Becoming More 21 May: DAI Roaming Assembly #14 - Sunday 21 May
Becoming More 21 May: DAI Roaming Assembly #14 Sunday 21 May
Location: Auditorium
Conveners: Emily Pethick and Leire Vegara
Speakers: Zach Blas, Michael Marder, Emily Pethick, Alejandra Riera, Graeme Thomson & Silvia Maglioni, Leire Vergara
Towards Entangled Modes of Becoming More
Towards Entangled Modes of Becoming More invites artists and theorists who are developing new ways to read contemporary modes of relationality, beyond singularities and binaries, finding more complex and expansive articulations of forms of coexistence, multiplicity, opacity and entanglement.
Philosopher Michael Marder’s recent work (in collaboration with Luce Irigaray) has looked towards plant life as a way to think about relations between human and non-human beings and forms of coexistence and collectivity. He will look at how from plants we can learn how to “become more by becoming less”, by “minimizing the occasions for consuming, polluting, and despoiling the world.” He proposes “a model of energy inspired in a vegetal manner of being—an alternative, non-violent framework for thinking about and practically relating to energy without destroying living beings and our planet through its extraction.”
Artists Graeme Thompson and Silvia Maglioni will perform Dark Matter Cinema Tarot, experimental, collective readings that operate through connecting diverse fragments of films, in order to find new, affective and creative ways to address political and social questions in group situations, which open up lateral, exploratory modes of thinking through the politics of images.
Zach Blas – an artist and writer whose practice confronts technologies of capture, security, and control with minoritarian politics – has written about Édouard Glissant’s notion of opacity as “... an unknowability—and, hence, a poetics, for Glissant—that makes up the world, and it must be defended in order for any radically democratic project to succeed. Glissant defines opacity as an alterity that is unquantifiable, a diversity that exceeds categories of identifiable difference. Opacity therefore exposes the limits of schemas of visibility, representation, and identity that prevent sufficient understanding of multiple perspectives of the world and its peoples” He will talk about opacity in relation to biometrics.
The day will culminate in a presentation of artist Alejandra Riera’s film … –Ohpera – Muet– … [… –Mute – Ohpera…]. Realised in collaboration with the Brazilian theatre group UEINZZ, the film revolves around spaces and places of History, constructions and demolitions, such as the removal of the statue of Colombus in Buenos Aires in 2014, among others. It engages stories and storytellers, female narrators for whom there is often no space, so that space has to be produced.
Tickets
Tickets for this programme are €10,- including lunch and dinner. Order your ticket here.
Programme
11:00 Word of welcome by DAI-director Gabriëlle Schleijpen
11:05 - 11:20 Emily Pethick and Leire Vergara introduction to Towards Entangled Modes of Becoming More
11:30 Introduction to Alejandra Riera’s film … –Ohpera – Muet– … [… –Mute – Ohpera…]
11:30 - 13:30 Screening of Riera’s film … –Ohpera – Muet– … [… –Mute – Ohpera…]
13:30 Lunch
14:30 - 15:10 Michael Marder: Becoming more vegetal—energy-wise
15:10 - 15:25 Conversation with Leire Vergara and students of Curating Positions
15:30 - 16:10 Zach Blas
16:10 - 16:25 Conversation with Emily Pethick and students of Curating Positions
16:30 Break
16:45 - 18:00 Graeme Thompson and Silvia Maglioni: Dark Matter Cinema Tarot.
Biographies participants
Abstracts
Abstracts of the works Dark Matter Cinema, –Ohpera – Muet– … [… –Mute – Ohpera…], and Becoming more vegetal—energy-wise.
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.
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.
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.
