• Wed 23 – Thu 24 05 2018 •
Slowness
With NATAŠA PETREŠIN-BACHELEZ and VIOLA VAHRSON
Internal Seminar is a new format established to provide a space for deeper refection on the issues that are important for institutional practice in middle-scale contemporary art initiatives. We hope that it can lead to regular exchanges that foster critical thinking and feedback regarding institutional habits.
The seminar consists of two thematically interrelated sessions led by an invited guest lecturer. For each session there will be a reading list with the texts made available online.
The seminar is free of charge, but the number of participants is limited. Accommodation and travel costs must be covered by the participants. However, we offer the option of staying at the Academy’s apartment (3 rooms with a double bed in each). Please let us know as soon as possible if you are interested in this.
Internal Seminar accompanies the symposium “Rethinking Locality,”.
WED 23 5 18 / 11:00 – 14:00: Academyspace, Herwarthstraße 3
THU 24 5 18 / 11:00 – 14:00: Temporary Gallery, Mauritiuswall 35
In English Free admission
In cooperation with Temporary Gallery
Program
23 05 (Academyspace)
Part I – Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez „I cannot work like this“
How can we work within and with institutions today, as cultural workers and artists, at a time of violent racialization and profound ecological crisis, when heightened surveillance reinforces the organized and transnational governmental abuse of natural resources and the commons? How do we engage various institutional constituencies in countries of the Global North, when precisely their governments cause and contribute to inhuman civil wars, ecological catastrophies and drone strikes in certain regions of the world, force thousands of people into displacement and dispossession, whereby too many of them drown, suffocate, or are starved to death, exposed daily to violence and at the mercy of those they encounter?
This is an invitation for cultural workers operating in distinct geographies but within an intertwined geopolitical reality to slow down their ways of working and being, to imagine new ecologies of care as a continuous practice of support, and to listen with attention to feelings that arise from encounters with objects and subjects. It is an invitation to the institutions to radically open up their borders and show how they work—or don’t—in order to render themselves palpable, audible, sentient, soft, porous, and above all, decolonial and anti-patriarchal.
24 05 (Temporary Gallery)
Teil II – Viola Vahrson „Reclaiming Leisure: Historical Perspectives on the Creative Power and Function of Leisure“
The second seminar explores the status and value of leisure from antiquity to the present: Doing nothing often implies a silent refractoriness towards the imposition of ordinary life and towards the demanding economy. There is leisure time with its seduction of passiveness and consumption, and also with the continuance of work on other endeavors. There is also the involuntarily loss of employment or the total exhaustion caused by permanent stress and tension at work. There is a decline from the accustomed regularity of everyday life into languorousness, bitterness and squalidness. But the melancholy can be broken up by another “faineance” ‒ the leisure of knowledge. Leisure as a combination of ease and devotion expresses itself in activity, the aspiration towards research and art.
