THEMATIC PROJECTS

OUTLINES THEMATIC PROJECT 2021-2022

Critical Practices Thematic Seminar Led by PZI Master Fine Art Core Tutors October – June 6 ECTS

The Critical Practices thematic seminar introduces students to principal discourses and debates within artistic practice and the critical theories that inspire them. Led by the team of MFA research and practice tutors, the seminar examines how the critiques of our present affect the research methods and material practices of artists and culture-makers. Issues of labor, class, race, gender, sexuality, technology, and economic and social power relations will be explored through the research and practices of the MFA tutors and those of other contemporary artists, writers, and thinkers. Through readings, conversations, screenings, and lectures, we will learn and share reflections and construct vocabularies of critical political and social awareness.

Each tutor will lead one or more thematically focussed sessions addressing intersections of critical social discourse and artistic practice. Drawing from our practices, these sessions will range in structure and content. Students will participate in readings, discussions, and workshops, and participate actively in creating discourse amongst the class.

Tremor of the World Led by Ioanna Gerakidi January - March 2022 6 ECTS

Thinking across multifaceted forms of violence, varying from the violence of the archive that anti-colonial, linguistic and queer theories are trying to unveil, to slow violence, a term coined by Rob Nixon when referring to the 'violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all', the seminars will speak about alternative currents and imaginaries and their possible application in design and other art forms. They will trace that which resists legibility, that which willfully remains incalculable and excessive, in order to find ways to subvert dominant histories.

How can we think across resonances between studies of southness, blackness, discourses on diaspora and indigenous bodies as means to form other sociabilities? How can linguistic systems, idiolects, oral stories, mythologies and visual transcriptions of the yet undistributed, be approached as tangible and intangible parables for legitimising inconsistencies, mental breaks and physical disorders? How can we speak nearby the pain implied in the aforementioned, without exotifying it, but without demonising it either? Alina Popa, in one of her diaries writes that: 'The body is as alien as the world. And we have to embrace its strangeness. Especially when we need reality to be crazy, when we are ill with no chance at survival from the standard perspective. I don’t want my reality normal. I need it off the hook.' The monthly seminars aim towards reaching this non-normal reality, whilst modulating a focus on objection, projection and resistance.

Each of the workshops will consist of collective reading and analyses on the proposed material and of a series of exercises varying from writing to other ways of embodying theory (depending on the needs and desires of the students). At the end of each meeting the students will be invited for a session where curated filmic and sound material will be presented, under the theme discussed over the day.The study groups will also include personal meetings with the students. The focus of these meetings will be on discussions around each student's work and practice.

OH SO MUCH MORE THAN HEAVEN ALLOWS Lived Histories of Phenomenal Embodiments in Modern Arts and Cities Led by Jan Verwoert October – June 6 ECTS

OH the people came to see, hear, and feel: the lights, the beat, the heat, the melt-down, the phenomenal, sensational, once-in-a-lifetime performance, or display of what was unseen and unheard of before, so it just got a new name that was fun to say, like what's that Jazz, or how Post the net are we now, like really? OH and backstage we stood, and peaked through the curtain trying to get a read on the room. Is it showtime already? Are we ready to sweat until we can't sweat no more? Who's in the crowd? Lovers and haters? Strangers? Censors? Military? OH and if we made our bodies talk and gave our selves to be seen and heard, would the crowd listen and want to understand? Or did they come to do the opposite: take cruel pleasure in staring at what made the news because no one understood so everyone wanted to have an opinion, and pass judgement, from the distance of the newspaper column, hospital lecture theatre or dimly illuminated cabaret seat? OH and what if we blinded them all with lightning, glitz and the rolling thunder of a spacecraft descending to the sound of more horns and percussions than fit the stage, flicking feathers, projecting abstractions, scrambling words, and making the future happen now, so OH us and them is a thing of the past, since aboard this unknown flying object all is tripping.

The Seminar will move between several thematic islands, in a process of closely reading texts, looking at art, and listening to music:

1. From Harlem to Paris and beyond. The modern metropolis has a new truth, the nervous system is wired to the electric circuits of urban life, and switched to overload. Souls flash up and burn publicly, put on stage for good money, you may still get locked away in the work house or psychiatric ward any time, for pretty much the same reason people got a ticket to see you: because whatever you seem to embody has no place yet in the conventional order of things, and is hence deemed exciting and dangerous to the status quo. Not that the system wouldn't pump its soldiers with amphetamines too, so they can fly bombers all night, teeth grinding. But if you're found dancing on the streets, high on the same army pill supplies, prepare to be imprisoned for acting disorderly. Science wants you, but not having fun.

Before the turn of the 20th century, Blanche Wittman is among the big stars of Paris. People flock to the Salpêtrière hospital to see her, a former nurse now branded "queen of the Hysterics", go into convulsions on cue, in public lectures by neurologist showman Jean-Martin Charcot. Freud sees her perform and founds psychoanalysis. With the body put on display (for the maladies and ecstasies of modern souls to be visualised) gendered female, and recruited from the workforce, sexism, classism, and racism are built into the foundations of a performance culture that splits power unevenly between those summoned to put the bodysoul on show, and those entitled to sit back and watch. Around the same time in the US, black people, leaving the South to seek freedom in the cities of the North, create radical forms of new urban culture while exposed to racial stereotyping, police violence, and random imprisonment for "loitering", the sheer fact of being out and about in the city without assuming a place (as if there was any) the status quo would condone.

Parallel to norms of race/class/gender being imprinted into the living flesh of urban performers, it writes its own stories, of existential experimentation, and improvisation, involving modes of coming together, and falling apart, personally, artistically, politically, sexually, poetically, physically, intellectually. Conventional art histories and philosophies struggle to discern what's going on: they can no longer tell artists apart from the art, or thinkers from ideas, as the medium in which the making and the made melt together, is a form of life, lived experience which may or may not leave lasting traces, beyond the shared sensations a day and night lived in a certain key might yield. Auto(biographical)-fiction writing, and poetry, however, emerge as a means for sharing the art of living life experimenting.

We'll open the inquiry by reading in Saidiya Hartman's Wayward Lives Beautiful Experiments, the hallmark reconstruction of the interwoven lives and struggles of young black women forging biographies and urban culture in New York and Philadelphia, at the turn of the 20th century. We will read writing by Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Djuna Barnes, and the Baroness Elsa von Freytag Loringhoven. We'll study feminist deconstructions of the making of the modern "hysteric", and Paul Preciado's engagement with the making of modern bodies via the industrial production of gender and drugs.

1. With Spring approaching we will take a conceptual break to consider a question disruping the conventions of the Eurocentric canon: How do you grasp the value and meaning of art when it has become existentially impossible to isolate an artifact (awaiting aesthetic judgment and commercial sale) by separating: artist from art, process from product, worker from work, inspiration from outcome, performer from audience, symptom from analysis, cure from poison, pleasure from pain? What to do when the bodily presence of performers can't be subtracted from the art in the mode of real-time performance? What irreducible surplus does the body constitute? Recent black theory offers powerful concepts for recognising the fundamental change in the conditions for the production and appreciation of art — from the isolation of artefacts to the engagement in live processes.

George Lewis, Fred Moten, and Arthur Jafa, for example, give a clear account of how the practice philosophy of improvisation advanced by Jazz and Bebop effectively reset the terms of 20th century art — with a white canon coopting the impulse (Pollock et al.) while denying its source, values and philosophy. Taking the lead from these thinkers, we'll see if the thoughts opened up around the extra bodily presence in realtime improvisation might not also help to recast a pressure in a different light that many feminist art practices (particularly but not solely in the field of performance, particularly but not solely from the 1960s onwards) were confronted with: How to bring the body into play, and voice intensities, traumata and joys, socially and publically, without being cornered as "hysterical" (too personal emotional subjective etc.)? How to fully authorise the act of making yourself visible if patriarchal conventions de-authorise heteronormatively female coded bodies as "models", "muses", or "hysterics" when they give themselves to be seen? We'll study the art of Senga Nengudi, Pauline Boty, and Alina Szapocznikow.

1. With Summer in view, we will try to take matters to the edge by getting a sense of how existential physical presence enters into play with a an exuberant use of symbolism, artifice, and both new and ancient technologies of make-up, special effects, and surreal presence. We will consult Philip Core on "Camp: The Lie that Tells the Truth", and watch All That Heaven Allows back to back with Fear Eats the Soul. We'll look into and listen to the psychedelic revolts that Brasilian artists and musicians like Helio Oiticica, Lygia Clark, and Os Mutantes realised under, and against dictatorial rule. We will try to initiate ourselves into the Black futurist philosophies born by the holistic musical visions of Sun Ra and Fela Kuti. We hopefully arrive at a different sense of how false oppositions of the "artificial vs authentic", "folkloristic vs futuristic" can be debunked, in the course of performances, and modes of living art and life that reset the codes for how bodies signify. Along this thematic arc, we may move from a historical, via a conceptual, to a more speculative discussion of the questions at hand.

The Seminar will be split into morning, and afternoon session. As a host, I consider it my task to provide the frame, put text on the table, and moderate the debate. The primary objective of the Seminar, however, is to create a group that exercises the art of collective thought. To this end, no prior knowledge is required, nobody needs to impress anybody. On the contrary, the challenge lies in forming a resonanting body through listening, reading, and looking that can amplify thoughts in the process of their making (and unmaking), and permit participants to think out aloud together, so we weave a fabric of concepts that can hold weight, or tears, so we have to start over again. Taking the risk of speaking up, and experimenting with the coining of concepts for what is perhaps not yet sayable is welcome. Yet, so is the investment of attention that concentrated listening and attuned responses to other participants' interventions require. It's like switching between playing solo or rhythm in musical improvisation. Can't have one without the other. Things don't move without either. As a host, my job lies in keeping the basic rhythm in the pocket, and the overall thematic arc in view. Yet, I would very much appreciate it though if participants co-hosted sessions, put their spin on the morning or afternoon, and guide us into material, based on their experiences, and inquiries. I hope we can make this one move.