Script reading with actors, masks

Manufacturing Mischiefs is a script reading from a series of puppet sketches by artist Pedro Reyes. Reyes believes “jokes are a sort of airbag that cushions the collision of reality with your expectation of reality, laughter explodes simultaneously with the collision of ideology and realpolitik.” Featuring Noam Chomsky, Karl Marx, Ayn Rand, Donald Trump, and Elon Musk, this episode comments on the connections between techno-optimism and right-wing ideologies, pervasive in the United States and a primary source of Trumpism. This ideological screwball comedy interweaves issues of the destruction of labor by automation, artificial “intelligence,” and the menace of nuclear apocalypse.

Screening with introduction and conversation

On 19 September 1943, a group of Karrabing ancestors escaped from a war internment camp and walked over 300 kilometers back to their coastal homelands in Northern Australia. Night Time Go is an exploration of the settler state’s attempt to remove Indigenous people from their lands during the World War II using trucks, trains, and rifles, and the Karrabing ancestors refusing to be detained. The film begins by closely referring to the actual historical details of this ancestral journey, but slowly turns to an alternative history in which the group inspires a general Indigenous insurrection, driving out settlers from the Top End of Australia. Mixing drama and humor, history and satire, Night Time Go pushes subaltern history beyond the bounds of settler propriety.

Three short videos

Within the long-term research itinerary Propositions for Non-Fascist Living, BAK asks artists, philosophers, scholars, and activists from multiple (political) geographies facing contemporary fascisms how they engage with the question of what constitutes non-fascist living. The responses are 1–5 minute video statements recorded with technology at hand: mobile phones, voice recorders, Skype. Throughout Propositions, these diverse perspectives are published online and screened at performative conferences. Online and offline, they become part of a growing constellation of reflections on ways to think, act, and bring about non-fascist living. (WM)

Conversation

What forms of autonomous infrastructure (e.g., in some refugee camps, common kitchens) can become processes, tools, methodologies, strategies for decolonizing? How can we share and explore meanings and understandings of the current lived realities of “hospitality”? How can radical praxis allow for hospitality to become unconditional? BAK 2017–2018 Fellows Pelin Tan as well as Isshaq Al-Barbary and Diego Segatto of Campus in Camps engage in a discussion that relates to our current times of nomadic dwelling and to living conditions in cities and contested territories capable of sustaining decolonized infrastructure.

Four short videos

Within the long-term research itinerary Propositions for Non-Fascist Living, BAK asks artists, philosophers, scholars, and activists from multiple (political) geographies facing contemporary fascisms how they engage with the question of what constitutes non-fascist living. The responses are 1–5 minute video statements recorded with technology at hand: mobile phones, voice recorders, Skype. Throughout Propositions, these diverse perspectives are published online and screened at performative conferences. Online and offline, they become part of a growing constellation of reflections on ways to think, act, and bring about non-fascist living. (WM)

Conversation

In April 2017, the booklet Words of Labour was presented to the Social and Economic Council of the Netherlands. This publication, by the Netherlands Trade Union Confederation (FNV), is a collection of some essential terms from International Labour Organization Convention 189, accompanied by stories from domestic workers in the Netherlands that shed light on the often invisible realities of the facts and figures for this field of labor. During the talk, BAK 2017–2018 Fellow Matthijs de Bruijne—who has been involved as an artist in the domestic workers union organization—and Migrant Domestic Workers network FNV representative Charisma Adams discuss the context of the booklet and ways to claim rights to self-determining gestures. (MdB)

Four short videos

Within the long-term research itinerary Propositions for Non-Fascist Living, BAK asks artists, philosophers, scholars, and activists from multiple (political) geographies facing contemporary fascisms how they engage with the question of what constitutes non-fascist living. The responses are 1–5 minute video statements recorded with technology at hand: mobile phones, voice recorders, Skype. Throughout Propositions, these diverse perspectives are published online and screened at performative conferences. Online and offline, they become part of a growing constellation of reflections on ways to think, act, and bring about non-fascist living. (WM)

Participative performance

BAK 2017–2018 Fellow and artist Luigi Coppola brings together his ongoing interests in social choreography and “political chorality”—namely, underrepresented communities having voice through public art performances. This collective experiment is part of his research on evolutionary population, which began within Coppola’s projects in Castiglione d’Otranto in the south of Italy. Making use of the writings about interethnic communities by politician and activist Alexander Langer and evolutionary plant breeding by agronomist Salvatore Ceccarelli, the artist coordinates an impromptu choir that addresses these textual sources through a live reading. (ML)

Screening with live commentary and conversation

Like an evening at the cinema when you are disturbed by your neighbors’ comments on the film, educator, curator, and BAK 2017–2018 Fellow Sepake Angiama engages in live commentary and conversation during a screening of the film Born in Flames (1983), directed by Lizzie Borden. The film address questions of feminism, gender politics, race, surveillance, and police brutality, and these same topics form the foci of the talk.

Lecture-performance

This lecture-performance follows up on the assumptions and subjectivities assembled with artist and BAK 2017–2018 Fellow Ola Hassanain’s project Back and Forth (2016–ongoing). The project has raised questions about how we can re-articulate the space of collectives of gender to speak to policies under particular modes of power, and how these political dialogues can then push for a transition from private to public. This lecture-performance is a point of transmission, through performative gestures, of a mode of political dialogue from Khartoum. (OH)

Lecture-performance

Whatever Floats Our Boats sketches a decolonial positioning of Curaçao on the world stage in the twentieth century. Artist and BAK 2017–2018 Fellow Quinsy Gario presents three instances of resistance to colonial and dictatorial practices on and via the Dutch Caribbean island that had international consequences. Through archival photos, videos, and family stories Gario presents actions of Venezuelan revolutionaries, exiled Portuguese soldiers, and black Curaçao dockworkers that impacted militarization in the Caribbean, the decolonization of Lusophone Africa, and the independence of Surinam. Through images from the archive of the Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam, found archival footage on YouTube, and oral histories, another lens is proposed for looking at the political significance of the island.

Lecture

Gloria Wekker investigates what it means to cultivate and live in intimate relationships that do not repeat fascist patterns; as in power-hungry or, on the contrary, power-evasive patterns. Struck by contrasting patterns in United States and Dutch interracial relationships, she gives a brief overview of the historical differences and commonalities. Whereas in the US such relationships, especially those between black and white people, are relatively recent and rare, such mixed relationships are much more frequent in the Netherlands. What does that mean? Does it mean that we are beyond race, post-race here? Or are the patterns for religiously mixed people that Dienke Hondius lays out in her 1999 dissertation Gemengde huwelijken, gemengde gevoelens (Mixed Marriages, Mixed Feelings)—evacuation of difference, evasiveness, aphasia—extant in these racially mixed dyads? (GW)

Musical and visual battle

Without any wish to undo difference, contradiction, or distance, artist Charl Landvreugd and artist and BAK 2017–2018 Fellow Wendelien van Oldenborgh generate a discourse through a playful “battle” made of musical and visual interactions, with a wide variety of questions, fragments, and choices from their respective and specific idioms: filmmaking, visual arts, theory. Like Mikhail Bakhtin, the Russian philosopher and critic who coined the term polyphony in literature, has argued, multilingual environments “liberate man by opening up a gap between things and their labels.” Nonequivalence is not a matter for despair, but is rather the impulse to life. (WvO)

Performance

Otobong Nkanga comes together with soap maker Evi Lachana to expand upon the idea of soap—a ubiquitous product essential to our health and central to Nkanga’s work Carved to Flow, 2017. As part of documenta 14, the artist started a performative soapmaking laboratory in Athens, later selling the soap in Kassel. In the performance Germination, Nkanga evokes the previous phases of Carved to Flow and meditates on the networked geographies, traditions, histories, and people engaged in the production of soap, proposing it as a model of social, economic, and conceptual circulation.

Performance

What happens when protests “become form”? Does a protest become clearer or stronger through a gesture, a song, a chant in unison? Can the memory of past demonstrations nourish the struggles to come? Help organize new ways of reclaiming the future common good through generations celebrating past achievements? Marinella Senatore brings together an impromptu assembly of Utrecht-based musicians to test these questions as part of her project Protest Forms (2016–ongoing), previously performed in Rome and New York. It is a modest way of continuing the legacy of the center of world cultures RASA, which formerly inhabited the venue at Pauwstraat 13a in Utrecht, and of connecting it to the site’s current endeavor as a platform for the contemporary.

Film, 48 min.

Reflecting Memory is a documentary video about phantom limb syndrome, featuring interviews with specialists such as surgeons, neurologists, psychoanalysts, and amputees. This pathology, which affects those who have lost a part of their body, involves the persistent sensation of the presence of a limb even after it has been amputated; that is, the perception of pain coming from a body part that actually no longer exists. The work extends into the workings of postcoloniality and beyond, and, in the words of the artist, becomes a “reflection about the complexity of memory, the working of memory, the duty of memory and its representation; about ‘repair’ as a form of ‘re-appropriation,’ but above all as a form of resistance.”

Video archive, variable duration

The Tools’ Dance is an ever-growing video archive of agricultural movements. It involves local communities of farmers, seasonal migrant workers, dancers, and agricultural historians, who come together each new crop for dance workshops in several locations in the Mediterranean and collectively develop Tanztheater performances. The aim is to “collect” and preserve motions and gestures that disappear and transform in the mechanization of the last centuries. Concurrently, the project questions the continuous social transformations in agricultural labor and the role of migrants in this context.

Film, 18 min.

When Hiwa K embarked on the journey from his native Sulaymaniyah in Kurdistan-Northern Iraq to become a refugee in Turkey, Greece, and Italy, packed in his bag were only some of his abstract paintings. He revisits part of this journey in this video. While his body was transiting borders, his identity was fragmented into the many roles projected onto him by the gazes of others. These are symbolically represented by the small mirrors that branch out of the antenna he balances on his nose. His image is shattered and merges with the landscape. The anecdotes, memories, and other stories he recalls are what kept his spirit alive and steadily rooted while his life was exposed to death.

Film, 29 min.

Wutharr: Saltwater Dreams comprises five ten-minute films shot by Karrabing members on iPhones. Filmmaking provides a technique of self-organization and social analysis. Film acts as a form of survival, a refusal to relinquish their country, and a means of investigating contemporary social forms of inequality; they make reference to third cinema, Boalean political theater, and an innovative local form of improvisational realism. The films represent the lives of the collective, create bonds with their land, and intervene in global images of Indigeneity.

Wallpaper, video presentation

Public Smog is a clean-air park in the atmosphere that fluctuates in location and scale. The park is constructed through financial, legal, and political activities that open it for public use. Since 2004, these include purchasing and withholding greenhouse gas emission offsets in California’s South Coast Air Quality Management District and the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS), and ongoing efforts to inscribe Earth’s atmosphere on the UNESCO World Heritage List. Public Smog is subject to prevailing winds and the long-range transport of aerosols and gases. Here on show are a newly commissioned indoor billboard with the sky of Utrecht and a video chronicle of the project.

Campaign (flag, postcards, petition)

The Francis Effect (Dignity Has No Nationality) aims to change public perception of immigration and redress the assault on the citizenship rights of undocumented migrants throughout the globe. Intended to be a durational work, The Francis Effect (Dignity Has No Nationality) is a letter-writing campaign collecting signatures to be presented to Pope Francis, the first Latin American Bishop of Rome, in support of his message against indifference toward immigrants. Installed are the Pangaea flag that acts as the symbol of the campaign, as well as the manifesto, and postcards to sign the petition. Feel free to sign the petition and to use the hashtags #dignityhasnonationality and #franciseffect.

Video, 19 min.

Political gestures and civic actions are at the center of the artistic practice of Tania Bruguera, who recently announced her candidacy for President of her native Cuba. In this video, Bruguera addresses some of the ongoing themes and issues of socially engaged artists today. She touches upon some of her most recent works, such as Immigrant Movement International (2010–ongoing), developed in collaboration with Queens Museum in New York and Arendt Institute of Artivism in Havana. Her works are presented as examples and case studies of new practices that involve the artist in novel relationships with institutions and civic society.

Neon sign

In the film Dr. Strangelove (1964), Stanley Kubrick foresaw a post-apocalyptic future in which dominant male leaders would repopulate the Earth, with ten women allocated to every man. The neon sign by artist Yael Bartana presents the opposite scenario; imagining a condition in which women are in charge of a world in desperate need of a new vision. The work unfolded in a performance that took place at the 2017 Manchester International Festival, in which groups of female experts were confronted with some of the urgent crises of our time. These scientists, politicians, activists, and thinkers of global reputation spent the evening attempting to solve the global emergencies as the clock ticked.

Instigated aural intervention, sound installation

Writer Angela Dimitrakaki and theorist Antonia Majaca were invited by artist Sanja Iveković to animate her Monument to Revolution (2017), installed in Athens in the context of documenta 14. The original Berlin monument of the same title (in memory of Communist Party of Germany founders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht) was destroyed by the Nazis in 1935. The new monument is set symbolically in Athens, where the struggle against capitalism is rife. Thirty international feminist contributors, both individuals and collectives, were asked to each send a short recording about fascism and the importance of feminist struggle against it. Sound sculptor AGF scored the multi-lingual collection of recordings here installed.

Dispersed installation with clipboards of various materials, with various printed media, a rubber band, aluminum clips, variable dimensions

This work is composed of a number of old-fashioned clipboards scattered around the space and reproduced in very expensive materials such as marble and bronze; materials usually used for government buildings or public sculpture and with bureaucratic or “official” connotations. Attached to these are various collages of images and text excerpts decontextualized from their original context, playing new roles in their novel relationships to the surrounding events. The monumentality conveyed by the chosen materials suggests, in the words of the artist Antonis Pittas, the idea of “capturing and framing public memories in the making.”

video documentation of a performance, 25 min. (loop)

Aernout Mik’s performance Untitled was realized in the context of FORMER WEST: Documents, Constellations, Prospects at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, 2013. Unannounced, 100 professional and amateur actors attended the seven-day event, silently building presence and familiarity with the public. At the near-conclusion of the event, at the end of a lecture by art theorist Piotr Piotrowski titled “Global Agoraphilia” about the potentials of the collective to shape contemporary public life, the performers erupted into a collective uprising as they, dispersed among the audience, began “speaking in tongues.” Intervening in the language and setting of a conference, Mik’s work made manifest both the disruptive and propositional power of the unintelligible in art and collective action.

Video, 4 min. (loop)

This animation addresses the so-called Islamic State’s sustained destruction of artifacts, buildings, and monuments of cultural heritage and human history. The artists ask where this destruction comes from, what it means, and test a tentative answer with philosopher Judith Butler’s idea that rage is born of intense grief. Over 2,500 media images and stills were manipulated by the artists through collage, painting, or drawing to create what they call “moving paintings.” The aim is to elicit “astonishment rather than empathy” from the viewer, calling for critical analyses of the depicted scenes so that the images, in their words, “land in the region of none-violence.”

Radio station

Piratensender, which means pirate station in German, is a project in which artist Ahmet Öğüt presents a series of interviews and dialogues with lawyers, immigration law experts, broadcasters, socio-cultural workers, musicians, urban subcultural groups, and feminist and LGBTQI+ activists on radical pedagogies, the concept of urban citizenship, self-proclaimed micronations, artists’ rights, alternative currencies, unconditional basic income, immaterial labor, precarious labor, domestic labor, and the necessity of self-initiative, participation, and autonomy as tools of resistance for marginalized communities, undocumented masses, and non-citizens. On this occasion, Öğüt realizes a new and broadcasts previous episodes through a collaboration with Utrecht-based online radio station Stranded.FM.

Installation with vinyl records, turntables, headphones

Reverie. On the Liberation from Work is a two-chapter guided hypnosis exercise aimed at deeply relaxing one’s body and mind in preparation for a future without work. Think of “reverie” as a tool to help you visualize what a life free of work can be. This hypnotic exercise guides one on a peaceful journey of the mind to explore a realm where work is no longer needed, and where the dream of universal basic income has finally succeeded.

Performative instructions

At the entrance of BAK, visitors receive a handout titled Careful and Careless Tasks with instructions, penned for the occasion by artist Koki Tanaka. The artist invites the audience to reflect on smaller or bigger gestures of their everyday lives, those that affect collectivity and our relationships with one another, impacting the overall atmosphere of the gathering. Following his interest in the relationships between human beings in the most diverse contexts and scenarios, this new work is inspired by the “I Care” sign that was hanging in a classroom of educator and priest Don Lorenzo Milani’s School of Barbiana, Barbiana, founded in the 1950s, in opposition to the fascist slogan “I Don’t Care.” (ML)