Art Lives in the Age of Global Transition
Conference – festival
12–16 March 2012
www.wearethetime.info
www.rietveldacademie.nl
Life experience is always generated as the intersection between the personal rhythm of one’s life and the larger societal perspective. How do we position ourselves in time? How do we weave the historical moment into our life-narratives?
From Tahrir Square to Occupy Wall Street, we are witnessing a worldwide desire for transition, but its direction is still open. The network condition we live in, offers unprecedented possibilities to have simultaneous and multiple perspectives on events with social and historical significance. This implies a very different mode of historicizing, of writing down our memories. It is in this vortex of eventfulness we have to find ourselves again.
Monday March 12:
WORLD QUESTION CENTER REDUX
World Question Center Redux will constitute the performative prologue to four days of curated lecture-programs. We will look back at the questions that James Lee Byars collected in 1968 and merge them with ours, produced live on stage. With sweeping interventions by Koen Brams and Jonathan Dronsfield.
Tuesday March 13:
THE RESEARCH ON/OF PROTEST
Curator Aneta Szyłak asks how artists are implicated in the conditionof the academy. Hiwa K speaks about modifying the academy from within. Franco Berardi explains why we have to reinvent autonomy. Irit Rogoff explores the role of self-education in global resistance movements. Miguel Robles-Duran contributes insider knowledge on spatial organization and circulation of speech in the Occupy Wall Street movement. Plus an open rehearsal of the Chicago Boys While We Were Singing They Were Dreaming – 1970s revival band and research group on the neoliberal concept that shaped the reality questioned today.
Wednesday March 14:
HOW WE BEHAVE
Curator Grant Watson explores Foucault’s proposition that life can resemble a work of art. Couldn’t everyone’s life become a work of art? David Daboso introduces Foucault’s epistemology. Foucault’s interview “How we behave” from 1983 is restaged in collaboration with If I Can’t Dance. Adrian Rifkin talks about the aesthetics of being a Maoist, drawing on aspects of his own biography. AA Bronson will discuss Foucault’s concept folding together professional and biographical categories. Yael Davids develops with the audience, ideas about listening, recording and speaking.
Thursday March 31:
EXTREME MAKEOVER
Curator Jorinde Seijdel asks why radical forms of makeover are imagined and practiced so abundantly today. What kind of new ‘forms of life’ are produced ? And how do these appear with art and artists? Miya Yoshida points at the amateur; Anneke Smelik at the ideal of the hairless body. Boris Groys expands about the transformation of oneself into an image of universality, while Camiel van Winkel considers the white cube as the proper structure for a reinvention of the figure of the artist. Heath Bunting and his Identity Bureau challenge the idea of personhood all together.
Friday March 16:
I TOLD YOU SO
Curator Alfredo Cramerotti asks what the relationship between gossip and the history books is. Or between a general election and eternity. In response Cathy Haynes explores the improbabilities of temporal cartography; Tai Shani presents ‘ registers’ of representation and an over-identifying actress. Sally O’Reilly demonstrates the alien nature of historical speeches and Fay Nicholson digs up un-archived legacies of art education.
All Week:
SHADOW CABINETS
In between lectures and performances we invite you to the shady places of the Rietveld Academie. The shadow is the night during the day. The space where alternatives can be nurtured until they are ready to step into the light. Here you will find the Pirate Cinema for Historical Contextualization, the F.I.R.E.I.N.C.A.I.R.O. radio station, a Soul Rebel Movement poetry workshop, a The Living Rooms discussion, a 3 hour lecture on film title design by Albert Wulffers, a search into the Metaphysics of Youth, We Are Neighbors (of the Rietveld Academie) and a Magic Mauss hunt.
Framework & concept WE ARE THE TIME: Gabriëlle Schleijpen, together with Alena Alexandrova, Jort van der Laan, Anna Hoetjes, Joris Lindhout.
MORE at: wearethetime.info
