Propositions #12: Waves Breaking Walls, Futures in Movement

BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht, proudly invites you to Propositions #12: Waves Breaking Walls, Futures in Movement, a culmination of the BAK 2019/2020 Fellowship Program. In the course of the past year, the Fellows individually and collectively developed their research engaging with the pressing issues of the contemporary in concert with BAK’s research focus, Propositions for Non-Fascist Living (2017–ongoing). Propositions #12 synthesizes the research and learning trajectory of the Fellowship and addresses it through “an acoustic choreography.” Consisting of a series of experimental scenes presented in four acts, devised by one or more of the Fellows through direct and indirect collaborations, this acoustic choreography includes sonic works, radio plays, music, interviews, conversations, and more. Breaking out of spatial constraints through the use of a radio broadcast, streaming, and collaboration across distance, Propositions #12 can be attended physically at BAK in small groups, listened to online, or tuned into via FM radio (via broadcast.fm).

The Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns have caused a loss of “the spatial” as we know it. Social distancing and dangers that come with a physical co-presence opened up new questions as to how to collectively resist the divides and massive inequalities in the world. If these conditions have been met with an even stronger collective resistance, it is because new approaches had to be opened, leading to changes in duration, sensation, and thus the texture of collectivity. In making this program with BAK, the Fellows embrace the anxiety that distance creates and intensifies and seek to put forward propositions for proximity beyond physicality. Using science fiction as a speculative form of reimagining presents, pasts, and futures, the Fellows foreground the concept of the wave as a unique form of movement and materiality. The tradition of “the spatial” gives way to “the sonic” in sound waves, in which forms of being together otherwise allow the emergence of other ways of assembling. The scenes in Propositions #12 “sonify” visions, practices, and forms of being-in-common, unlocking different potentialities to “re-group”: as new ways of returning to each other in times of social change.

Propositions #12: Waves Breaking Walls, Futures in Movement is the 12th iteration of BAK’s long-term research series Propositions for Non-Fascist Living (2017–ongoing), which seeks to collectively think and act out ways of being together otherwise. It follows Propositions #10: Instituting Otherwise, as Propositions #11 was lost to the circumstances surrounding the outbreak of Covid-19.

A complete schedule of the acts and scenes can be found here. The entire program, taking place from 12–9:45pm, is broadcast and streamed via Reboot.fm, Berlin. For the first three acts, limited in-person spots are available: please book your tickets via Eventbrite.

BAK 2019/2020 Fellows include Mijke van der Drift (philosopher and educator; Amsterdam and London); Mitchell Esajas (anthropologist and curator; Amsterdam); Katia Krupennikova (curator and critic; Amsterdam); Diana McCarty (independent media producer; Berlin); David Muñoz Alcántara (artist, architect, and researcher; Helsinki); Oleksiy Radynski (filmmaker and writer; Kyiv); Reem Shilleh (researcher, curator, editor, and artist; Brussels and Ramallah); Urok Shirhan (artist and researcher; Utrecht); Joy Mariama Smith (performance, installation, and movement artist and educator; Amsterdam); and Grant Watson (curator; London).

Since 2017, BAK conducts a post-academic Fellowship Program with, at its center, research on reframing and rethinking conditions of the contemporary through politically driven art-making and inquiry. The Fellowship Program offers research positions to Netherlands- and internationally-based practitioners at the intersection of art, theory, and social action, with specific affinity to BAK’s current trajectory Propositions for Non-Fascist Living (2017–ongoing), which engages aesthetico-political experimentation to engage the urgencies of the present. The Fellowship Program develops talent and critical practice, and fosters artistic and theoretical inquiry in concert with the public projects of BAK, advancing the notion of art as a public sphere and a political space.

The realization of this project has been made possible through financial contributions by the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science and the City Council, Utrecht.

BAK’s main partner in the field of education and research is HKU University of the Arts Utrecht.