VOLITIONAL VOLUTIONS OF THE VOLATILE WATERS BY MERVE KILIÇER

Date: Friday 6 December 2019 from 15:30 till 17:30Location: Karel Doormanhof 45, 3012 GC/ Mauritsstraat 36, 3012 CJ Rotterdam

This Friday, from 15.30-17.30 we invite you to the Open Studio of Merve Kılıçer, the first of our alumni to occupy a new research studio in Karel Doormanhof 45, Rotterdam.With this initiative we hope to consolidate and extend ongoing conversations across all the Masters of the Willem de Kooning Academie about the capacity of artistic research, while supporting the recent graduate.For the last four weeks Merve has been in residence at Karel Doormanhof 45, and on Friday we welcome you to explore her emerging work as part of the project Volitional Volutions of the Volatile Waters.Refreshments will be served.http://mervekilicer.com/about/http://mervekilicer.com/volitional-volutions-of-the-volatile-waters/

Book Talk # 4: Thurs Nov 28, 19.00 – 21.30 hrs

Field Essays: Éloj Kréyol

With: design-duo dach&zephir (Dimitri Zephir and Florian Dach), Rolando Vásquez, associate professor in sociology at University Utrecht/University College Roosevelt.

Moderator: artist/researcher Sophie Krier.

Location: Research Station, Willem de Kooning Academy, Wijnhaven 61

Admission: free, the presentation is open to the public

How can we decolonize design, and its curriculum? The fourth issue of the experimental editorial series Field Essays brings to the fore the research Éloj Kréyol by design-duo dach&zephir (Florian Dach and Dimitri Zephir). Initiated in 2015, Éloj Kréyol is an attempt to reconcile, reactivate, and transmit neglected artisanal and cultural lifelines in the genealogy of the French Caribbean archipelago. Field Essays is a research platform that explores peripheral practices probing unknown territories, methods and works. It is initiated and led by artist / researcher Sophie Krier and released through Onomatopee.

After a short introduction by Sophie Krier on the process of making the book, designers Dimitri Zephir and Florian Dach will share the cultural, ecological and economical stakes of their field research in Martinique. In a short statement, respondent Rolando Vázquez, associate professor in sociology at University Utrecht / University College Roosevelt, will be asked to share the questions, which the book raises, from the position of his field of work, decolonial aesthesis. A concluding round table will open up questions regarding the book’s content, form, and motives to the audience.

dach&zephir is a design studio based in between Paris and Guadeloupe, transforming History, habits, and cultural contrasts into objects/things. They define themselves in between the industrial world and the research part in design. They aim to create a space where spreading is in fact reassembling, where cultures, stories, habits and technics become a way of creating. Stories and History are their entry point in design, from domestic behaviors, memories or cultural heritage there is always more than a “pretty shape” in their projects. For them objects are “a medium of the mind”, if we pay enough attention to it, it can tell you something, ask you something or make you realize something.

Sophie Krier is a relational artist, researcher, educator and editor. Through her work she interweaves biographies of beings and places, and conceives tools and situations for collective narration and reflection. Her practice moves between intense periods of fieldwork and editorial/publishing activities (book- and filmmaking, exhibition design and moderation). Between 2004 and 2009 Krier led the undergraduate programme designLAB (Rietveld Academie, NL). On invitation of University College Roosevelt (NL), Krier developed Art & Design Practice, an undergraduate programme on visualising ideas in the spirit of Liberal Arts & Sciences. Since 2008, Krier leads Field Essays, a series of hybrid publications, which enables listening pauses between practitioners and thinkers across disciplines.

Rolando Vásquez contributes to the movement of decolonial aesthesis and thought. He is associate professor of sociology at University College Roosevelt, affiliated to the research institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICON) and the Gender Studies Department of the University of Utrecht. With Walter Mignolo he has coordinated for ten Years the Middelburg Decolonial Summer School. In 2016 with Gloria Wekker et. al. he wrote the report of the Diversity Commission of the University of Amsterdam. His work seeks to transgress the dominion of contemporaneity, heteronormativity and modernity/coloniality. Developing the questions of ‘precedence’ and ‘the end of contemporaneity’ he seeks to contribute to decolonize institutions and subjectivities, epistemologies and aesthetics.

Image: Field Essays 55.3_Couverture_©dach&zephir_2019

We are happy to invite you to the opening of Maquette, a photography and moving image exhibition of Piet Zwart Institute & WdKA students.

Date: Opening on the 14.11.2019 

Time: Starts at 18:00 

Address: Weena 10, 3012 CM Rotterdam

Maquette is a photographic and moving image exhibition presenting the work of five artists-students from the Piet Zwart Institute and the Willem de Kooning Academy. The exhibition focuses on the dynamics that are emerging from the contiguity and porosity of singular representations of the world. With artworks varying in their format, processes, perspectives and narratives, differences and contrasts have been given a central position in the curation. We are pleased to present works by Julia Gat, Yael Laroes, Sonia Mangiapane, Felix Obermaier and Ugo Petronin.

Initiated and coordinated by the collective Leaving Space, the exhibition takes place in temporary space granted by Hilton Rotterdam, which was once the breakfast room of the hotel. 

http://leavingspace.org

Alessandro Bava is an architect and writer based in Naples, Italy and London, UK. He runs a studio in Naples making exhibitions, installations, interiors and architecture projects. From the academic year 2019-2020 Bava teaches a history and theory of architecture course at the postgraduate master B-PRO at UCL Bartlett in London. He is the co-founder of åyr, an art collective which made installations and research on contemporary domesticity, and the independent ecology magazine and publishing platform ECOCORE.

Alessandro’s talk will address the thematic issues set by the design team Cookies for the current Thematic Design Project. It is a presentation specific to the interest on the floor, addressing material, ecology, politics and labour.

http://www.ecocore.com

Navigating the Virtual, a workshop by Anja Kirschner Tuesday 5 November.

Anja Kirschner’s seminar will consider immersive technologies, such as Virtual Reality (VR) and other digital simulations (in gaming, training and design), not as ‘neutral’ technologies for modelling physical reality, but as technologies that have emerged from the military-entertainment-research complex and are actively shaping the physical world and modulating affects, behaviours and dispositions within it.

Drawing on Harun Farocki’s exploration of digital animation and Virtual Reality exposure therapy and the way these inform recent theoretical texts on navigating the virtual (by Tom Holert, Pasi Väliaho, Orit Halpern), we will explore the politics of virtuality, artificiality and survival (Claire Colebrook).

In particular, we will look at the rise of dominant navigational paradigms and at what the visual culture theorist Nicholas Mirzoeff has called decolonial countervisuality, or the right to look, which “refuses to allow authority to suture its interpretation of the sensible to power, first as law and then as the aesthetic.”

Anja Kirschner is an artist working in the moving image. Currently she is a PhD researcher at the Royal College of Art, London.

www.anjakirschner.com

Events Series Learning With Others Film Screening # 3: Fri Nov 22, 19.00 – 21.30 hrs Film screening Donna Haraway: Story Telling for Earthly Survival (Fabrizio Terranova, 2016) With: Irene van Oorschot and Shailoh Phillips. In collaboration with Erasmus University College and V2_Lab for Unstable Media, Rotterdam.

Location: V2_Lab for Unstable Media, Eendrachtsstraat 10, Rotterdam Admission: For this screening a reservation is necessary. Please reserve at: https://www.eventbrite.nl/e/tickets-film-screening-donna-haraway-story-telling-for-earthly-survival-76427989173

In Donna Haraway: Story Telling for Earthly Survival (2016), Fabrizio Terranova presents a playful, intellectual and intimate portrait of one of the most daring and original thinkers of our time. Haraway, a multispecies feminist theorist and leading scholar in science and technology studies, draws on the figure of SF (science fiction, speculative fabulation, string figures, so far…) to ask how we can think-with, live-with, and be-with other humans and non-humans on a damaged earth. The urgency in her writings and ability to create new and generative narratives on how to “stay with the trouble”, has seen her theories embraced by designers / artists / academics / feminists / environmental activists and many others. Terranova’s documentary is both an accessible introduction to Haraway’s works, and a visual statement in itself: making the materiality and visuality of her thinking come alive on the screen. For this screening, the MA Education in Art and Design of the Piet Zwart Institute/Willem de Kooning Academy, Erasmus University College and V2_Lab for the Unstable Media collaborate to bring together difference audiences and knowledges, woven together by an introductory talk by Dr. Irene van Oorschot and afterword by Shailoh Phillips.

Dr. Irene van Oorschot is senior lecturer in the humanities at Erasmus University College. With her background in feminist and postcolonial science studies and pragmatist philosophy, Irene approaches the humanities as an important resource in thinking with and through human and non- and post-human realities. Teaching and researching, to her, are first and foremost practices of building collectives and archives – important tasks in individualized and forgetful times. Irene is especially interested in the relationship between knowledges and ecologies; or, in the way various ways of seeing and accounting for the world are situated within specific spaces and problematics. Her current focus extends her engagement with knowledge practices to include a concern with the materialities and temporalities of cognitive labor, the affective texture of knowledge practices and sites/spaces of intellectual escape.

Shailoh Phillips is a polymash media artist / researcher / educator. Originally trained in Anthropology, Philosophy and Cultural Analysis (University of Amsterdam, Humboldt University), she has spent the past decade working in the field of digital media and design education, as well as cultivating a collaborative studio practice of cross-media projects and tinkering with electronics. She works along the interstices between digital/analogue, making/thinking, art/engineering, theory/practice, building interdisciplinary bridges. Her practice revolves around fostering playful forms of resistance and seeking out pressure points to act in the face of social inequalities and unfolding ecological disasters. In 2017, she graduated from the MA Education in Arts and Design (Piet Zwart Institute). She is a researcher in the Critical Making Consortium, teaches Hacking and Digital Crafts at Willem de Kooning Academy, and in the Design, Curating and Writing Master at the Design Academy Eindhoven.

Date and time: Tuesday 29th of October 2019, 7pm

Location: Karel Doormanhof 45, 3012 GC Rotterdam

Lisa Robertson is a poet and art writer. Born in Toronto, raised into writing by her feminist peers in Vancouver, resident now of rural France, her most recent publications are Proverbs of a She-Dandy (Belkin Gallery, 2018) and Thresholds: A Prosody of Citizenship (Bookworks, 2019)

The Baudelaire Fractal – This is the title of Lisa Robertson’s just-completed novel, which will be published by Coach House Books in January 2020. Robertson will read an excerpt from this story, in which a poet, Hazel Brown, of middle age and mild accomplishment, awakes one morning in a hotel room in Vancouver to discover that she has written the complete works of Baudelaire. Yet she never has been Baudelaire, not will she ever become him. The hotel room is the mysterious portal to this authorship, and so she meanders through the many hotel rooms of her life, considering fashion and sex in the 1980s, painting in the 1840s, perfume in the 1990s, the humiliation of domestic labour, and the good luck of having become a reader as an act of escape from both class and gender.

Events Series Learning With Others

Master class # 2: Thurs Nov 7, 19.00 – 21.30 hrs BioTRANSlab: Hacking Science for a Transfeminism Narrative Paula Pin, artist, trans-feminist performer, bio-hacker and initiator of BioTransLab Location: Research Station, Willem de Kooning Academy Admission: Free: the presentations are open to the public

BioTRANSlab is a nomadic laboratory open to experimentation with the body and technology, based on the proposal to learn by doing. As a queer trans-hack-feminist science laboratory (s), this lab seeks the opening of a particular space-time, a place for the confluence of cyber-witches and alchemists. One of the BioTRANSab proposals is to think of us as a constantly changing subject, multiple existences that are no longer defined and do not focus on the division between object and subject, but can be seen as a configuration of other possible narratives that no longer conform to the binarism inherited from modern Western culture. We flow and become, change and tans-form(C)tion, we are the constant re-articulation of complex entities, of uncertain transits and bio-processes, we are meta-organic entities, degenerate post.formations, we are the negation of the pre-existence through the traces that leave the desire and the affections.

Paula Pin is a researcher and artist activist with a strong inclination towards research and experimentation processes with collective and free technologies. She has undertaken residencies at institutions such as CERN, Université Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris), KASK School of Arts (Gent), Prototyp_ome at Hangar (Barcelona), Gaîté Lyrique (Paris) and Quirky Ecologies at Click Festival (Helsingor). Although her work emerges from a scientific tradition of research and experimentation, it relates to drawing, abstract video, circuit bending and lab experiments, and is always located in the intersection where biology, science and queer art collide. Paula Pin has an interest in DIY-DIWO technologies, hacking and hardware electronics in a context of learning by doing. She co-founded a trans-hack-feminist electronics open laboratory (Pechblenda) in Calafou. Most recently she has been designing and fabricating the devices for the BioTRANSlab, developing a line of hardware (HardGlam) for a Gynepunk project that is used for autonomous gynecology practices and health ecological investigation.

Date and time: Tuesday 15th of October 2019, 7pm Location: Karel Doormanhof 45, 3012 GC Rotterdam

Azar Mahmoudian is an independent curator and educator based in Tehran. Her recent projects include “When Legacies Become Debts” at The Mosaic Rooms, London (2019); multi-chaptered film program, “Sensible Grounds/Tectonics of Camaraderie”, for Tensta Konsthall, MAAT, SAVVY Contemporary, and Fundació Antoni Tàpies, among others (2018-2020); “Staging a change” and “Shifting Panoramas” at TMOCA, Tehran, and DAZ, Berlin (2018).

About the lecture: As sites of experimentation under less inhibited circumstances, self-organised and small-scale art institutions host projects that take different sorts of risks in face of the aesthetic ecologies of contemporary art world. Yet they hardly engage in creating a self-sustained and independent network, which can take care of its own models and values.  Instead, most of them often deploy the same methods or instruments of credibility that the mainstream art world follows, specifically in regard to the neoliberal agendas of visibility, inclusivity and myths of accessibility.

So these initiatives only complicate the shape of social, political, and economic strata of contemporary art world, while leaving its overall power relations, associated economies and prevailing value systems intact. This make those who work for these initiatives feel that their efforts have fed the mainstream at the end; a logic of “gentrification” that small-scale art institutions often lapse into.

Following some case studies, this lecture suggests fundamental considerations in regard to the slippery notion of the “public” of/for art, and potential of small scale and self-organized art spaces in adopting strategies of insulation, subversive invisibility, and inversion of private and public domain, for the benefit of “the communal”, and “interpretive communities”.