Session 6: April 29 & 30, 2016

Friday April 29

Sarah Pierce will meet with participants for one-to-one meetings beginning at 9:30 for 30 minute slots through the day until dinner, with a break for one hour at lunch. When not in other meetings there will be a designated work room on Floor 1 for students to meet, spread out materials, hold conversations, and process ideas face-to-face. 

Saturday April 30

We will begin at 10:00 and work until dinner, with a one hour break for lunch. The entire day is dedicated to our research for “I left my PDF in Bandung”. Everyone should come prepared to share and work on a practical level. 

10:00 -11:00 Group meetings

11:00-13:00 Report back

13:00-14:00 Lunch

14:00 – 17:00 Practicalities

Session 5: March 18 & 19, 2016

The Saturday session shall consist of four parts. It will begin with a group reading of Georg Simmel’s “The Stranger”, followed by the last research presentations (Nika Timashkova, Flora Woudstra and Uri Ruff). After which we will be sharing the first and second directives, and laying the ground for our upcoming group project.

Session 4: February 12 & 13, 2016

The February 2016 gatherings of Location Location Location will hinge on group research, commencing on Friday with a return visit to the Bronbeek Museum to meet with curator Hans van den Asker. This visit is part of our lateral research into Arnhem as a location, conducted by students Mirjam Linschooten and Joost Mellink. Friday afternoon will involve one-to-one meetings with Sarah Pierce and Tirdad Zolghadr as per the circulated schedule. On Saturday, a morning reading group on The Stranger by Georg Simmel will be followed after lunch with presentations by students Sonia Kazovsky, Flora Woudstra and Despina Sevasti. The Stranger (1908) is a short essay by Georg Simmel that introduces a notion of the stranger as a sociological category. Unlike the outsider who has no relation to a group or the wanderer who comes today and leaves tomorrow, the stranger “comes today and stays tomorrow.” In the context of today’s geopolitics, Simmel’s essay presents the difficulty of what he terms, “social distance” — where, despite proximity and nearness, the stranger is perceived as being ‘in’ but not ‘of’ the group. The day will conclude after dinner with an evening meeting for all participants to discuss our Sonsbeek contribution and “Wayne’s Proposal.” Alongside the Simmel essay, a second reading is the a summary of C.H. van Winkel’s PhD Thesis “During the Exhibition the Gallery Will be Closed” (University of Amsterdam 2012)

Session 3: January 8 & 9, 2016

In this month’ seminar we are meeting as a group to share the research groups’ materials to date, decompress as a group post-Indonesia, and set out a course for many adventures for the remainder of the year.

Session 1: October 16 & 17, 2015

Our first two-day meeting will introduce the participants to the methods and the thematic focus of Location Location Location, and to the working parameters of our trip to Jakarta and Bandung. In practical terms, the session on Friday the 16^th will involve a presentation by Tirdad, followed by a group discussion. Since Friday will offer only limited time to be together as a group, this discussion will continue on Saturday the 17^th. (Both the morning and afternoon sessions on the 17^th will be devoted to teasing out the motivations, premise and pursuit of Location Location Location as a focus of group research.)

In order to explore “location” as a premise, comparisons will be drawn to “site”, “plot” and other topographic categories. The aim is to test the potentials of location as a productive working premise within the field of contemporary art, within the challenging context of “Third World” geopolitics, as well as within the setting of an academic outing to Southeast Asia. One central working hypothesis here is that there are specific orthodoxies currently governing the field of contemporary art. And that the notion of location can not only help recognize these orthodoxies as such, but may even point to new directions. A second working hypothesis is that focusing on how locations are actually proactively produced – and not merely visited or used – whether in terms of a seminar context or as a touristic attraction – can help us make the most of our collective expedition coming November.  

Throughout the year, the group will also be implementing several practical “directives” as proposed by Sarah and myself, the first of which we will perform on 16 October 2015, Day One, Arnhem. These short exercises will constitute a key component of our module’s approach to knowledge production as a way of knowing where location concedes to a geographic zone. We will pursue the directives in Arnhem, Jakarta, Bandung and beyond (individually between sessions). The conversations that are to unfold in smaller groups over Friday October 16 will be structured by these directives, which will be announced during our first meeting.

The evening of Friday October 16 will feature a screening of one of two cinematic options, to be discussed and determined together with the group.

By way of preparation, please read the following essays by Friday, October 16

• Vijay Prashad, “Introduction”, in Darker Nations, University of California Press 2007

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B7trXEFcZimVSUZuOXhFYjdMZHc/edit

• Vijay Prashad, “Bandung: the 1955 Afro-Asian Conference”, in Darker Nations, op. cit.
• T. Zolghadr, “Location, Location, Location”, in WdW Review 2014

http://wdwreview.org/desks/location-location-location/

• Time permitting, please also read Robin Mackay, “The Barker Topos”, in When Site Lost the Plot, ed. R. Mackay, Urbanomic 2015