Knowledge production in contemporary art and artistic research are terms that have gained attention lately in Copenhagen. The two concepts are intimately intertwined in that, in my opinion, artistic research is an element of knowledge production. Artistic research is developed mainly from an institutional point of view in relation to practice-based PhDs, whereas knowledge production is wider referring to all the elements of knowledge production that take place within a contemporary art scene, thus also curatorial and academic practices. Well, over the course of 3-4 weeks during February and March this year we experienced 3 significant events about those two topics, which I will spend a bit of time running through in the following.
The first event was a seminar held in late February by UKK – Young Art Workers and BKF (union for artists) about artistic research at Overgaden – Institute for Contemporary Art. I co-organized and moderated the event in my role as co-director of UKK and also contributed to the editing process of a special issue for the BKF magazine about the topic in a Danish context. In that way, we had given a potential audience the chance to inform themselves, which was part of our plan as the topic is new in Denmark and as there are very different opinions
about it from fear to fascination. That the event gathered an eager crowd of maybe 80 artists, academics, curators, architects etc. of all ages was a great surprise. The programme was packed and we had organized it as an inaugural informative encounter primarily for the members of the two organizations. First, we had two presentations of artists doing artistic research PhDs, Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld at the University of Copenhagen and Frans Jacobi at Kunsthögskolan in Malmö. It helped to exemplify what artistic research can be. Next, we had invited Mikkel Bogh from the Royal Danish Acedmy of Fine Arts who has been working politically, practically and theoretically with knowledge production and artistic research over the past years trying to establish a political and educational environment in which to conduct practice-based PhDs for artists, especially through the scholarships from the Mads Øvlisen Stipendium. We talked about the new report from the Ministry of Culture in which leading figures in the creative educational field define artistic research. Mikkel Bogh could tell us that the Ministry of Culture recently has decided to open a research school for the creative and artistic educations in Denmark. It means that they want to develop a common research framework and eventually PhDs in these schools, something that will change the scope of creative and artistic educations in Denmark widely. Director of Malmö Kunsthögskolan Gertrud Sandquist was also invited, but had to cancel due to a broken arm. It was a petty, as her around 10 years of experience with practice-based PhDs at the Malmö Kunsthögskolan is valuable in a Danish and not so developed context. Luckily, it turned out that the public had more than enough of questions for Mikkel Bogh about the development and consequences of artistic research on an institutional level. We ended the session with the desire to organize a second edition, probably touching upon methods of artistic research and educational strategies. It might be next year..
Two weeks later Den Frie Udstillingsbygning held a seminar Knowledge Production Right Now inviting different artists to develop the concept from their own practice and thinking. The event was intense and what I found most interesting were Simon Starling’s method of serendipity, an investigation based on chance occurrences that unfold the research topic in hitherto unseen ways, and Ane Hjort Guttu’s video Freedom Requires Free People questioning learning and education through the eyes of an 8 year old kid. The final discussion, however, revealed a general confusion about what knowledge production is and it was never really defined during the seminar. It is good to leave the concept of knowledge production open, or, not to close the definition too much. Still, it is necessary to have some common ground to talk from and as there are quite a lot of actors working with the concept through diverse art practices in Denmark, I think we need to gather their different experiences and collectively create a definition that works in a Danish context.
To follow up on the problem of defining knowledge production I will do a small detour. A year ago, we were a group of PhD students who invited academics, artists and curators to create a network for artistic research. Surprisingly, about 30 people showed up to the first meeting even though it was not advertised widely. This forum could eventually be important in developing artistic research and knowledge production collectively and I hope it will experience initiative of organizing meetings in which such dialogues can take place. After all, if we are to have practice-based PhDs in Denmark, it would be great if the actors working with the topic already in their practice could be part of defining what artistic research should be in a Danish context.
Lately, about another two weeks after the event at Den Frie Udstillingsbygning, the curator’s collective Kuratorisk Aktion launched an impressive monography about the artist Pia Arke, TUPILAKOSAURUS: An Incomplete(able)Survey of Pia Arke’s Artistic Work and Research, which emphasizes her especially ethnographically inspired reserach method. One of the main topics Pia Arke kept studying and developing was the relationship between Greenland and Denmark. It is a field of which there hasn’t been produced much knowledge and her artistic practice thus contributes importantly to a not only artistic, but also political, colonial and historical discussion in a productive way. The work of Kuratorisk Aktion is significant in that they have made Pia Arke’s work reach a wider public through exhibitions, books and seminars. All these threads, artistic research, development of new knowledge and dissemination of an artistic practice, ultimately can can change the collective cultural memory of a general public.
One of the next events about knowledge production that I would like to participate in will take place in New York in April; Critical Knowledge Production in Art, Science, Activism. It discusses the critical potential of knowledge production and the acknowledgement that knowledge production automatically, while being potentially critical, contributes to the development of late capitalism. Knowledge production is to me a complex concept; it is at once very intriguing in terms of incorporating art practices as active contributors to a political, academic, historical and social debate as well as very limiting in terms of schematization and utilization. I think that knowledge production in the arts reaches its greatest potential when developed within a free framework and not when developed within a framework where the outcome is predefined in order to fulfill the needs of academia or society. Hopefully, those two positions will productively challenge one another in the Danish debate and in the political and institutional decisions that will be made during the coming years.
Prologue. Santiago de Chile. Nov. 9. 2011.
Suitcases are an obsession of mine these weeks. I have dreamt about them four nights in a row. Curious to find meaning in such a serial experience I searched online and found dreammood.com and dreamdoctor.com. Following their dictionaries dreaming about a suitcase symbolizes that you are a ”very composed, together person”, in need of a much wanted vacation or looking for a ”change of scenery in your life”. Yet, does the suitcase appear unpacked in your dream, you are not prepared for the coming transition and is it over-packed you are too heavily tied to your emotional baggage. They ask; is it ”time to release the past, so that you may successfully arrive at your future?” I think so, yes, I answer the dream interpreter, it is time to let go of some of the content of the suitcase in order to prepare for a trip to the future open for new acquisitions on the way.
Santiago de Chile. Nov. 10.
During the past decades the working conditions for art writers have changed. Art history and art practices have turned global not only for a small avant garde and it necessarily asks of art writers to reconsider the way in which they interpret contemporary global art practices and relate to traditional art history. In short, how to go about referencing. There are many ways of interpreting artworks and to delimit and coherently direct the possibilities, art history as a discipline serves as a consecrated net in which to place an artwork and connect it with historical periods and works of other artists. Such a manoeuvre, successfully done, lines up the art historic genealogy of the work and adds a trajectory of artistic concepts, techniques and forms that both enhance the content of the analysis, place the artwork in a context and validates its existence in the world. So far, this is largely done within the framework of a tradition of Western art history, but with an increasingly globalised and culturally diverse art scene the following question has to be posed; how can one as an art writer establish artwork genealogies, when art and art history turn global the way in which they do today? You could add; is it time to release the past, so that we may successfully arrive at our future?
Cambridge, Massachusetts. Oct 19.
The point of departure for the above posed question has been on the way for a while and materialized itself in a public mid-term review session at the MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology in mid October 2011. An MA student, Giacomo Castagnola, presented a project he developed as part of Proyecto Coyote at the independent project space Taller 7 in Medellín in Colombia during the biennial Encuentro Internacional de Medellín MDE11: Enseñar y aprender. Lugares del conocimiento en el arte in 2011 (MDE11: Teaching and Learning. Sites of Knowledge Through Art). Proyecto Coyote, curated by the independent curator Lucía Sanromán, invited artists residing in Tijuana in Mexico to create work based on different neighbourhoods in Medellín. Castagnola chose to work on the area called Moravia and he told us during the review that it has undergone a significant change in the past years. A decade ago it was affected by delinquency, unemployment, drug addiction, drug trading and class inequality, but now it is a blossoming area with a cultural sector that the population has appropriated and generated in their own way. As the project description of Proyecto Coyote reads, the change came through “processes of civic regeneration through art and cultural activism in response to the social and physical decomposition caused by “narco“ violence in Medellín especially during the decades of the 1980s and 1990s.” The situation of Medellín in the 80-90’s is not unlike the one of Tijuana today, so, inspired by the pedagogical theme of the biennial the curatorial concept consisted in asking artists to learn from the successful development in Moravia and teach their lesson in Tijuana through artistic and cultural production – as a coyote smuggling knowledge and information across the border.
Castagnola’s project Moravia archive, social construction from Medellín to Tijuana: a project about tranference of knowledge consists of an unfoldable cardboard display containing different documents all related to social and cultural initiatives in Moravia. The display measures approximately 2×3 meters and can be folded so as to fit an old, red suitcase of Castagnola’s in which to be transported to Tijuana. The idea with the display was to collect material that reflect the positive change in Moravia and send it to Tijuana as an optimistic example of how to exit the extreme violence in which Tijuana and its citizens find themself.
After the presentation Castagnola and I set up a meeting to exchange ideas and thoughts one of the following days. It was in this conversation that he showed me photos of the micro-economies in Peru, Colombia and Mexico, which are carried by one person and can unfold into a small street shop. As he is an architect by 
education, the aesthetics and the for m of micro-economies had inspired him in his work, also in working with the Moravia archive. This source of aesthetic and formal inspiration did not come up in the review session, which is maybe why one of the reviewers finished the session by referring to Marcel Duchamp’s Boîte en Valise. An obvious reference in terms of formal gestures, however, Castagnola, did not create the display thinking of that reference. Instead, he focused on creating a portable imaginary inspired by the formal aesthetics of informal economies recognizable in both Medellín and Tijuana and thus, I would argue, a means of visual communication that could be easily inserted and appropriated in Tijuana. The form had a practical and contextual function, not an art historical one.
Williamstown, Massachusetts. Nov. 5.
A few weeks later in the conference In the Wake of the “Global Turn”: Practices for an Exploded Art History Without Borders at the Clark Art Institute I happened to discuss this experience of referencing with the art historian and critic T.J. Demos. The interpretive mechanism puzzled me. The reference of the Moravia archive was automatically made to Duchamp and I wondered what it meant for the analysis, if anything, that the aesthetic source was in fact something entirely different. Something which moreover exists due to specific socio-political and economic conditions that one would not recognize without an intimate knowledge about the context.
The conversation ended at the problem of connecting artworks mainly by form, something Demos referred to as pseudomorphosis. Pseudomorphosis is an act of mis-projected referencing where two artworks, across periods in time, get connected because they share the same form or formal gestures. Erwin Panofsky defines the concept in Tomb Sculpture. Four Lessons on its Changing Aspects from Ancient Egypt to Bernini from 1964 this way: “The emergence of a form A morphologically analogous to or even identical with a form B, yet entirely unrelated to it from a genetic point of view” (p. 26-27). However, already in the canonical work Studies in Iconology. Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance from 1939 he works out the concept by showing how “certain Renaissance figures became invested with a meaning which, for all their classicizing appearance, had not been present in their classical prototypes.” Meaning is added to an object or artwork, he argued, because it is identical to a similar object, which carries such meaning. The point is that two identical forms can develop across time without necessarily being related or invested with the same meaning.
From Panofsky’s iconographic articulation of the concept the art critic and historian Yve-Alain Bois places it into a 20th century context by discarding comparisons especially of paintings with lookalikes from earlier periods and other genres. In the talk “Pseudomorphism: What to make of Look-alikes?” from November 2007 at the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago he mentions the comparison of tantric paintings with 
paintings by Kazimir Malevich and Alphonse Allais’ caricature and framed white image Première communion de jeunes filles chlorotiques par un temps de neige from 1893 with white monochromes by Robert Rauschenberg, Pierre Manzoni and Robert Ryman. Such comparisons by likeness can also happen among contemporaries, as Bois cites artist Sol LeWitt for having said. Examples are Manzoni and Ryman, who are said to be similar because of their white monochromes, and Joseph Beuys and Robert Morris who both use felt. Such “petty gossips” do not look at the oeuvre as such, only tendencies or lookalike qualities. However, it is difficult not to do it, Bois adds, as depicting resemblances is at the “astethic heart of human knowledge”. However, ignorance is key, the less one knows about the context and the period, the more one enacts pseudomorphisis. And the danger of such a formal identification, Bois points out, is to project content from one artwork to the other, thus mis-aligning artworks into an already existing order of art.
So far so good, artworks, as the theoretical assertion above states, should not only be compared due to formal resemblance, but also due to a historical contextualization. This statement, however, should today be expanded to also include cultural contexts. The art scene is a complex arena after the global turn, where artists, curators and writers work in sometimes incompatible cultural contexts with unlike art histories and thus are open to pseudomorphological interpretive acts.
Irvine, California. Dec. 7.
There are two levels on which the current global turn of art operates that should be highlighted here; international exhibitions and growing mobility among artists, curators and art historians. The former is accentuated by the transnational focus of mega-exhibitions (fermented and consolidated with Documenta X and XI curated by Catherine David and Okwui Enwezor. Recent examples are the Sao Paulo Biennial 2010 and the Istanbul Biennial 2009 and 2011) and an art history, which is increasingly happening and written not only on European and North American territory. Growing mobility, however, questions what it does to the actors on the art scene to either work globally or to be presented to art from other cultural contexts at ‘home’. Chinese, Middle Eastern, South American, Indian and African contemporary art scenes have gone worldwide the past fifteen years and it asks all actors to reconsider what has been the shared knowledge so far and what should be it in the future. With increased circulation and convergence we might ask which systems of references we use and what references we call attention to when we connect things – be it artworks, art histories, socio-political contexts and forms. Are we in need of building up new common references or other ways of referencing?
Williamstown, Massachusetts. Nov. 4.
The scenario of automatic referencing appeared again at the Clark Art Institute. Here, it was the Brazilian art historian and theorist Renata Camargo Sá who showed the work of a young Brazilian artist that at a first glance sent my thoughts back to a colorful Agnes Martin, but which, she explained, was work based on forms and aesthetics from the street in Brazil; last year’s summer clothing fashion and goods wrapped in plastic and brown scotch. Even though I have been to Brazil, have lived in South America and am aware and fascinated by such phenomena, the abstraction was high and I did not think of a street phenomena as its reference. I went straight to known traditions of a known art history. Being self-reflexively aware of that instant interpretive move it became clear that how we establish open mechanisms of interpretations in the engagement with artworks is a great challenge of the future. It reminded me of a German colleague who during MFA studies in Santiago de Chile was told by students and professors that they could not give feedback to her work as it was (too) “German”. They thus implied that it was beyond their reach because of national and cultural difference and that they needed another set of references with which to understand her work.
Los Angeles. Dec. 9
Let us now, however, return to the suitcase of Duchamp. Because, even though the reference made to it was not intended by Castagnola it can add interesting layers to the Moravia archives. In the article “Duchamp’s Boîte en Valise: Between Institutional Acculturation and Geopolitical Displacement” Demos argues that Boîte en Valise unfolds how context and conditions shape the work of an artist; in the case of Duchamp, it was the exile to the US during World War II that made him place the box, boîte, of miniatures of his artworks into a suitcase, en valise, so that he could send them by boat across the ocean. The form and the aesthetics of the artwork were thus conditioned by the circumstances in which it was created. Demos moreover proposes an aesthetic of the suitcase, which is characterized by the “qualities of mobility, compactness, fragmentation, miniaturization, and the impulses toward nostalgic collection and portable containment” (p. 9).
However, the condition of geopolitical exile of Duchamp, as Demos frames it, is a particular one, one that is embedded in the “modernist homelessness” described by Rosalind Krauss (p. 16), of cutting off ties to the national and thereby also to a national, historical moment and its specific, national iconography. For Duchamp, this came about particularly in the work of the suitcase, which in itself embodies mobility. Moreover, that Duchamp chose to bring reproductions of his work in a suitcase also implied the act of re-defining the museum institution by reducing it to a portable miniature exhibition space. Other redefinitions of the museum was brought about by the modern condition of homelessness, which prepared art for mobility and also cleared the exhibition space into the white cube in order for it to contain artworks without reference to a particular context.
Demos notes in the article that we are more open to works like Duchamp’s suitcase today due to our continuous struggle with the modern condition of homelessness and geopolitical dislocation. Coming back to the Moravia archive the conditions that bring about the aesthetics of the suitcase in this work is not a geopolitical exile, rather, the piece reflects Castagnola’s unhindered mobility, a nomadic life and engagement with different and specific socio-political contexts. Castagnola used the suitcase as a link between the realities of a community, which he extracted, folded, packed and sent to be received and inserted in a community elsewhere. Using the aesthetics of the suitcase in this case unfolds an artist’s will to interfere in and connect people’s living conditions using the mobile aesthetics of these particular and popular contexts. The social aesthetic of the suitcase grows out of an economic limitation of possessions and out of using what is there, the existing possibilities, on the level of the individual in concordance with the objects and materials at hand. In the case of the Moravia Archive content and form goes hand in hand with the social responsibility of the artist.
Copenhagen. Dec. 16.
Coming back to the main question in this essay about mis-interpretation and mis-referencing it is not so that the reference to Duchamp is wrong, in fact, together with the analysis of Demos it can unfold how a suitcase, the objects it carries and its carrier are embodied in the specific conditions for artistic production and socio-political realities in which they exist and respond. However, to have knowledge about the sociopolitical contexts help to make the analysis resonate in its complexity. Yet, there seem to be one consideration to give thought to. How will the future methodology of art historians, theorists and writers take shape if they both have to gain an overview knowledge about art on a global scale and contextually very specific knowledge related to the artwork in question? It seems like an insurmountable task, but if it is not done, how to write about art in its intricacies in the wake of the global turn?
When discussing this question with my PhD supervisor at the University of Copenhagen, Anne Ring Petersen, she referred to the literary scholar Franco Moretti and his concept of distant reading as opposed to close readings – which the literary tradition hold in high regard. Distant reading is based on statistics of formal gestures of literature or background information (year and country of publishing, gender of the author, genre etc.), as a way to grapple world literature in its massiveness. In fact, at Stanford University Department of English where Moretti is a professor, they work with computer-generated analyses of literature feeding computers with an enormous amount of digital data in order to show general tendencies and developments, sometimes over centuries.
The readings proposed in this text do not point toward such an approach because they focus on the particularity of individual art works, not statistics. Still, applying Moretti’s literary concept of distant reading to global contemporary art history is helpful. It brings about the acknowledgement of the impossibility of close readings of artworks when operating on a global art scene. Yet, it is indeed important to know the contexts in which artworks are created in order only to refer back to a canonical art history when it is constructive. And not because it happens automatically. Inevitably, the analytical grip has to loosen in order to look up and out at the world and then into sources about the context one is writing about. My proposal for a future methodology includes conducting interviews with artists and art historians of the context/s in which the artwork in question is embedded. Tending toward a sociological research methodology is productive as it opens up for other types of referencing. Contemporary art history is still in the making, so the art historical writer of contemporary art has to create his or her own empirical material as well as knowing his or her art historical material. This is a double task, yet, only when we stop referring by default to canonical art history and start listening to other histories, art history will become global.
Epilogue. LAX Airport. Dec. 11. 2011.
In half an hour the bag drop will open and I can descend to the floor below and check in my two suitcases. They have been my companions the last two months in and out of airports, train stations and bus terminals. One was intentionally empty at departure and is now stuffed with books, prints, drafts and exhibition leaflets.
It is not improbable to dream about suitcases in such a stage, and even less when one is obsessed with how to deal with the inheritance of references and referencing. As with the Moravia Archive of Castagnola, it implies responsibility to live, work and operate between contexts and countries. For the art writer, this responsibility transfers into being attentive toward the not yet known as well as knowing when to ignore the known. I am off to the bag drop, ready to move on.
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Image Captions
Image 1: Giacomo Castagnola, Moravia Archive Project, Medellín- Colombia, 2011
Image 2-5: Scott Berzofsky, Moravia Archive in Process of Unfolding, MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2011
Image 6-7: Moravia Archive in Process of Unfolding, Mid-review of the course Zones of Emergency: Artistic Interventions – Creative Responses to Conflict & Crisis, MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology, MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 201. Photograph by Nadia Volicer
Image 8: Giacomo Castagnola, Recuperar Cooperative’s Interview, Medellín- Colombia, 2011
Image 9: Recuperar Cooperative’s Archive, Moravia’s Dumpster, Medellín- Colombia, 1958
Image 10: Giacomo Castagnola, Teen Hip Hop Dancers in Moravia’s Cultural Centre, Medellín- Colombia, 2011
Image 11: Giacomo Castagnola, Metro Cable, Medellín- Colombia, 2011
Image 12: Marcel Duchamp, Boite-en-Valise. 1935-1940
Image 13: Giacomo Castagnola, Suitcase Street Vendor, Medellín – Colombia, 2011
Image 14-15: Giacomo Castagnola, Cardboard CDs Street Vendor, Medellín – Colombia, 2011
Image 16: Giacomo Castagnola, Bread Street Vendor, Lima- Peru, 2011
Image 17: Giacomo Castagnola, Clamatos Street Vendor, Tijuana- México, 2011
Image 18: Kazimir Malevich. Black Square and Red Square. 1915
Image 19: Unknown. Tantric painting
Filed under: Beirut, bla bla on writing and language, konversationpieces, Kunst / Art, Lyd / Sound, notes on cph, texts, The Love Libration Movement
Texts, reading and writing came out to be the topic of October and November last year. First, in the workshop Verb Lists – Knowledge Done Again at the conference Mobilityshifts : International Future of Learning Summit at New School in New York and later, in a talk about Roles and Relations in Artistic Research at the ISCP International Studio & Curatorial Program, a talk which nevertheless morphed into a collective reading-writing session.
The workshop Verb Lists – Knowledge Done Again was developed from a symposium held in Copenhagen in June 2011 with the University of Copenhagen, Freïe Universität and Goldsmiths University of London, which I co-organized with Adam Drewes, Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld, Martin Glaz Serup and Trine Friis Sørensen. The symposium was called How to do things with academia and questioned traditional ways of organizing and performing academia. All participants submitted, instead of an abstract, a manual of how to do something differently with and in academia. Divided into 5 groups some 30 people worked intensively over a period of 3 days to create 5 collective manuals, which were printed and performed the last day.
In my group (consisting of Thorbjørn Becjman, Jürgen Bohm, Paola Crespi, Janis Jefferies, Trine Friis Sørensen and myself) we had DIY universities as our topic and somehow ended up creating a circular manual of “doing” as such inspired by Richard Serra’s Verb List from 1967-68. We literally read the verbs out loud, performed them, video recorded it and then asked others to interpret our movements thereby generating a new list of verbs. The new list of verbs was then performed, recorded, interpreted etc. creating a never ending manual translating verbs into action, actions into verbs and text into image, image into text.
The transformation of verbs to physical movements inspired Trine Friis Sørensen and I to translate the manual into the driving force of a workshop for the Mobilityshifts conference in October 2011 at the New School in New York. With a critical intention to question the discourse of the “educational turn”, which has influenced the European art scene the last decades, we decided to look at core texts from the discourse in terms of what verbs they use and thus what actions they ask us readers to perform. We were interested in asking if the sometimes abstract and idealistic theory, which we both are inspired of in our work, could be grounded and materialized in simply performing the verbs of the texts.
We chose to work with Jacques Ranciere’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, Irit Rogoff’s article “Turning”, Anton Vidokle’s “Exhibition as School: unitednationsplaza” and the text material from the Mobilityshifts conference itself. From these texts we chose central paragraphs and extracted the verbs into two verb lists. During the two hours we were scheduled to do the workshop we divided the participants into two groups, asked them to perform the verbs of one of the verb lists, recorded them doing it and swapped the videos for the other group to interpret their movements.
The reactions were many, some understood the concept without further questions and jumped easily into the exercise, others questioned everything. Roughly, some expected to learn a useful teaching method, others were happy staying with an open situation in which an experiment was being carried out and in which the means were more important than ends. Finally, we never really discussed the actual discourse of the “educational turn” (it was not clear how present this discourse was among the participants, we assumed that they were well informed as the conference material referred to initiatives considered part of it), but somehow we ended up performing it instead. To stay with the process and the means are key features of that discourse and this was what actually happened. One, who focused on the ends straight from the beginning and kept discussing what we were doing, was told by one of the others to “stop wanting to know everything beforehand”.
What we learnt from the workshop were two things. One, that on the one hand it takes something to make people go through a two hour session that is not focusing on results, but on the other hand that this situation carries a lot of potential. And two, that having had one more hour and having made the participants find the verbs themselves would have made the texts more present and the discussion of them potentially more open for realizations about the discourse.
One of the participants in the verb lists workshop was Mirene Arsanios, a friend and colleague who also participated in How to do things with academia and with whom I have been developing public reading and writing exercises during the past year. Being co-founder of 98weeks Project Space in Beirut she was invited by the ISCP to present 98weeks there during a one month residency. Mirene had asked me to do a talk with her and what we proposed was something about roles and relations in artistic research in relation to 98weeks. However, and more excited about trying out new ideas rather than cementing old ones, we decided to do an open and collective reading session to explore the mechanisms of reading desires and writing. Some 30 people gathered with the book they were reading at the moment and after a short introduction we sat reading in silence. Whenever one felt the urge to share some lines, one would go to the microphone and read out loud a paragraph. This was recorded and rules were simple. All the time one person had to be live archiving the event taking notes on a computer and one could swap books with another person, but then one had to go to two computers to take notes in a shared google document.
Unfortunately, we had to stop after an hour, because just at that moment the group found a rhythm, got hooked on writing and dived deep into the reading/writing experience. Afterward, while sharing the leftovers of the wine, we dreamt of doing this for hours on and on. With people coming and going, falling asleep, eating, smoking, drinking and sharing their often lonesome reading experience. There might be a chance we can do so in Copenhagen in March, if so, you are all invited.
Filed under: konversationpieces, Kunst / Art, texts, The Love Libration Movement
TEXT TASKS. A COLLECTIVE READING PERFORMANCE
Sunday, 6 November, 3PM, at the ISCP, New York
http://www.iscp-nyc.org/
Sidsel Nelund and Mirene Arsanios would like to invite you to reading performance on Sunday Nov. 6, at 3pm.
The performance will explore reading as a collective practice by proposing a series of tasks, to be carried out individually or in group. If you would like to join the performance simply bring the book (or any text) you are reading at the moment.
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For more info, see ISCP and e-flux
Filed under: Beirut, bla bla on writing and language, konversationpieces, Kunst / Art, notes on cph, texts, The Love Libration Movement
A while ago it was a Saturday afternoon. We wanted to go reading in a café. It got late, like 6 or 7, and we ordered some food and beers. We were three people, J, M and I. J was commenting a paper and writing in the margin. M was reading a book she had gotten from another M. I was reading Nelly Richard, a masterpiece; Margenes e Instituciones. As the local families left the café the younger generation of cph hipsters started entering. M and I invented a reading/writing exercise where we took notes of each our books in the same notebook mixing minds and sudden reflections. As the night came closer and the café turned into a going out place I felt increasingly uncomfortable. As if reading, writing and thinking were not appreciated in this party-collective-social-happy setting. I told M, who got a bit offended and claimed that it was because I was not absorbed enough in what I was doing and that first of all she would not operate with a distinction between the intellectual and society. That was what I had done, I had questioned the role of the intellectual in public space. Because the feeling of not being wanted there resonated with the lack of intellectuals in public opinion, the lack of time to listen to reflections and the lack of people reading books in public space in Denmark. Experts investigating specialized areas are not that hot.
A couple of days later we met again and something had happened, she gave me some texts about the role of the intellectual and we continued the discussion. Somehow we decided to think more about it. Do readings in different places and reflect about the text, the place it was being read out loud and the relation between them.
We didn’t have the time to carry out the experiment. But some weeks later we met up in Beirut and wanted to do yet another project, a summer exorcism, a ghost dance on a platform in a wasteland in-between highways, rubbish and houses. We didn’t have the time to that either, but had nevertheless decided to do something there the following Saturday at twilight. It ended up being a reading/sleeping interaction, just for us and the passersby. M tried to fall asleep and I tried to make her do so while reading a sort of random collage of fragments of texts. We sat there for and hour and a bit more. She never really fell asleep, it was full of nature, mosquitos, bats and bushes. Only guys passed by us, I could hear their steps as they climbed the stairs, crossed the platform and walked down. They didn’t approach us or gave us comments. Not until afterwards, when we had finished and were leaving through a nearby street. A guy whose steps we recognized made the classic coquette noises and interpellated us into heterosexual women in the street. Apparently, before that we had been something else and had had a situation that was not to be entered. Both our Saturday night intellectual-interventions were in that sense exclusive, which I cannot clearly identify as a problem, a consequence or just a mere fact that does not mean that the intervention did not resonate with its surrounding.
Film: Terror’s Advocate
When: 04.08.2011
Where: Vesterbro, Copenhagen
Who: Marianne, Honey’s friend, Joachim, Agus, Cathrine, Iben, Arendse, Oscar, Tina, Frauke, Peter, Karina, Marie, Honey and I
Why: In one week two incidents marked me one way or another. Tuesday July 19 I went to a meeting in the reading group “After Evil. A Politics of Transitional Justice” in Beirut and Friday Jule 22 a bomb exploded in the centre of Oslo and the brutal massacre took place in the nearby island, Utøya.
For the reading group we had to watch the documentary Terror’s Advocate and read chapter two in Robert Meister’s book After Evil: A Politics of Human Rights. The film adresses the complexity of terrorism through the controversial character of the lawyer Jacques Verges, who since the 1960′s has defended, among others, terrorists/freedom fighters, Second World War nazi war criminals and African dictators. On the one hand, we see Verges act against European consensus in an anti-colonial gesture (the documentary focuses especially on his strong ties with the resistance in Algeria and the Palestinian cause), but on the other hand he never succumbs to one discourse; the cases he defends simply do not add up to one homogeneous ideology.
A third point that came up in the reading group was how Verges aestheticizes law. This becomes visible when he openly talks about how he used the court room as a stage, as his stage. Two things that he himself underlines is that every person has the right to be defended and that he does not like individuals to be humiliated by a group in majority. If that were the case with his enemy, he would probably even defend him/her.
The chapter of Meister discusses the concept of winning in justice-as-reconciliation processes, the role of pain in human rights discourses, the (revolutionary) before and (the human rights) after 1989, and the relationship between victim, perpetrator and beneficiaries, among many other things. One point that is particularly interesting in this context is the uneasiness the unreconciled victim creates; the victim, who does not accept the reconciliation process and continues to struggle, maybe violently, and thus becomes a thread to the surrounding reconciliation consensus. On the one side there is the global and institutional discourse of human rights and on the other side there is the thread of the possible agency of one person or a group when acting on their own means and not through established political channels.
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There do not seem to be many links between the incidents in Oslo and Utøya and the film + the chapter discussed above. However, there are some affinities in precisely the act of reacting with violence to a political situation you do not agree with. That is probably why we are so disgusted by the Norwegian case, because it shows the uncontrollable rage that exists impersonated in our society by some extremist persons and groups.
When I wanted to screen Terror’s Advocate in my house in the light of what happened in Norway it was because I missed a historical and reflexive level in the media coverage and debate. And thus I felt a need, within the momentum, to exchange with friends and colleagues about what had happened. But not directly, because that seemed to close the discussion in disgusted wonder of how one can show such detachment as to cold-bloodedly kill young people face to face. The discussion we had was quietly reflexive, probably weighted down by the ungraspable nature of the Norwegian case and history of repression, resistance and political/diplomatic relations between Europe and the Middle East that the film reminded us about. We didn’t by far reach a conclusion, apart from sharing the desire to discuss and reflect. This may be the pacifist agency we can show right now. And in the context of Denmark something we ought to show having elections coming soon.
Back in December last year Florencia Grisanti, Aymara Zegers and I started working on the exhibition Ensayo Bífido. The exhibition itself took place in August 2010 in a gallery in Santiago, but consisted of 3 stages of documentation of a performative act made elsewhere by Florencia and Aymara in an laboratory of anatomy in the University of Chile.
Step one consisted of two opposite video projections showing closeups and in real time with clean sound the hands of Florencia and Aymara working in the laboratory of anatomy. For a week we recorded one session a day that was showed the subsequent day in the gallery. During this stage of the exhibit I was mainly working in the laboratory documenting the performative act in the form of written documents.
Step two was marked by the ending of the recordings in the laboratory and the exhibition of the objects Florencia and Aymara had made during the previous week. The objects were exhibited in two glass cabinets from the laboratory and the video recordings were now projected unto the table they worked at in the laboratory. During this stage I unfortunately had to go to Denmark from where I reflected upon the experience and wrote an epilogue.
Step three consists of a publication with the Spanish title Vademécum, which is a handbook used by doctors. Vade mecum is latin and means “go with me”. The format of the vade mecum had been chosen for a while and the reason why I created written documents of the performative act was to mime the documents of a scientific vade mecum.
Finally, the Vademécum took the form of 26 photographs consisting of 2 stills from each video and close up photographs of the glass cabinets. On the back side of the photographs you find the written documents as an interweaving narrative that, however, does not always correspond with the photographs, thus creating an extra layer of imagination about the actions, objects, and atmospheres of the room in which the performative act took place.
Filed under: Beirut, bla bla on writing and language, konversationpieces, Kunst / Art
How it all started:
konversationpieces is a series of performative conversations developed in response to Home Works V, in Beirut April 2010. Every day, nearly, meeting points will be announced and scheduled in specific locations across the city as spaces of conversation where to debate Home Works’ program. konversationpieces wants to tackle conversations’ potential to initiate critical debate within the contingency of a specific moment, space, and crowd.
To participate you need just to be, there. For exact information, please email your Lebanese cell phone number to nelund@gmail.com or mirenearsanios@gmail.com and you will receive information about meeting points and time from day to day.
The above is taken from konversationpieces.wordpress.com and responded to a desire we (Mirene Arsanios, Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld and Sidsel Nelund) have felt during previous Home Works’ and other intellectual events or conferences: a desire to discuss in informal settings and also with people who do not necessarily raise their voice in Q&As. After several engendering conversations during Home Works 5 in April 2010 we still desire to continue our conversation and aim at creating enigmatic capsules for experiment and thought-provocation in the future.
