Becoming More 26 May - Friday 26 May
Becoming More 26 May Friday 26 May
Agents of Change Presents: Yama Saraj: Open conversation
Location: Studio Van Abbemuseum
Time: 10:30 - 13:00
For the Caucus, Agents of Change will present a program in collaboration with four different initiatives on Thurs 25th, Friday 26th and Sat 27th willing to invite participants and the public of the museum to get to know them better, to visit them and to join in their activities. It will give an alternative approach to the city of Eindhoven, their urgencies and their challenges.
Yama Saraj: “In 1998, at the age of 12, my family and I found our refuge in the Netherlands from war-torn Afghanistan. This event had a tremendous impact on my worldview and identity construction. Later I would study at first engineering then finally switching to development economics, to go back and look for my roots, to belong and to be part of the reconstruction process in my country of origin. I have been working in development assistance in Afghanistan/Kosovo/DR Congo. I saw with my own eyes the dysfunctionalities of our development framework and approach and how it actually negatively affects 'development''. I would like to talk about my research on grassroots movements, and how I ended up back in Eindhoven where my journey started. As a development economist with (a technology heart as I put it) , I have been thinking about " development" and " progress" and how to bring it to my people back home in Afghanistan. I found out about my own identity, belonging and purpose and the role of creative/cultural scene in shaping these, to be specific, the internet, forums, open source software, maker stuff, hacking stuff have been significant for my own process. I would like to have an interactive discussion with the participants of Caucus and everyone interested on these topics.
Resistance is Fertile Step 1, ‘Refuge in Fauxtopia’
Location: Auditorium Van Abbemuseum
Time: 14:00 – 17:00
Convened by: Vaari Claffey with Sam Keogh
Presenters: Vaari Claffey, Joseph Noonan Ganley, Sam Keogh, Dr. Tina Kinsella, Our Table - Michelle Darmody Lucky, Seamus Nolan, Grace Weir
Accompanied by Sarah Grimes on drums
With thanks to Culture Ireland
Resistance is Fertile is a multi-platform project which proposes the development of a set of counter-pragmatics for cultural production designed to generate altered modes of operation in situations of emergency or where resistance is required. It looks to provoke strategies which are not memetic of currently normalized ‘pragmatics’ but which disrupt, queer, oppose or reconstruct them.
The project proposes and problematizes Ireland as the site of a cultural 'safe house’ to provide shelter for those practices and practitioners that are threatened by current or impending political or cultural conditions. This forces the necessity for some self-examination on behalf of the hosting country.
This first iteration, 'Refuge in Fauxtopia', begins this process by looking at the history of shelter in Ireland as that of a kind of ‘false-friend’. In linguistics a ‘false-friend’ is a word or expression that has a similar form to one in a person's native language, but a different meaning.
Becoming More Playlist
Kuba Szreder: ‘Always more than one: art worlds beyond the art market’
Time: 19:30
Location: Designhuis The Project Space
A critique of the political economy of art should encompass a critique of political ontology of art worlds. Art practitioners populate and constitute more art worlds than just one. However, the market-oriented art world has a tendency to present itself as the only possible art world. Agents of the art market - similarly to propagators of neoliberal capitalism - reiterate over and over again that ‘there is no alternative’ (to their own art world). Obviously, the marketoriented art world is dominant, just as neoliberal capitalism is hegemonic, but it is definitely not the only social system possible or even actually existing. There are many ways of doing art, thinking about it, exchanging it and appreciating it. What engaged architects in Liverpool, social sculptors in Warsaw or artistic cartographers in Chicago call and practice as art might differ from what is peddled as art on art fairs in New York. They forge and animate emergent art worlds, the very existence of which undermines hegemonic claims of art marketeers.
Background information
Other events and projects
Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons, (UTRECHT)
New Name for Casco, New Modus Operandi, and Exhibition Program
Opening: Friday, 26 May 2017, 17:00-20:00 hrs
Exhibition: until 16 July 2017
With Adelita Husni-Bey, Aimée Zito Lema, Annette Krauss, Bram van den Berg, Charlotte Rooijackers, Cooperativa Cráter Invertido, David Bennewith, Dora García, Fernando García-Dory (Inland), Faivovich & Goldberg, Gunndís Ýr Finnbogadóttir, Ingo Niermann, Jort van der Laan, Laura Pappa, Lily van der Stokker, Lotte Schröder, Maja Bekan, Marjolijn Dijkman, Merel Zwarts, Riet Wijnen, Ruth Buchanan, Southern Wave (Dutch Art Institute), Terra Critica (Utrecht University), and Wok the Rock.
After more than twenty-five years as Casco, Casco Projects, and finally Casco – Office for Art, Design and Theory, we are changing our name to Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons. The title heralds our new modus operandi, presented initially in the form of an exhibition that opens on 26 May 2017. With this change we aim to act on our political-aesthetical intentions and face their urgencies with “working for the commons” as the guiding imperative for all Casco operations. The commons, as we mean it here, refers to more than a common resource pool—it is rather a value system and general governing principle, a way of living and working, an alternative to capitalist modes wherein the mutual blindness of the private and the public lead to one dominating another. While exhibitions are not always the best medium to unfold such a process, as display tends toward finality, we also see the possibilities within rearranging and taking pause to grow and entangle. It is an integral part of the commoning process and depends on your feedback and common desire to (un)learn! Please visit casco.art to learn more about the exhibition phase of the project.
Becoming More… Porous / A Porous Archive (DAI Curating Positions Class)
Location: DIY Archive Van AbbemuseumBaha 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.
Degrees of freedom: Human, robot and the medium of automation
Location: Room 2 & 3, Designhuis
Degrees of Freedom is an exhibition in which ideas, forms and experiments related to the Dutch Art Institute’s Roaming Academy class In Dialogue with Robotics are presented to the public. Many of the contributions to Degrees of Freedom are not so much finalised artworks but rather pilots for projects that are at different stages of development. The title refers to the technical term used to describe the extent of a robot’s freedom of motion. This term explaining a robot’s physical characteristics and ability to move converges with wider questions and popular concerns about more ‘disembodied’ computational technologies and artificial intelligences in relation to social and political agency, labour, and financialisation. How can art-oriented research inhabit these interconnected fields of inquiry? In what way can it contribute to this discussion? These are the most general questions that this class has tried to engage with and what this exhibition attempts to address through its array of contributions.
Lead tutor: Bassam El Baroni
