Take a Walk on the Wild Side—Fabulating Alternative Imaginaries in Art & Life

Four-day conference-festival organized by Studium Generale Rietveld Academie with guest curators Kunstverein, Hypatia Vourloumis, Daniela Rosner and Tavia Nyong’o, who each inaugurate a discursive and performative study day with practices of critical fabulation in art, design and theory.

The conference-festival is an invitation to “take a walk on the wild side,” and to regard fabulation—in the sense of fabricating the real, world-making or speculative fiction—as an artistic, social and political capacity. By making use of the fictional, critical fabulation in art, literature or theory can produce or uncover visions, histories and stories that are radically discontinuous from official and dominant narratives about our lives and living together. By bringing the unthinkable and silenced into representation, fabulation can be a way or methodology to enter the wild side: a space for what lies beyond current systems and structures of rule.

March 27
Vernissage featuring Rietveld Uncut, an annual joint presentation of art projects by the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, forming an ongoing setting for the symposium.

March 27
Kunstverein/Maxine Kopsa, “Take a deep breath”
Take this day as a remedy, a retreat, a parachute drop out of frippery and pseudo-fame trappings. Take this day as a day of experiences, involvements, encounters, occurrences, friendship, digital avoidances, first person accounts, parallel perceptions, alternative languages and song. In waves and ribbons, and transitions, accompanied by silences and lights. A stroll with Alice Chauchat and Raimundas Malašauskas. Listening to time travel with Rosalind Nashashibi. Encountering “a misdirected weeping angel within a close proximity communication method” hosted by Austin Redman. Dancing, swaying and being involved in the occasion of Isabel Lewis. Topped emotionally with a ballad song to you by Mark Buckeridge.

Participants: Mark Buckeridge, Alice Chauchat, Dario Dezfuli, Isabel Lewis, Raimundas Malašauskas, Heleen Mineur, Rosalind Nashashibi, Austin Redman.

March 28
Hypatia Vourloumis, “Excess Swarm (Wild in the Wild)”
The presentations and performances on this day of study will delve into the aesthetic practices and unruly visions of queer diaspora, sensual excess and brown jouissance, the poetics of emergent aberrations, the magic of science and the intertwining of neurodiverse sensory circuits, futurisms and distorted constellations, the love song, anticolonial time, and the dancing of things and nothingness.

Participants: Nwando Ebizie, Gayatri Gopinath, Malak Helmy (with Janine Armin), Monsur Mansoor, Amber Jamilla Musser, Sandra Ruiz, Jackie Wang.

March 29
Daniela Rosner, “Who Gets to Future?”
Rather than position the past as a stable precursor to the present, or view the future as a progressive march to the finish, the artists, scholars and activists in this session materialize stories to challenge teleologies of innovation, reworking who and what are made to matter. Across lectures, screenings and performances they weave feminist speculation into critical rereadings, drawing out a ‘techno-affect of attunement’, curtailing relations of domination.

Participants: Shaowen Bardzell, Åsa Ståhl/ Kristina Lindström, Priscilla Telmon / Vincent Moon, Sarah Sharma. 

March 30
Tavia Nyong’o, “Dark as the Door to a Dream”
This study day explores the aesthetics practices of Afro-surrealism through a kaleidoscope of feminist, queer and trans* optics. We seek to decolonize surrealism from the Eurocentric frame of art history and colonial anthropology and look expansively at black (and blak) art forms that take on the fantastical, the mythical and the otherworldly. Resisting institutional and intellectual tendencies to separate blackness and indigeneity, we wish to reconnect Afro-surrealism to a planet-spanning archipelago of freedom dreams, fugitive escapades and dissident genders. We are interested in how the often obscene hallucinatory reality of blak (and black) life can inform art in form and content, and help us re-envision what we mean by freedom and selfhood.

Participants: Tina Campt, Jayna Brown, Luke Willis Thompson, Naima Ramos Chapman, Tiona Nekkia McCLodden.   

Framework
Studium Generale Rietveld Academie, an exploratory theory programme aimed at all departments, open to the public.

Chief curator: Jorinde Seijdel
Coordinator: Jort van der Laan