Time: Wednesday 17 September 2014, 5 – 6 PM
Venue: Konstfack, Mandelgrensalen (next to Svarta havet)
LM Ericssons väg 14, Stockholm. T-bana: Telefonplan

The ninth Organising Discourse lecture continues to explore approaches to Research and Education as forms of discursive platforms.

Utrecht based artist Annette Krauss will present her artistic practices with regards to hidden and alternative curricula in educational settings and discusses the aspect of learning and unlearning with regards to hierarchical knowledge systems.

ANNETTE KRAUSS

… IT CONSISTS NOT IN MERELY REVEALING THE INVISIBLE

In her research-based practice Krauss addresses the intersection of art, politics and everyday life. Her body of work emerges through the intersection of different media, such as performance, video, historical and everyday research, pedagogy and text. Revolving around informal learning and (institutionalized) normalization processes her artistic work approaches the questions of how these processes shape our bodies, the way we use objects and engage in social practices. In other words: she investigates art’s capacity of going beyond routine patterns and habits of thinking and doing when it comes to how we perceive the world, what we sense, what we don’t see and why.

“These questions function as a spotlight with which I explore different dimensions of vision. On one hand, the concept of vision points towards the visionary potential of art to imagine things otherwise. On the other hand, vision is not identified as purely discursive here, but as embodied processes that are saturated with taken for granted norms and conventions. What interest me is the constant questioning and negotiation of (in)visibilities that contribute to the production of the social around us.”

ANNETTE KRAUSS has (co-)initiated various long-term collaborative practices (Hidden Curriculum / Read-in / ASK! / Read the Masks. Tradition is Not Given / School of Temporalities). These projects reflect and build upon the potential of collaborative practices while aiming at disrupting taken for granted “truths” in theory and practice.

Recent exhibitions include [2014] Uneducated, Counihan Gallery Melbourne; New Habits, Casco Utrecht; Regimes of Memorizing, SMBA Amsterdam; [2013] Randzonenlesung Kunstverein Wiesbaden; In Search of the Missing Lessons, Whitechapel Gallery London; [2012] (In)visibilities, The Showroom London, GDR goes on – Grand Domestic Revolution, Casco Utrecht; Amateurism, Kunstverein Heidelberg; [2011] For Einhoven Van Abbemuseum Einhoven/NL; We are Grammar Pratt Gallery/New York; School Days, Lewis Glucksman Gallery/Cork; [2010] Manufacturing Today, Trondheim; 2 oder 3 Dinge, IG Bildende Kunst, Vienna ; Extra-Curricular, JMB Gallery/Toronto; [2009] Momentum, Nordic Biennale; World in Hand, Kunsthaus Dresden; [2007] Hidden Curriculum, CASCO, Utrecht; Soft Logics, Künstlerhaus Stuttgart.

Time: Thursday 4 September 2014, 6 – 8 PM
Venue: Konstfack, Mandelgrensalen (next to Svarta havet)
LM Ericssons väg 14, Stockholm. T-bana: Telefonplan

The eighth Organising Discourse lecture session explores approaches to research and education as forms of discursive space.

London based artist Céline Condorelli will talk about her investigations into forms of display by problematizing the notion of ‘support’. Hélène Frichot, Australian architecture researcher and teacher, will talk about experimental methodologies in architecture practice and the invention and construction of a feminist design power tool.

CÉLINE CONDORELLI

SUPPORT STRUCTURES

My practice is concerned with how our encounter with the material world happens through counting on it, and the fact that all human action takes place amidst countless structures of support mostly taken for granted, and therefore appearing almost invisible.

I have been focusing on the problematics of forms of display and the manifestations of blindness towards them, by re-imagining them through a variety of possible relations between context, exhibition, work, and the public; which has in turn allowed the questioning of these categories and the notions they form. This particular attention has developed through installations, exhibitions and publications that foreground display by proposing it as my main artistic medium in both form and subject, through the construction of structures of display, staging devices and framing mechanisms, the apparatuses of visibility that I have come to designate as ‘support structures’.

I have been investigating forms of display by
problematizing the notion of ‘support’ –the physical, economical, social, political structures and
infrastructures that correspond to conditions of possibility. This investigation is undertaken as an entanglement between two modes of articulation: historical and theoretical on the one hand, and one grounded in my art practice on the other. In both, the notion of ‘support’ is used as a critical lens through which to interrogate the development of forms of display, by examining that which sustains them.

HÉLÈNE FRICHOT

HOW DO YOU MAKE YOURSELF A FEMINIST DESIGN POWER TOOL (IT’S LESS A MATTER OF MEANING THAN A QUESTION OF USE)?

The invention and construction of a feminist design power tool is an inevitable act of experimentation that necessarily deals with the situation at hand, with the problems that face you right here, right now. It is anything you want it to be, so long as it works, but then the onus is on you to delineate the ethico-aesthetic criteria of assessment that determine how well it has worked in situ. Tool and method are closely associated, and if there is anything that the creative disciplines needs it is a way to celebrate the ways of doing they already actively deploy; ways of doing or methodologies that are distinct from the sciences. To apply a tool you need some working method, and once you reflect on this method, what you have is a burgeoning methodology, that is, a logic of how you are doing what you are doing. This means that your tool can subsequently be passed from hand to hand, transforming the subject who handles the tool, the tool itself, and the situation that the tool is being applied to. A ‘power-tool’ alludes to hand-held motorised power tools, but also to the equally real question of power relations and how they are redistributed across existential territories. Power relations can enable liberatory encounters and new modes of life, but they can also devolve into bad habits and oppressive regimes. This lecture will address the role of the feminist design power tool as it has developed in Critical Studies in Architecture, a teaching and research group at KTH Architecture, Stockholm. The discussion will be set amidst the conceptual context of what has come to be called material feminisms, and will draw on such thinkers as Isabelle Stengers, Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti and Donna Haraway.

CÉLINE CONDORELLI

Céline Condorelli is a London-based artist who makes supporting structures; she is the author and editor of Support Structures published by Sternberg Press (2009), and one of the founding directors of Eastside Projects, an exhibition space in Birmingham, UK; she is currently Professor at NABA (Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti) Milan. Recent exhibitions include Céline Condorelli, Chisenhale Gallery, and Positions, Van Abbemuseum including the publication The Company She Keeps, Bookworks, and baubau, Museum of Contemporary Art, Leipzig, Germany (all 2014), Puppet Show, Puppet Show, Gävle Konstcentrum, Grundy Art Gallery (2014), Additionals, Project Art Centre, Dublin, Ireland, Things That Go Without Saying, Grazer Kunstverein, Austria, The Parliament, ‘Archive of Disobedience’, Castello di Rivoli, Italy (2013), Social Fabric, Iniva, London and Lund Konsthall, Sweden (2012), Surrounded by the Uninhabitable, SALT Istanbul (2012) “There is nothing left”, Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum, Egypt and Oslo Kunstforening (2011-12), Manifesta 8, Murcia (2010), Revision‘part 1 and 2’, Artists Space, New York, (2009), and Cell Projects, London, 2010).

www.celinecondorelli.eu

HÉLÈNE FRICHOT

Dr Hélène Frichot is a researcher and teacher in Critical Studies in Architecture, School of Architecture and the Built Environment, KTH, Stockholm. She has co-curated the Architecture+Philosophy public lecture series with Esther Anatolitis in Melbourne, Australia since 2005 (http://architecture.testpattern.com.au/). Between 2004-2011 she held a continuing academic position (senior lecturer between 2007-2011) in the School of Architecture and Design, RMIT University, where she has recently been appointed the position of Adjunct Professor. Her research examines the transdisciplinary field between architecture and philosophy; while her first discipline is architecture, she holds a PhD in philosophy from the University of Sydney, 2004. Hélène’s published research has ranged widely from commentary on the ethico-aesthetics of contemporary digital architecture operating within the new biotechnological paradigm; to the role of emerging participatory and relational practices in the arts, including critical, creative, and feminist spatial practices; to a consideration of the ethics of immanence and contemporary atmospheres of affect in urban environments. She considers architecture-writing to be her mode of practice. A selection of recent publications include: On Finding Oneself Spinozist: Refuge, Beatitude and the Any-Space-Whatever, in Gilles Deleuze: Image and Text (Continuum, 2009); The Forgetting of the Ethics of Immanence, in Architectural Theory Review, 7:1, 2012; Drawing, Thinking, Doing: From Diagram Work to the Superfold in ACCESS, 30 (2011); Following Hélène Cixous’s Steps Towards a Writing Architecture Architecture Theory Review, 15:3 (2010); Deleuze and Architecture, EUP, 2013.

www.helenejuliafrichot.net

For teaching blogs see:
www.archandphil.wordpress.com; www.philosophiesresarc.net

Tuesday 10 June 2014, 1 – 2 PM
Venue: Konstnärsnämnden, Iaspis projektateljé
Maria Skolgata 83 Stockholm. T-bana: Mariatorget/Zinkensdamm

The seventh Organising Discourse lecture continues to explore aspects of publishing as forms of discursive space.

Benjamin Reichen, graphic designer from the London based design studio Åbäke and architect Tuomas Toivonen of NOW for Architecture and Urbanism in Helsinki are together setting up a new publishing platform. Ideas around space specific formats, translation and alternative means of distribution will be discussed in this collaborative lecture.

CULTURAL SAUNA

Unbuilt, unwritten, unreal, unmade, unfinished, unspoken, unsung, unheard and unthought are the soul of all things unseen.

An oral tradition belongs to all who participate in passing it on, adding to it slight nuances and details, introducing new twists, names and meanings, keeping it from becoming forgotten. The unwritten remains alive.

Shakespeare introduced many new words and concepts, some of them with the prefix un-. The real was suddenly paired with its negation, the unreal. With this invention of un-, Shakespeare opened the possibility for a parallel universe of concepts, a linguistic equivalent of antimatter. If the real has been realised, how did the unreal come about?

The unmade bed is an honest testimony of its use.

This city is not complete.
This house is not finished.
And this is fresh.

Explicit lyrics – Parental advisory
Tacit meanings – Stranger executive

As the other characters were gave the moral of the story – an evildoer’s death mirrors the evildoer’s life – thing take a different turn. It’s Don Giovanni’s turn to return from the dead and take revenge on his friends passing posthumous judgement on his past life. With the last note of the opera, the ghost of Don Giovanni cuts air with a sweep of his hand, and all
others collapse, dead, too. Applause.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on

Had thoughts are great, but those unthought
Are greater; therefore, ye soft minds, think on

[GHOST OF BANQUO vanishes]

BENJAMIN REICHEN is a founding member of Åbäke, a transdisciplinary design studio based in London. Together, they formed a loose association of ideas and processes. A city wide channel of teachers, readers, bathers, citizens, glass blowers, and dark matter specialists.
www.abake.fr

TUOMAS TOIVONEN and Nene Tsuboi are NOW for Architecture and Urbanism. Last year they opened Kulttuurisauna a public bath house in the centre of Helsinki.
www.nowoffice.org

Thursday 8 May 5 – 7,30 PM at Konstfack (Mandelgrensalen)

The sixth Organising Discourse lecture starts to explore various aspects of publishing as forms of discursive space.

British graphic designer James Langdon will discuss formats in relation to design methods and decision-making. Swedish publisher and editor Staffan Lundgren will speak about the relation between publishing as a practice and criticality in design.

JAMES LANGDON:
FORMATS

Formats seem to exert two contrary forces in my practice: First, the potential of ‘appropriate’ format. A display format as a device to organise material to be represented. Second, format as a conditioning influence. Formats as programmes, limiting effects of formats.

In the presentation I will draw on examples in my practice and its frame of reference. The emphasis will be on demonstrating and manipulating tensions between format and narrative in design. This will include a visual typology of applications of the codex format, and my recent restaging of English designer and teacher Norman Potter’s isomorphic play In:Quest of Icarus.

The performance is staged on a model of the typewriter which composed it. The construction and performance are undertaken by design students. The play was performed only once during Potter’s life, by his students at the Construction School, Bristol, on 5 December, 1974. The two recent performances were produced by James Langdon with students from Werkplaats Typografie, Arnhem; and University of the West of England, Bristol.

STAFFAN LUNDGREN:
THE DEFUNCT DEMOCRACY OF DESIGN

“[S]o some of us is putting our social consciences to work. We believe, for social, political, religious reasons, that these things should be done. On the other hand, it is not too difficult to see that […] the motivation of professionals to stir up the populace into participatory action has been a way of finding allies for our own private inter-professional guerilla wars.”

Reyner Banham – in his opening address to the 1971 “Design Participation” conference at Owens Park, Manchester University.

In reflecting on the aim of Organising Discourse to ”support and invigorate the development of new conceptual and physical spaces for presentation and display, meetings, discussions and debate, research and modes of production, etc.” in general and its focus on “critical practice” in particular the notion of critique stands out. Not by means of its presence however but rather the opposite.

Notions of critical practice and its supposed possibilities is an oft called for trope in the designing disciplines based on the understanding of designs possibility to act as an agent of social and political change. In a time simultaneously defined by the void of self-critique and the omnipresent ideo-logic of late capitalism several strands of supposedly covert undertakings has proven themselves a failure. A failure that, I would like to suggest, is partly grounded in what architectural (and design) historian Manfredo Tafuri once referred to as “anachronistic ‘hopes in design’”.

In addition to, and as part of, the ideological “hopes of design” an important factor of the failures at hand lays in an epistemological and ontological turn away from the agency of the subject and its capacity of judgment and responsibility in favour of a turn towards material conditions as the basis for a critical practice expressed through, for example, the will to organise discourse by means of “physical spaces for presentation and display”, be this in the form of institutions or books. A question of outmost importance hence arises: is at all possible to democratise (by) design?

JAMES LANGDON is an independent designer and one of six founding directors of the artist-run gallery eastside projects in Birmingham, UK. He is director of the itinerant school for design fiction. In 2012 he was the recipient of the inform award for conceptual design, presented by the museum of contemporary art Leipzig, Germany. www.jameslangdon.net

STAFFAN LUNDGREN is founder and publisher of Axl Books, a member of the editorial board of Site, and currently conducting research on the ideo-logic of cybernetics at Chalmers School of Architecture and KTH School of Architecture. www.axlbooks.com

Wednesday 9 April, 5 – 6 PM at Konstfack (Mandelgrensalen)

The fifth Organising Discourse lecture continues to explore approaches to institutional and curatorial practice, this time with a focus on art, architecture and urban practice.

Francien van Westrenen, architecture curator at Stroom den Haag, will talk about the practice of Stroom and show examples of recent projects in relation to ‘organising discourse’, from Dunepark and Pig City to Timebank and Expanded Performance.

CITY AS DISCURSIVE PLATFORM

Stroom Den Haag (an independent foundation founded in 1989) is a centre for art and architecture with a wide range of activities. Starting from the visual arts, architecture, urban planning and design the program focuses on the urban environment. It aims at being a hospitable and stimulating platform. Starting from this mentality Stroom, in collaboration with other institutions, wants to contribute to the permanent development of the reflection on the city and the part that can be played by the visual arts in this context. A lot of the art projects initiated by Stroom are functioning as discursive spaces as well. They stimulate discussion and thinking on topics related to the city like monuments, gentrification, informal urbanism, value creation and food production.

FRANCIEN VAN WESTRENEN

works at the art and architecture centre Stroom Den Haag as an architecture curator of exhibitions, projects, publications and lectures based on a interdisciplinary and cultural approach to the urban environment. She has several publications to her name, among which Game Urbanism (together with Hans Venhuizen) and three city guides for The Hague. At the moment she is working together with her colleague Maaike Lauwaert on a book about Upcycling. In 2002, she completed her degree in Art and Culture Studies at the Erasmus University Rotterdam with research on the future of the art museum.

http://www.stroom.nl/

Thursday 20 March, 5 – 7 PM at Konstfack (Mandelgrensalen)

The fourth Organising Discourse lecture session is exploring alternative approaches to institutional and curatorial practice, from the museum to the architecture triennale.

The Dutch curator Joanna van der Zanden will discuss how the museum role can change and become an active catalyst for critical thinking, through the new open ended and experimental project Reinventing Happiness at the Stedelijk Museum ’s-Hertogenbosch. The British architecture and design curator Beatrice Galilee will speak about the third issue of the Lisbon Architecture Triennale Close Closer and it’s approach to largely exclude the built-form of architectural practice.

JOANNA VAN DER ZANDEN

Prototyping transition
The museum as catalyst

Many of the current challenges we face in society, are dealing with making a transition towards a more sustainable, resilience and social future. One could say that we are a society in transition, envisioning our next steps and questioning existing systems. What could a possible new role be for the museum or any cultural institution within this given context?

Artists and designers have always questioned society. They did so mostly in solitude, showing their vision of the world in functional, symbolic or conceptual arte facts in art galleries, museums or shops. Artists would use abstract language and designers and architects concrete, everyday functionalities. But today’s challenges are solved and reflected upon differently. More and more artists, designers, architects work with people and in neighbourhoods, playing a role in setting new relational situations, providing alternative everyday social and economic practices on the spot and making prototypes for the future in a trans-disciplinary and co-creative way. Their focus is more on the process than the outcome, and their audience is active and participating.

If the artists and designers way of working is changing where does this leave the cultural institute? Could the museum also function as a catalyst in prototyping transition? Locally and globally? What kind of participatory techniques could be used and which new programming formats should we consider? What would be the implication for the way of working of museum employees? And how to make sure that this new kind of ‘open and collaborative’ programming is a valuable experience for any visitor as well as a great opportunity for artists and designers to start a new research?

And last but not least: If the museum becomes a catalyst for critical and creative thinking would it have to give up its neutral place in society? And if it does so, would that also change the way the collection is presented? Could one show for instance, a porcelain cup without mentioning the enormous effect the porcelain industry had on its environment?

BEATRICE GALILEE

Close Closer

To give context to a manifesto that invites architects to consider life beyond buildings, it may be worth first describing my favourite work of architecture. It is a small chapel in a field in southern Germany; a work of craft, design, thinking and space so remarkable, moving and sacrosanct that the memory of standing quietly within its perfectly cast walls will always remain.

And yet, for all its quality, this architecture, the conditions in which it came to be and the working methods of its author is far away from what I believe constitutes a relevant, responsible and necessary dialogue of global architectural practice today. The craft and beauty of most built architecture is well known celebrated, praised and awarded. To situate it in contemporary language, it belongs to the 1%.

For three months in Lisbon, in autumn 2013, we are
interested in the 99%.

Close, Closer is conceived to examine the political, technological, emotional, institutional and critical forms of global spatial practice. By publicly interrogating the terminology, practicalities, inspirations, inventions and their influences on the city, we open spatial practice, one part of which is architecture, to be closer to vital new audiences and new publics.

From within their discipline, architects strive to expand
their practice through political, social theory, literature and philosophy. Students freely read the essays of geographers and sociologists, they investigate their work in the context of art and performance and are encouraged to be playful, creative and experiment with new technologies to design their buildings. From without, architecture is opaque, physical.
Bricks and mortar.

It is the gap between these two discourses that we seek to close. For the third Lisbon Architecture Triennale, the plurality of spatial practice will be presented as a multi-dimensional active and accessible idea. The city, the civic stage where money, power, commerce and culture meet, is where this meeting of ideas should happen.

The loosely termed ‘Third Industrial Revolution’ of
digital manufacturing, new production and fabrication, new technologies as well as crowd-sourced funding and the open source movement has transformed the idea of a bottom-up approach of production from idealistic, niche prac tice used in informal conditions into an increasingly valid and well-used strategy for self-funding projects.

This networked society requires new, intelligent responses to issues of civic space. Architects confront specific local policies including access to schools, health or housing by collaborating beyond the boundaries of their discipline and accessing reams of relevant data from around the world. By utilising existing structures and interacting with politicians, sociologists, programmers or developers, spatial practitioners are not only proposing structures, they are designing tactics,
behaviours and strategies.

In its own way too, the notion of the architectural exhibition is evolving. Biennales and Triennales are multiplying as the strength of city government rises and national boundaries dissolve.

The challenge to exhibit complex ideas and also utilise the momentum and power of a Triennale to generate meaningful content is immense.

In September 2013 in Lisbon, four curatorial projects:
Future Perfect, The Real and other Fictions, The Institute Effect and New Publics will examine distinct and discrete realms of spatial practice. From a laboratory of the future through to distorted atmospheres and political lobbying, the programme is intended to provide polar experiences and interpretations of spatial practice.

The Crisis Buster small grants programme is our alternative to an open international competition. By inviting proposals for civic-minded interventions we can invest and support the city’s entrepreneurs as well as encouraging architects and their collaborators to think about what small amount could do to their local environment. We will award a number of grants ranging from €500 to €2,500 specifically for Lisbonbased proposals.

One of the opportunities of a connected world is that we
have the opportunity to extend our ideas for Lisbon beyond national boundaries. Our series of digital publications authored by the curatorial team will provide detailed research, essays, insight and context to all exhibitions in advance of the opening.

The aim of Close, Closer is to question, excite and provoke. It is to provide a platform for debate and to put forward a proposal for an alternative narrative of spatial practice. We want to place architecture before a prism and accept all its facets, divisions, conflicts and neuroses. We are approaching a new understanding of our city, of an architecture whose craft and qualities are less tangible than before. We would like you to get closer, too.

(Curatorial Statement by Beatrice Galilee, from the Close Closer, Lisbon Architecture Triennale booklet, 2013)

OTTO VON BUSCH (SE): SHARED DREAMS, SHARED RESPONSIBILITIES: SOME CONVERSATIONS THAT CAME TO LIFE

Wednesday 5 March 2014, 5 – 6 PM at Konstfack (Svarta havet)

More open lectures to come. Please share this page with friends and colleagues!

The third Organising Discourse lecture continues to highlight self-organisation and collaboration as ways of constructing discursive space.

THE TWO HANDS: MANIFESTING NARRATIVES

Emerging from feminist Barbara Deming’s conception of a resistance with “two hands”, the lecture aims to explore how craft can be a tool for artisan innovation, civic engagement and political resistance. Applying the capabilities approach of economist Amartya Sen and philosopher Martha Nussbaum, we may shift perspective away from objects, and see how craft capabilities may support development of abstract concepts such as freedom and social justice. The lecture will explore how dissident design and craft capabilities can be a component of political engagements.

OTTO VON BUSCH (PhD) is professor in textile design at Konstfack university college of arts, crafts and design (Stockholm), and assistant professor at Parsons the New School for Design (New York). He has a background in arts, craft, design and theory and aims to seamlessly combine these fields into one critical fashion practice. In his research and practice he explores how design and craft can be reverse engineered, hacked and shared among many participants as a form of civic engagement, building community capabilities through collaborative craft and social activism.

Thursday 13 February, 5 – 8 PM at Konstfack (Mandelgrensalen)
More open lectures to come. Please share this page with friends and colleagues!

The second Organising Discourse lecture session is focusing on self-organisation and collaboration as ways of constructing discursive space. Presentations from the social thinker and writer Dougald Hine, graphic designer Maryam Fanni, artist Sarah Degerhammar and architect Tor Lindstrand, covers different examples from the small self-initiated project to forms of collaboration, networks and collective manifestations to strategies of operating within existing institutional structures.

DOUGALD HINE:

SHARED DREAMS, SHARED RESPONSIBILITIES: SOME CONVERSATIONS THAT CAME TO LIFE

“Like just about everything worthwhile I’ve been involved in, Spacemakers grew out of a particular kind of conversation: unhurried, drawn out over time, beginning with an open invitation to all kinds of people, not oriented to a preformed objective, but given focus by its subject.”

As a social thinker, writer and the kickstarter of a diversity of projects and organisations, I have been involved in and sometimes responsible for creating a series of groups and networks.

In this session, I will draw on my experience as the founder of the utopian regeneration agency Spacemakers, responsible for reanimating high streets, markets and other public spaces in London, and as co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project, an international network centred on the Dark Mountain journal, whose manifestations have also included festivals, exhibitions, local meet-ups and music releases.

Both of these projects are the visible flowering of a less visible network of conversations and collaborations, some of which I will try to trace here. This will take in the story of such experiments as the Pick Me Up email-zine, the London School of Art & Business, the Temporary School of Thought and the University Project; the interrelation between online networks and face-to-face activity, so that blog posts led to meet-up groups that seeded organisations; and some attempts to theorise the qualities of such convergences, including Brian Eno’s concept of scenius.

I am fascinated by the process by which ideas (sometimes) come to life, the journey from dreams to responsibilities, and the reasons why some conversations have consequences that last a lifetime, while others turn out to be dead ends. I am sceptical of processes designed to achieve this kind of alchemy, but I do believe that there is a craft of bringing people together and making things happen, and I look forward to sharing what I’ve learned of this craft and seeing where it connects to your experiences.

MARYAM FANNI AND SARAH DEGERHAMMAR:

BOENDEMONOLOGEN (SODERORTS INSITUT FOR ANDRA VISIONER / JORDBRO STADSTEATER)

Maryam Fanni and Sarah Degerhammar will present their two groups and resistance strategies Soderorts Institut For Andra Visioner and Jordbro Stadsteater, both dealing with the privatizations of the city and making visible the processes behind and the effects of it and what it does to the democracy.

This will be followed by a presentation of their joint project Boendemonologen (“Citizens monologue”) that deals with the same issues but focuses further on the event-based so called democratic dialogues that are being provided by the municipality and housing companies today, and also how artists are being instrumentalized in city planning. Who are defining the problems and who provide solutions? What is possible to talk about within the given frames?

TOR LINDSTRAND:

TOWARD AN INSTITUTION

“At first I thought it was revolving; then I realised that this movement was an illusion created by the dizzying world it bounded. The Aleph’s diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished. Each thing (a mirror’s face, let us say) was infinite things, since I distinctly saw it from every angle of the universe. I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak and nightfall; I saw the multitudes of America; I saw a silvery cobweb in the centre of a black pyramid; I saw a splintered labyrinth (it was London); I saw, close up, unending eyes watching themselves in me as in a mirror; I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me.”

(from ‘The Aleph’ by Jorge Luis Borges)

How do we transform existing institutions and how do we organize different kinds of institutional frameworks? First we should realize that what drives institutions, what they really want, is to institutionalize whatever matter filters through them, to tame and domesticize knowledge. They do this through being professional, static, essential and successful. They operate on commissions, performing a service to clearly stated aims — whether political or economical. They materialize themselves through re-producible and formal aesthetics.

Instead, what we are looking for is an institution that is to be described as hobbyesque, temporal, ephemeral and destructive, an institution that operates through unsolicited work and insists on being disobedient — producing, rather than representing politics and economies.

When producing work within or for institutions it is important to realize that they are much more porous then they appear to be. The relationships within an organisation, the spatial configuration and how it is programmed are often more open — even if only for a brief moment — to transformation and distortion then we tend to believe. With a starting point in projects made for large cultural institutions this presentation will be about strategies used in order to temporarily disrupt the traditional boundaries between art, artist and institution. Not necessarily in order to produce an institutional critique, but rather to trace other possible organisational modes for being together differently.

DOUGALD HINE is a social thinker, writer and kickstarter of projects and organisations. These have included the utopian regeneration agency Spacemakers, the web startup School of Everything and the Dark Mountain Project, as well as events such as Redrawing The Maps (Kings Cultural Institute, 2012) and Universities: Past & Future (HUB Westminster, 2011). From 2011-13 he was thinker-out-of-residence with the Scarcity and Creativity in the Built Environment project at the University of Westminster. He is Senior Visiting Fellow in Higher Education Policy at the University of Lincoln and has advised on the future education for Demos and the Young Foundation. In 2012, he was listed by the UK’s national innovation agency NESTA as one of Britain’s 50 New Radicals and his work
featured as one of thirteen case studies in the EU’s Team Culture 2012 report into ‘the role of culture in a time of crisis’. He is a regular speaker at universities, art and architecture schools across Europe, as well as for organisations including Google, the European Commission, the British Council, Design for London, the Royal Institute of British Architects and the RSA.

His books and pamphlets include ‘Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto’ (with Paul Kingsnorth, 2009), ‘Despatches from the Invisible Revolution’ (ed. with Keith Kahn Harris, 2012) and ‘The Crossing of Two Lines’ (2013), a collaboration with Stockholm-based artist duo Performing Pictures. He grew up in the north-east of England, studied English Literature at Oxford and worked as a radio journalist for the BBC. In 2012, he left London and is slowly arriving in Sweden.

www.dougald.co.uk

MARYAM FANNI is a freelancing writer and graphic desginer based in Stockholm. She has a BA in Graphic design and Illustration from Konstfack, University College of Art, Crafts and Design, Stockholm, 2013.

Currently she’s working with communication for Konsthall C and guest-editing at Svenska Tecknare.

www.maryamfanni.se
www.sifav.wordpress.com

SARAH DEGERHAMMAR is an artist based in Stockholm. She has a BA in Fine Arts from Konstfack, University College of Art, Crafts and Design, Stockholm, 2013.

She is a founder and member of the performance group TIR and Jordbro Stadsteater. Currently working with sound artist Mira Eklund and artist Petra Bauer at Tensta konsthall.

www.sarahdegerhammar.com

TOR LINDSTRAND is an Assistant Professor at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH-A) and a co-owner of the office of Larsson, Lindstrand and Palme. He has been working on projects oscillating between architecture, visual art and performance in numerous cultural contexts, among others TATE Liverpool, Venice Architecture Biennale 2008 and 2010, Steirischer Herbst, Shenzhen and Hong Kong Bi-city Biennale of
Urbanism/Architecture 2009, VOLTA Basel, Performa New York, Royal Dramatic Theatre Copenhagen, NAI Rotterdam, Stockholm Architecture Museum and Storefront New York. Together with choreographer Marten Spangberg he initiated International Festival, a practice working on context specific projects spanning from buildings, publications, films, installations, public interventions and situations. In 2010 he founded
Economy together with Jessica Watson-Galbraith, a Swedish-Australian studio working with architecture, art and performance. He is currently involved in a collaborative research project on Power, Space and Ideology at KTH-A and Södertörn University.

www.this-is-economy.com/

Monday 20 January, 5 – 7.30 at Konstfack (Svarta havet)

As a point of departure for the new independent course Organising Discourse this double lecture will present and discuss discursive space emerging from within the disciplines of design, crafts and architecture, at the same time resulting in self organisation and institutional activities such as exhibitions. Drawing a line from history to the present, Peter Lang brings his examples from the 1960’s and 70’ Italian radical movement whilst Ana Džokić and Marc Neelen will present samples from their diverse and interdisciplinary practice of today.

PETER LANG:

Outer-limits: experimental collectives, groups, movements in post-war Italy.

A number of cutting edge art and design collectives were established in post-war Italy, notable for their diverse practices and far reaching visions. These ensembles produced an extraordinary range of work, reaching broad international audiences, while setting new benchmarks for intellectual rigor and social conscientious. Yet group work is at best controversial, frequently debilitating and often of short duration. Gruppo 63, gruppo 70, gruppo N, the international New Tendency, gruppo T, Superstudio, gruppo Strum, 9999, Global Tools, operated on the fringes of the traditional exhibition circuits, gallery venues, literary circles, publishing houses, and in the case of design, industrial production.

The kinds of experimental processes developed within these collectives entered instead different arenas of exposure, collective exhibitions or non-profit galleries, alternative magazines and underground festivals. The work of these collectives also filtered through the larger exhibition venues, like the Trigon in Graz, the Milan Triennale, the Venice Biennale, the Palazzo degli Esposizioni in Rome, or via exceptional events, like the Contemporanea, held in 1973 in the newly finished Morretti garage under the Villa Borghese.

While these multi-disciplinary collectives were largely held together by political ideology and common social concerns, the tangential way these movements operated largely hindered their long-term diffusion and success. Just what would it take today to operate using similar strategies and programs today is a question that remains extremely relevant, as similar kinds of network and social media communities are becoming increasingly active in the creative public domain.

ANA DŽOKIĆ AND MARC NEELEN:

Navigating the discourse: STEALTH.unlimited

Oscillating between fields like urban research, spatial interventions and cultural activism, a line of activities has emerged over a number of years, meanwhile manifesting itself as the practice STEALTH.unlimited. When asked to describe the inner logic of this trajectory, with a slight feeling of awkwardness we admit that managing to keep on track the discourse of shared authoring of space, while navigating through various projects, takes us at times by surprise. In any case, moving in this way from project to project has enabled a practice that sets its subsequent subject of focus slightly off-track, and thus opens the horizon for other, less expected possibilities or opportunities to tackle the larger social relevance of architecture today.

With this talk we will take a look at a set of involvements, like co-curating activities at the Venice Architectural Biennial in 2008 with ARCHIPHOENIX: Faculties for Architecture (a platform occupying the Dutch pavilion to focus on the capacities and capabilities of architecture – beyond building), a yearlong involvement with Cittadellarte / Fondazione Pistoletto in Biella (on artistic and cultural initiatives and institutions changing key aspects of urban life) and the platform Who Builds the City we co-initiated in Belgrade in 2010. We will speak about our submersion into particular institutional contexts, our exchange with and resurge from them, in order to fold these contexts inside-out and subvert them to become productive in terms of common knowledge, awareness, and approach.

PETER LANG is professor in Architecture History and Theory at the Royal Institute of Art, in the Department of Architecture, Stockholm (Kungl. Konsthögskolans, Mejan Arc). He holds a Bachelor in Architecture from Syracuse University (1980) and a Ph.D. in history and urban studies from NYU (2000). From the Fall of 2001 to the Spring of 2009 he served as permanent Texas A&M faculty at the Santa Chiara Center in Tuscany Italy. In 2009 he was appointed Associate Professor at Texas A&M in College Station Texas where he has taught graduate courses and directed PhD students.

Peter Lang writes on the history and theory of post-war Italian architecture, with a focus on sixties Italian experimental design, media and environments. Together with Luca Molinari and Mark Wasiuta, Peter Lang has co-curated the exhibition. Environments and Counter Environments: Italy: The New Domestic Landscape, MoMA 1972 on view at the Graham Foundation Chicago from September 18, 2013. Peter Lang is also actively involved in urban field research.

STEALTH.unlimited is a practice operating between Belgrade and Rotterdam, set up in 2000 by Ana Džokić and Marc Neelen. Through intensive collaboration with individuals, organisations and institutions, STEALTH broadens the understanding of what architectural and urbanistic engagement can be today. Following their curatorial engagement in Venice (2008), in 2009 they curated the Tirana International Contemporary Art Biennial, in 2010, and IMPAKT festival in Utrecht under the title Matrix City. In 2011 they were curators of the fiction-based exhibition project Once Upon a Futuremagn, for Bordeaux’s biannual Evento. In 2008 with Marjetica Potrč STEALTH completed a schoolyard in Knivsta, Sweden, based on the principles of sustainable energy, in 2011 in Gothenburg initiated a spatial intervention of the local community at Röda Sten and with El Puente_lab built a cultural development node out of recycled materials in a slum neighbourhood of Medellin, Colombia. STEALTH are currently undertaking research at the Royal Institute of Art (KKH) in Stockholm.