Call for applications: CCC Research Practices, Master and PhD-Forum in Visual Arts

“They broke the limiter.” Ashley Too in Black Mirror, 2019 

What can art/research do for us to be in this world all the way to the end of it, as Fred Moten suggests, because there is another world in this world, and beyond this world? 

Our locations of knowledge, geopolitics of art-making and the spectrum of cognition have changed and continue to change profoundly. Our chrono-politics of remembering and trans-generational desires for a better world put more and more pressure on imperial-normative orders. 

The CCC Research Program, Master Program and PhD-Forum, of the Visual Arts Department at HEAD Genève is specialized in working on project-specific research practices by means of contemporary art, welcoming a trans-continental group of students. 

The CCC RP Master accepts applicants from art- and non-art backgrounds to submit a dossier for the study year of 2020/21. During two years, the multi-part curriculum provides an environment for students to advance research methods by the means of art. The CCCRP Master’s main objectives are to train students in developing their own voice, to learn to think in long-term processes, to flesh out an idea from thought to public display, to materialize the research project as a network of practices, and to build a research community as well as a project-library beyond graduation. 

Students may develop their research project as a curatorial mobilization, art installation, exhibition, research display, archival intervention, an essay film or desktop-documentary, performance lecture, storytelling, book publishing, astrological chart, a project space, cross-screen collaborations, digital platform, online application, academic or poetic writings, a reading group, creative hang-outs, QTPOC initiatives, a DJ-set, etc. The program offers a series of group-projects for training the students to engage, commit and respond to a given frame in three main fields of the CCCRP: Critical Studies, Curatorial Politics, Cybernetic Theory Fiction. 

Current projects 
The exhibition the many voices of “les indiennes”, January 16 to February 22, 2020, at LiveInYourHead, Visual Arts exhibition space on Rue de Hesse 5, CH-1204 Geneva. Conceptualized by students of the Curatorial/Politics seminar since 2018, the many voices of “​les indiennes”​ is a research-exhibition ​​that studies the visual culture of a colonial textile practice as infrastructure of ​racial capitalism ​in relation to contemporary questions of technology, violence, education, art and global trade. The exhibition’s objective is to contribute to the decolonization of the contemporary arts in the 21s​t century condition. 

A curatorial intervention by students of the CCC Research-based Master, for the exhibition of LaToya Ruby Frazier at Centre de la photographie in Genève, February 12 to March 11, 2020, consisting of a collectively written Letter to Angela Davis, a screening for discussion with Kodwo Eshun—artist, theorist and co-founder of The Otolith Group—on February 25, 2020, and a CCConversation on March 5, 2020. 

A study trip to “Defiant Muses. Delphine Seyrig and the Feminist Video Collectives in France in the 1970s and 1980s,” exhibition curated by Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez (regular CCC-guest) and Giovanna Zapperi, at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid.

The Earthseed Project developed by the students of the Cybernetic Theory Fiction seminar 2019/20, is third in a series of artistic research projects that departs from the writings of Octavia Estelle Butler. The Earthseed Project is based on the collective reading of Butler’s novel The Parable of the Sower leading to the public mobilization of the future religion of Earthseed: The Books of the Living, developed from 2024 to 2027 by the eighteen-year old Lauren Olamina. 

This academic year, the ongoing CCC Public Seminar is organized by the Critical Studies seminar, which sets out to rethink the places of contemporary art in social, political, and planetary crisis. Upcoming dates are March 30, 2020 with Angela Dimitrakaki and May 19, 2020 with Anne Garland Mahler, each starting at 7pm, room 27, HEAD on 9 Boulevard Helvétique, CH-1205 Geneva. Open to everyone!

CCC Public Seminars since 2016 with Kader Attia, Zach Blas, Marina Fokidis, Pierre Hazan, Michael Marder, Andreas Philips, Ana Teixeira Pinto, Patricia Reed, Susan Schuppli, Françoise Vergès, a.o. are online.  

Further insights into constellations, conceptualizations and contemporaries: #ccchead

Team: Doreen Mende (Head of Program and seminar Curatorial/Politics), Çağla Aykaç (Research Writing Seminar), Kodwo Eshun (Cybernetic Theory Fiction), Anselm Franke (PhD-Forum), Dora García (Situated Art Practices II), Gene Ray (Critical Studies), Anne-Julie Raccoursier (Situated Art Practices I), Camilla Paolino and Julia Pecheur (Program Assistants, Reading Group). 

Guests: Ramon Amaro, Mabe Bethônico, Ursula Biemann, Zach Blas, Johanna Bruckner, Ghalas Charara, Camille Dumond, Övül Durmuşoğlu, Christine Eyene, Charles Heller, Samia Henni, Noémi Michel, Maria Lind, Julie Marmet, Callisto McNulty, Samaneh Moafi, Bahar Noorizadeh, farid rakun/ruangrupa, Aarti Sunder, a.o. 

Further Alliances: Biennale Internationale de Casablanca; La Source de Lion in Casablanca; Harun Farocki Institut in Berlin; BLOCC live; G.A.R.A.G.E. in Geneva; one gee in fog in Chêne-Bourg; a.o. 

The CCC Research Practices (CCC RP), Master and PhD-Forum, facilitates currently the SNFS-funded research project Decolonizing Socialism. Entangled Internationalism (2019–2023) at l’Institute de Recherche en art et design (l’IRAD) of HEAD Genève in collaboration with University Basel / Media Studies and Urban Studies Department, Van Abbe Museum Eindhoven and House of the World Cultures in Berlin. 

The CCC RP is affiliated with the European Forum for Advanced Practices funded by COST 2020. 

Founded at HEAD Genève in the French-speaking part of Switzerland during the late 1990s after the model of an Independent Study Program, the CCC Research Practices (CCC RP), Master and PhD-Forum, in Visual Arts provides a substantial archive of research practices in the arts that fosters an environment for students in Higher Art Education to contribute to, share and update ongoing debates in the field. The Program’s mission is committed to questions of technology, politics, race, gender, labor and knowledge with regard to productive localities in relation to global infrastructures. Pedagogical approaches are informed by feminist thought, Black radical studies, the need for decolonizing our minds, Marxist theory and alter-/modernities in the geographies and time-zones of the arts. Much remains to be done. 

Contact: ccc.head [​at​] hesge.ch

Application will be accepted by online submission only.