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Curating on the move
Commoning Curatorial and Artistic Education
Summer School and Public Talk series
23 June – 7 July 2022
at CAMP notes on education, documenta fifteen, Kassel, Germany
A format of the cooperation platform Shared Campus
www.zhdk.ch/en/international/shared-campus
Organization: Dorothee Richter, Ronald Kolb (Initiators, ZHdK)
with Cedric Maridet (HKBU), ZHENG Bo (SCM), Alison GREEN (UAL), Yatin LIN (TNUA)
In Cooperation with
– the Postgraduate Programme in Curating, ZHdK: www.curating.org
– publication platform Oncurating.org: www.oncurating.org
– the PhD in Practice in Curating, Practice-Based Doctoral Programme,University of Reading
– Artis
Summer School
The two-week Summer School “Commoning Curatorial and Artistic Education” will be held in Kassel (Germany) as part of documenta fifteen’s educational format “CAMP notes on education.” It is dedicated to PhD programmes and students from the Shared Campus universities, however a few slots are kept open for external participants.
Participants will share and discuss their experiences of practice and theory in open, experiential workshop formats, performances, exercises with and in the city, “diversity dinners” and a variety of events.
Public Talks
Additionally the Summer School will organise a public talk each day, at 1pm CET in hybrid form.
If not otherwise declared, the talks will be in the spaces of CAMP notes on education, Hafenstraße 76, Kassel, 2nd floor.
You will find a detailed schedule below.
Thu 23 June: Hammad Nasar
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Fri 24 June: COMMON VIEWS, David Behar Perahia & Dan Farberoff
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Sat 25 June: Jennifer Deger (FERAL ATLAS)
Sun 26 June: Sandy Hsiu-chih Lo & Hongjohn Lin
Location: GUDSKUL Area, Fridericianum
Mon 27 June: Gilly Karjevsky (Floating University)
Location: Rotunde, Fridericianum
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Tues 28 June: Philip Horst & Matthias Einhoff (ZKU, Center for Art and Urbanistics)
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Wed 29 June: Speculations on Funding (Day-long Symposium).
Detailed information here: https://on-curating.org/issue-funding.html
Fri 1 July: Bassam El Baroni (via Zoom)
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Sat 2 July: Avi Feldman
Sun 3 July: Ariane Sutthavong & Lara van Meeteren (Inappropriate BOOK CLUB, Bangkok 2021)
Mon 4 July: Jeanne van Heeswijk
Location: ruruhaus, Underground
Tue 5 July: Dagmar Pelger & Jörg Stollmann
Location: ruruhaus, Underground
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Wed 6 July: Public Movement / Dana Yahalomi
Location: ruruhaus, Underground
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Thu 7 July: Oliver Marchart
Location: ruruhaus, Underground
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Abstract
The two-week Summer School “Commoning Curatorial and Artistic Education” will be held in Kassel (Germany) as part of documenta fifteen’s educational format “CAMP notes on education.” It is dedicated to PhD programmes and students from the Shared Campus universities, however a few slots are kept open for external participants.
Participants will share and discuss their experiences of practice and theory in open, experiential workshop formats, performances, exercises with and in the city, “diversity dinners” and a variety of events.
Joseph Beuys’ open discussions with the public were influential at documenta; later, Jacques Derrida wrote “The University without Condition,” and Paulo Freire emphasised the empowering role of teaching, as did bell hooks with her emphatic message about the empowering force of an anti-racist, feminist education fuelled by love. Lesser known emancipatory teaching environments also exist, as do self-empowering initiatives. Concerning the commoning aspect of this Summer School, we consider theoretical approaches as by the feminist thinker Silvia Federici. She identified commons as the shared goods and knowledges of deviant groups. A renewed thinking about the commons is linked to movements of self-organisation and resistance and is now inspiring, as we see with ruangrupa, different cultural, artistic, and curatorial events. Can the art field introduce together with activist movements, the projection of living together in a communal way, sharing resources and knowledges? Or as ruangrupa would pose the question: how to compost knowledge together and make it fruitful for a multiplicity of partial practices and for a multitude?
Applicants are asked to send in a proposal for a shared moment: workshop, walk, performance, discussion, reading, etc. Based on these proposals, the organization team will co-design the programme. True to the motto of this Summer School, commoning starts here.
Schedule Public Talks
Thu 23 June: Hammad Nasar.
Please register here for online attendance.
Exhibiting Collectivity | Collective Exhibitions
In my presentation I will use the experience of two recent exhibitions – Turner Prize (2021) and the ongoing British Art Show 9 (2021-22) – to consider the challenges of working with collectives and collectivity in contemporary art exhibitions.
Hammad Nasar is a curator, writer, researcher, and strategic advisor. His most recent exhibitions include British Art Show 9 (2021-22), Turner Prize (2021) and Rock, Paper, Scissors: Positions in Play – the UAE’s pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale (2017). He is presently Senior Research Fellow, Paul Mellon Centre (London) and Lead Curator, Herbert Art Gallery & Museum (Coventry). Earlier, he was Executive Director of the Stuart Hall Foundation, London; Head of Research & Programmes at Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong; Principal Research Fellow, UAL Decolonising Arts Institute, and, co-founded Green Cardamom, London. He advises numerous arts organisations internationally, and is a Board Member of the Henry Moore Foundation (UK) and Mophradat (Belgium).
Fri 24 June: COMMON VIEWS, David Behar Perahia & Dan Farberoff.
Please register here for online attendance.
Commoning: Environmental Reconciliation in the Work of Common Views
Common Views present their methodology, of applying a commoning perspective and a social-ecological re-framing of contested issues within the context of arts engagement. They explore how this methodology has evolved over the course of their projects, beginning with their work with Bedouin communities in the Negev desert and continuing with projects in Poland and Germany.
The Common Views collective, formed in 2019 by artists David Behar Perahia and Dan Farberoff, conduct process-based, site-specific projects, addressing contested issues in local context, within a wider social-ecological, commoning perspective. Previous Common Views projects have taken place in the Middle East and in Europe, with upcoming ones planned in Africa and South America.
commonviews.art
Sat 25 June: Jennifer Deger (FERAL ATLAS).
Please register here for online attendance.
Collaborative formations: the Feral Atlas Experiment
Why do collaborative and collective knowledge practices matter more than ever in the Anthropocene? What role do curators have to play in giving form to such possibilities? Co-curator, Jennifer Deger will discuss the making of Feral Atlas, a deliberately layered and sometimes discordant approach to apprehending the Anthropocene in formation. With digital exuberance the atlas holds onto the value of place-based evidence, embracing profoundly different genres and traditions of knowledge to promote composite perspectives and communities of practice—without imposing hierarchies of value and truth from afar.
Jennifer Deger is co-curator of Feral Atlas: the More-than-Human Anthropocene www.feralatlas.org and a Professor of Digital Humanities at Charles Darwin University. She is a founding member of Miyarrka Media, an intercultural arts group based in northern Australia (https://miyarrkamedia.com) and curatorium collective (https://www.instagram.com/c_cltv/), an intergenerational effort to wade through the intertidal zones of art and anthropology.
Sun 26 June: Sandy Hsiu-chih Lo & Hongjohn Lin.
Please register here for online attendance.
Location: GUDSKUL Area, Fridericianum
“Multiple Heterogeneous Alliances and Endosymbiosis”
This event will be conducted by Hongjohn Lin and Sandy Hsiu-chih Lo with guest speakers from Gudskul and other Lumbung members. It’s a part of “Summer School: Commoning Curatorial and Artistic Education.”
At a time of urgent awareness of the epistemological and ontological issues at stake in contemporary artistic knowledge production, the theme of the documenta fifteen “Lumbung” is an ambitious statement of a progressive expansion of the collective based on its connotation of a social space and a platform for sharing public resources, which in turn retroactively defines what the common is. The meeting is to create a collective discursive situation, which is much similar to the “Lumbung” strategies, embodying multiple heterogeneous alliances and endosymbiosis from within. Through communing the knowledge for the plural epistemologies yet to come, can articulate the marginalized disobedient practitioners and collectives.
The Lumbung members and the Gudskul collectives are groups that have been established for years in their respective regions and countries. In this event, we invite artists, curators, and cultural workers to address the issues on the global Lumbung: How is it possible to negotiate the contradictions in various fields such as knowledge, conviction, politics, and ethics among collectives, and individuals within the collectives? How is it possible to propose the regeneration of episteme and translate the issues uncovered by different perspectives of epistemology into political incentives to challenge the dominant knowledge and practices of existing hegemonic systems? More importantly, how can the participating collectives transform exhibitions and events such as the documenta fifteen into an act of empowerment to allow art to regain its political potential?
Sandy Lo Hsiu-chih lives in New Taipei City, Taiwan, and works as an independent curator, art critic, film critic and filmmaker. Her main research areas include urban studies, philosophical construction of space, gender politics, contemporaneity of indigenous art, and situated knowledge. Curating topography, a curatorial practice method that she has actively used in recent years, uses relative and relational spatial concepts to bring to light different cultural concepts in the pluralistic dialectic concept of place in order to strengthen political and ethical transformation in the becoming of place. She is the co-host of the bilingual online journal “Curatography” which focuses on the study of curatorship in Asia.
Mon 27 June: Gilly Karjevsky (Floating University).
Please register here for online attendance.
Location: Rotunde, Fridericianum
Gilly Karjevsky will talk about the Floating e.V., a self-organised space and group– situated in Berlin Tempelhof, Germany –, where practitioners from a wide range of backgrounds meet to collaborate, co-create and imaginatively work towards futures by what they call Fields of Knowledge and Action: from maintaining and developing the site to gardening, cultivating collaborations and taking care of neighborhood connections.
Gilly Karjevsky is an independent curator who works at the intersection of the ethics of care and the curatorial, looking at languages of practice in relation to site and situation. She is a founding member of Soft Agency and developed the collaborative lexicon process Silent Conversation. Karjevsky lectures internationally and her writings have been published in numerous publications. She is the editor of a forthcoming publication about 72 Hour Urban Action, whose co-director she is.
Tues 28 June: Philip Horst & Matthias Einhoff (ZKU, Center for Art and Urbanistics).
Please register here for online attendance.
Citizenship
In June–July 2022, the Center for Art and Urbanistics (ZK/U) literally raises the roof of its home base in Berlin, and then sail in it to documenta fifteen—a trip of 650 km, fueled entirely by people power! At circa forty stopover points en route to Kassel, the crew and locals have ample opportunities to pool their knowledge, share their schemes for planetary survival, and enjoy a diverse program of events https://citizenship.zku-berlin.org/about
Philip Horst is a visual artist. He is co-founder/director of the artist collective KUNSTrePUBLIK (2006), ZK/U: Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik (2012), as well as founding member of the initiative Haus der Statistik am Alexanderplatz (2017) in Berlin.
Matthias Einhoff is co-founder and director of ZKU – Center for Arts and Urbanistics (www.zku-berlin.org), as member of artist collective KUNSTrePUBLIK he has been working in the public sphere exploring the potentials of art to (re)activate social and spatial relationships of individuals and groups usually divided. Matthias is a board member of Haus der Statistik (www.hausderstatistik.org), he is co-moderating the process and has co-directed ‚Statista’ (www.allesandersplatz.berlin/en/).
Wed 29 June: Speculations on Funding (Day-long Symposium on-site only).
Detailed information here: https://on-curating.org/issue-funding.html
Places are limited: Please register here for on-site attendace.
Fri 1 July: Bassam El Baroni (via Zoom)
Please register here for online attendance.
Inclusionary Effects
The talk’s starting point is curator and theorist Stephanie Bertrand’s observation that “curating’s inclusionary effects create a shortcut between cultural inclusion and social inclusion”. Which is to say that access to representation of marginalised cultures and their visibility through the sphere of art (cultural inclusion) does not sufficiently translate to access to wealth, resources, and opportunities (social inclusion). How can artists, curators, museums, exhibitions, and programmes address this shortcut to rethink the inclusionary effects they produce? To tackle this, art’s relationship with speculation is discussed, bringing in the concept of ‘leveraging’ as key to thinking how practices may pursue a shift from positing an agenda by imagining the world otherwise, to actioning that agenda by capturing a world and translating it into a set of organisational processes embedded into representations and modes of working.
Bassam El Baroni is associate professor in curating at the School of Arts, Design and Architecture, Aalto University, Finland. Formerly, he has lectured at the Dutch Art Institute, ArtEZ University of the Arts, Arnhem and was artistic director of the now folded non-profit art space ACAF – Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum in Alexandria, Egypt (2005–2012). His current research engages with financialization in relation to artistic practices, artists’ engagement with infrastructural futures and histories, and new forms of artist-led activism. Recent curatorial projects include: Infrahauntologies at the Edith-Russ-Haus for Media Art, Oldenburg, Germany, and La Box, ENSA Bourges, France (2021, 2022). He is the author of various essays on artists, art and curating, and editor of Between the Material and the Possible: Infrastructural Re-examination and Speculation in Art (Sternberg Press and Edith Russ Haus, 2022) and co-editor, together with Ida Soulard and Abinadi Meza, of Manual for a Future Desert (Mousse Publishing, 2021).
Sat 2 July: Avi Feldman.
Please register here for online attendance.
What’s Law Got To Do With That: On the Irrelevance of Law
From the Dada trial of Maurice Barrès (1921) to facial recognition systems in the era of surveillance capitalism, the talk will denote the space and role of legal systems, and conclude by seeking ways in which to act.
Dr. Avi Feldman is the founder of The Agency for Legal Imagination, an independent organization devoted to the investigation of existing and potential relations between legal and artistic imagination, and between visual activism and legal activism. Since 2019, Feldman has been the director of Wannsee Contemporary.
Sun 3 July: Ariane Sutthavong & Lara van Meeteren (Inappropriate BOOK CLUB, Bangkok 2021).
Please register here for online attendance.
Not (quite) your Utopia: On the ideological flexibility of the common(s)
Ariane Sutthavong & Lara van Meeteren (inappropriate BOOK CLUB) in discussion with Lee Anantawat
Ariane Sutthavong, Lara van Meeteren and Lee Anantawat critically examine the concept of the common, speaking from Thailand’s authoritarian, late capitalist context. Ariane and La-ra’s contribution is informed by their experience with organising the inappropriate BOOK CLUB in Bangkok in 2021 (a commoning initiative in the setting of the Bangkok Biennial dis-cussing art and politics), as well as by research into the history of common (educational) organising in Thailand. At the core of these engagements is a critical approach that sees the common as a third domain of social organising next to the state and the market. How-ever, experience suggests that this third domain of the common is not inherently ‘good’ or ‘inclusive’. Instead, we argue that the common is ‘ideologically flexible’, as it can support various positions. We make these arguments through a discussion of both counter-hegemonic common (art) initiatives, as well as anti-democratic initiatives that have sup-ported the existing hegemony in Thailand over the past decades. In conversation with Lee, art educator and common organiser behind the Bangkok Biennial and the We Take Care of Ourselves group amongst other things, we explore the consequences of these issues for Thailand. In the process, we will also reflect on the increasingly problematic role of art schools and institutions.
Ariane Sutthavong is involved in curation, writing and translation projects at the intersection of art and politics in Bangkok and London.
Lara van Meeteren lives and works in Hong Kong and Bangkok. She conducts research, writes and co-organises projects. Aiming to make the political nature of art and its events and institutions visible, in her work Lara explores the idea of contemporary art as counter-hegemonic practice. Together with Bart Wissink and Sina Wittayawiroj, Ariane and Lara have founded the inappropriate BOOK CLUB, an ongoing common-based initiative focusing on art and politics.
Lee Anantawat lives and works in Bangkok. She co-founded independent art space Speedy Grandma in 2012 to support local and international artists, and set an alternative for the Thai contemporary art scene. In 2018, with Jeff Gompertz and Liam Morgan, she founded the Bangkok Biennial, an art biennial challenging the ‘authority of access’ to representation in art and curatorial practices. Lee works as a full-time instructor in the communication design programme at the School of Architecture and Design, King Mongkut University of Technology Thonburi. She focuses on finding ways out of capitalism through teaching.
Mon 4 July: Jeanne van Heeswijk.
Please register here for online attendance.
Location: ruruhaus, Underground
Jeanne van Heeswijk is an artist who facilitates the creation of dynamic and diversified public spaces in order to “radicalize the local”. Her long-scale community-embedded projects question art’s autonomy by combining performative actions, discussions, and other forms of organizing and pedagogy in order to assist communities to take control of their own futures.
Tue 5 July: Dagmar Pelger & Jörg Stollmann.
Please register here for online attendance.
Location: ruruhaus, Underground
From the Struggles for Common Land to the Struggles for Spatial Commons.
As soon as one deals with the commons, one must also talk about space. The question of the availability of spatial resources includes the question of their accessibility, protection, economy as well as spatial organisation. After a first overview of historical forms and contemporary theories of commons we want to jointly discuss individual spatial experiences of commoning moments or conventions in order to speculate on the necessary struggle for self-organised art and cultural spaces as spatial commons.
Jörg Stollmann is an architect and urbanist and currently Professor for Urban Design and Urbanization at Technische Universität Berlin. His work focuses on cooperative and collaborative design tools, on mediatization and digitalization of planning and urban everyday life, and on the urban as a common good. He taught at ETH Zurich and UdK Berlin. From 2002 until 2008, he was principal of Instant Architects. Jörg Stollmann was a fellow of the German Academy in Rome, DAAD, Van Alen Institute New York, and Graham Foundation Chicago. He is part of the Collaborative Research Centre “Re-Figuration of Spaces” (DFG) with the sub-project “Smart People: Queer Everyday Life in Digitalized Spaces“.
Dagmar Pelger is an architect and urbanist with an interdisciplinary research focus on spatial commons, critical cartography and design methods for cooperative spatial production from neighbourhood to landscape. Her dissertation on Spatial Commons will be published by adocs in 2022. She is currently a guest lecturer in urban design at the UdK Berlin and since 2017 a member of coopdisco, an architecture and planning cooperative based in Berlin.
Wed 6 July: Public Movement / Dana Yahalomi.
Please register here for online attendance.
Location: ruruhaus, Underground
Choreographic Knowledge
Public Movement is a performative research body which investigates and stages political actions in public spaces. It studies and creates public choreographies, forms of social order, overt and covert rituals. During the presentation Dana Yahalomi, Public Movement director, will elaborate on the group’s theoretical departure point that politics exist within our bodies often as dormant knowledge. We will discuss concepts such as: corporal memory, the art of pre-enactment, social choreographies and the embodiment of politics. Yahalomi will present key examples for Public movement’s working methodologies in the creation of site-time-context specific actions, accompanied with visual examples of their recent projects.
Public Movement is working across mediums, in dance and theatre venues, museums and biennials. In 2022 Public Movement created One Day, commissioned by Galeria Arsenal, Białystok, a 12 hours series of performances, interventions, and demonstrations. In 2022, the group activated A Dialogue at 8 Kilometres Per Second, a first of its kind set of performative conversations with an astronaut at the International Space Station. Public Movement has performed in renowned art institutions worldwide including Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Berlin Biennial; Performa, New York; Hebbel Am Uber Theater, Berlin; Asian Art Biennial, Taipei; Australian Centre for Contemporary Art Melbourne; and steirischer herbst Festival, Graz. The group has won several awards including the Essential Art Prize (2021) and Rosenblum Prize for Performance Art (2017) and was nominated for Future Generation Art Prize, Kiev (2014). Dana Yahalomi is the co-founder of Public Movement (together with Omer Krieger) and its director since 2011.
Thu 7 July: Oliver Marchart.
Please register here for online attendance.
Location: ruruhaus, Underground
Oliver Marchart (Austria) is a philosopher and sociologist. Since 2016 he works at the Institute of Political Science at the University of Vienna.
Image caption: Workshop, Small Projects for Coming Communities, Zurich, 19th January 2022