinement of the university, we invite and commission non-academic art institutions and collectives (admired 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 or, in short, COOPs .
COOPs bring makers and thinkers, artists, organizers, writers and curators together around pertinent questions. During the academic year 2023-2024 the COOPs convened in St.Erme (France), Nida (Lithuania), Essaouira (Morocco) and Middelburg (Netherlands).
And so now we are back in Essaouira, where our public activities will be hosted by the Association Essaouira Mogador, branching out to the streets of the Medina and the extraordinary dunes of re-forestation land in proximity.
SHOULD YOU HAPPEN TO BE AROUND,
DAI & ASSOCIATION ESSAOUIRA MOGADOR WARMLY INVITE YOU TO JOIN US FOR
COOP SUMMIT 2024
~ our three-day assemblage of happenings on 5, 6 and 7 September
To all of you that will not be able to join us, we are delighted to convey that Giulia Crispiani, Fatima-Zahra Lakrissa, Harun Morisson and Baha Görkem Yalım will attend the summit to report on their findings ~ all to be published on our website sooner or later.
PROGRAM THURSDAY 5 SEPTEMBER :
*COOP study group The Word and the Wound presents
…And Then I Opened My Mouth
and invites you to a collective and muscle-bound stretching of voice, for mouth and ears: a mouth made of many mouths and multiple singular ears in a continuous dialogue of practiced rituals.
PROGRAM FRIDAY 6 SEPTEMBER (two presentations-in order of appearance):
*COOP study group Assembling Land: Rehearsals towards Place-making presents
ASSEMBLING LAND
and invites you on a collaborative rehearsal of creative interpretations, transforming text material on the topics of housing, water, institutioning, and land into engaging experiences; a multi-weaving gathering centred around a publishing station, celebrating the bonds and shared struggles, encapsulating the spirit of solidarity and resistance.
*COOP study group Curating Positions: Stream of consciousness: between collective filmmaking and anarchist thought presents
PRU-DONCE: Cinema on the Radio
and invites you to an anarchic cine concert relating otherwise: a conscious move against the frequencies of recurring images and an intergalactic stream of consciousness leaked in emails, bingeing embroiderers writing letters, into scripts, into weaves, into a cine-concert-distinctive-radio-transmission like no other…
*COOP study group FOREST IS LONG-TERM presents
Moving with the Dunes
and invites you on a sonically infused journey beyond Essaouira, to a place where histories of trade, occupation, transportation, and migration between The Baltic and Mediterranean Seas converge.
Neringa Forest Architecture
* COOP study group Choreopoethics: undisciplined corporeal publishing and choreographic planning presents
Meta/Mega TRANS - Modes of Narration
and invites you on a choreography of a multiplicity of crossings where memories, knowledge, and sensations are interlacing and forming substantial and complex grounds to resist the homogenizing force of oppressive politics; an inquiry into the opacity of the creation of collectivity.
TIME LINE & LOCATIONS ~ please return here for updates!
Thursday, September 5
18:00 - 19:00 ~ DINNER prepared by Myriam Taouriri (KOOZINA Garden)
Location: KOOZINA Garden, 44000, Essaouira 44000, Morocco
19:30 - 21:30 ~ …And Then I Opened My Mouth
Location: Dar Souiri ~ Association Essaouira Mogador, 10, avenue du Caire, Essaouira
Friday, September 6
16:00 - 18:30 ~ Assembling Land: Rehearsals towards Place-making
Starting Location: Dar Souiri ~ Association Essaouira Mogador, 10, avenue du Caire, Essaouira
18:30 - 20:00 ~ DINNER prepared by Myriam Taouriri (KOOZINA Garden)
Location: KOOZINA Garden, 44000, Essaouira 44000, Morocco
20:30 – 22:30 ~ PRU-DONCE: Cinema on the Radio
Location: Dar Souiri ~ Association Essaouira Mogador, 10, avenue du Caire, Essaouira
Saturday, September 7
16:00 - 18:30 ~ Moving with the Dunes
Starting Location: Dar Souiri ~ Association Essaouira Mogador, 10, avenue du Caire, Essaouira
18:30 - 20:00 ~ DINNER prepared by Myriam Taouriri (KOOZINA Garden)
Location: KOOZINA Garden, 44000, Essaouira 44000, Morocco
20:30 – 22:30 ~ Meta/Mega TRANS - Modes of Narration
Location: Dar Souiri ~ Association Essaouira Mogador, 10, avenue du Caire, Essaouira
DINNER INVITATION
External visitors of COOP SUMMIT 2024 are welcome to join us for our communal dinners at KOOZINA GARDEN prepared by our precious chef Myriam Taouriri and her team.
RESERVE your seat with Kaste Šeškevičiūte till August 4th.
Payment of 100 Dirham 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).
Communication design: Lauren Alexander (remote) & Hanna Rullmann (remote).
Hospitality & logistics: Kastė Šeškevičiūte (present on the ground) & Jacq van der Spek (remote) assisted by Hemminkways (remote).
Framework and partnerships: artistic director and head of program Gabriëlle Schleijpen (present on the ground).
See also: crew
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS:
DAI wishes to express its huge gratitude to Mrs.Kaoutar Chakir of Cultural Centre Dar Souiri |Association Essaouira Mogador, under the protection of Mr. André Azoulay, to whom we extend our most heartfelt appreciation, as well as to Mrs.Ghita Rabouli of House of Memory Bayt Dakira. We are furthermore honoured by the invaluable support of Mrs. Hayat Ennachiri and Mr. Jean Gabriel Nucci and his wife Christine, of Ryad Watier. Last but not least we wish to thank Hosseini and his brilliant family, activists and hosts of Café Essaouira. The love for and commitment to "all things Essaouira" of our local friends has profoundly inspired all of our explorations.
* a compilation based on information found on the internet.