Becoming More 20 May: "Future Caucus" - Saturday 20 May
Becoming More 20 May: "Future Caucus" Saturday 20 May
Location: Auditorium
Conveners: Eric de Bruyn and Sven Lütticken
Speakers: Diedrich Diederichsen, Kodwo Eshun, Maurizio Lazzarato, Doreen Mende, Kerstin Stakemeier, Marina Vishmidt, McKenzie Wark.
Future Caucus
Not too long ago, Fredric Jameson’s phrase that “it has become easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” was widely quoted and taken as proof of a decline—or indeed collapse—of the utopian imagination, which Jameson himself has analysed so compellingly in its literary (science-fiction) manifestations. Today, there is an abundance of neofuturisms, futurologies, speculative philosophies and accelerationist scenarios. What seems at stake here is a fundamental split between a “capitalist realism” that encapsulates the future in an ever-expanding process of accumulation, and a tendency that in the face of a looming planetary catastrophe attempts to imagine another future, which can be conceptualized as the liberation of human potential or, alternatively as the proliferation of posthuman alterities.
The tropes of “the end of history” and “the end of the future” are now replaced on the one hand by crisis-laden motif of the “end of the earth” or the “end of labour”, and on the other hand by a return to the future through a series of recent, themed exhibitions, festivals and biennials as well as a resurgence of artificial intelligence and automation in the popular imagination. Despite this return to the future, the temporal horizon of our present moment is perhaps more aptly characterized by the “shrinking future” of just-in-time production, risk management, high-frequency trading, and the futures market. “Speculative” artistic and intellectual practices seem little inclined to problematize their implication in a speculative market whose movement is marked precisely by a perpetual extension of the present and a colonization of the future.
The ‘future caucus’ is convened to address the following questions: Could it be that the total privileging of a radically different future (itself a modernist move) over various pasts and presents is not itself a dangerous impoverishment? What can be learned from historical futurities and potentialities? Do we need to distinguish between a return to the futurity of utopian thought and revivals of a specifically modernist, utopian imagination? Is there a repressed content of utopian thought to be discovered that might speak to our current predicament?
Becoming More Playlist
Tickets
Tickets for this programme are €10,- including lunch and dinner. Order your ticket here.
Programme
PANEL 1: THE LABOUR OF THE FUTURE, THE FUTURE AFTER LABOUR
10:30 Welcome: Annie Fletcher
10:45 Introduction: Eric de Bruyn
11:00 Keynote: McKenzie Wark
11:45 Keynote: Maurizio Lazzarato
12:30 Discussion moderated by Anna Teixeira Pinto
13:00 Lunch
PANEL 2: SPECULATIVE PRACTICES
14:00 Diedrich Diederichsen
14:30 Kerstin Stakemeier
15:00 Marina Vishmidt
15:30 Discussion moderated by Sven Lütticken
16:00 Break
EVENT 3: SOCIALIST AND AFRO-FUTURES (ON FILM)
16:30 Conversation & Film screenings Doreen Mende & Kodwo Eshun
17:30/18:00 close
18:00 Dinner @ Designhuis (Stadhuisplein 3)
Live blog Becoming More on Open!
DAI’s Open! COOP Academy Publishing Class will provide live coverage of the symposia taking place on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, May 19, 20, 21 at the Van Abbemuseum's auditorium. You can follow them on their live blog.
Biographies
Other events and projects
DAI Curating Positions Class
Becoming more.…porous, resonant, supportive, coherent, tactile, entangled, animal…
For Becoming More…, the Curating Positions seminar group have worked on a series of interventions into the Van Abbemuseum responding to the senses in order to question the historical prioritisation of the scopic within histories of art and museology. The projects seek to open up other ways of sensing the museum and to alter the existing patterns, routines and relations between those engaged in it.
Absence Takes Shape (DAI Curating Positions Class #1)
Location: The Foyer, Van Abbemuseum
Clementine Edwards, Maike Hemmers, Sanne Kabalt
Absence Takes Shape presents the Van Abbemuseum visitor with a ribbon - a material memento of a feminist conversation between three Dutch Art Institute students. Their exchange is about the absence and presence of craft in the museum as well as the tender and violent aspects of touch.
“The Elephant in the Room” (DAI Curating Positions Class # 2)
Location: Room B2, Van Abbemuseum
Alejandro Ceron, Leon Filter, Mirjam Linschooten
Since their emergence, museums have been excellent examples of a prestigious kind of microcosm: a site where beliefs about the order of the world and the individual’s place within it, are represented publicly. In museums, visitors enact a kind of ritual, interacting consciously or subconsciously with the museum’s structure, for example by following the institution’s narrative, or displaying a form of contemplation in front of artworks.
We propose to temporarily interrupt the sacred/ritual space of the Van Abbemuseum and the Caucus, by bringing in an animal as an agent of resistance and a critic of vision-based logic and ideological normalization of our (human) understanding of representation. As Jason Hribal suggests, turning the perspective around, thinking from below and not bringing it back to a theoretical discourse, but a methodology, is what we want to investigate as a “curating position” in relation to the caucus theme
“Becoming more” – in this case becoming more animal and less human (or to transcend what is human in that matter) in our perception of the museum.
Becoming More… Porous / A Porous Archive (DAI Curating Positions Class)
Location: DIY Archive Van Abbemuseum
Baha Görkem Yalım
The inclusiveness of the museum as an institution is at the heart of many discussions surrounding the caucus (and indeed the aim of its progressive intent). The archive of a museum is a crucial node in its existing structure in relation to what that museum contains, acknowledges, refuses, claims invisible; how the museum connects, and what it connects-in-between. Imagining museum as a structure that remembers reaffirms the importance of archives as clarifiers of complexities where any position of remembrance is a political act. Archive as the memory of an institution decides what is yet to be memorised. So our question here is; What is it that a museum remembers? awaking the second question; If a museum can remember what it can/should dream of? A Porous Archive will be a place for suggesting this dream, and proposing a future.
Deviant Practice
‘Deviant Practice’ takes place during two collective dinners (May 20th and May 21st) of the caucus through a series of spatial, behavioral and performative interventions. Collectively, the project speaks to and from the different choreographic, social and political positions that are brought to thetable at the end of our day.
