master-platform.ch

Master-Symposium 2022

École de design et Haute école d'art du Valais / EDHEA

On the Politics of Aesthetics

29. Mars 2022

Guests: Paloma Ayala, Kamran Behrouz, Valérie Félix, Anne-Laure Franchette, Ronny Hardliz. Conceived by Kadiatou Diallo, Petra Köhle and Nicolas Vermot-Petit-Outhenin.

Within the framework of the symposium, we will question together with students and guests how aesthetic imprints define the readings of what we perceive, which histories and politics are inscribed in it and how we might imagine decolonial strategies of perception.

The symposium is structured in five workshop groups of 15-25 students each. Facilitated by one of the guests and their specific artistic/curatorial/theoretical practice, the workshops provide space to develop these questions further and deliberate possible courses of action.

The Château Mercier, with its specific locations such as a former swimming pool (now conference room) or a horse stable (now studio for artists in residence), bears witness to this site's past and present and offers a multi-layered environment for the workshops. A common lunch allows exchanging between the groups.

The symposium provides lunch for everybody (Risotto). The confirmation of your participation is mandatory. Please inscribe to the symposium by writing to caterina.giansiracusa@hevs.ch by March 21th.

PROGRAMM
Meeting point: Sierre, train station 09h45

10h00 – 10h45 Walk to Château Mercier
10h45 – 11h00 Welcome
11h00 – 13h00 Workshop
13h00 – 14h30 Common lunch (Risotto)
14h30 – 16h30 Workshop
16h30 – 17h00 Getting together and farewell

 

WORKSHOPS

Making Anamen-ovens
Paloma Ayala

Following the ‘Siluetas’ series from Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta and the culturally-diverse cooking practice in pit holes, we will dig and construct a self-designed, environment-inspired oven pit. This Anamen-oven is thought to be a geo-social structure engaged with the community and the surrounding landscape. Digging holes, fire, and food will activate a framework for action, cornerstoned in the ideas:
1. Care is observing and maintaining bonds between human, more than human and their systems. (inspired in New Alphabet School)
2. Human is a caretaker and active element of the recuperation of a broken planet and its people.
3. To activate imaginative processes of repair, maintenance, and healing, we situate ourselves emphatically in situ and are aware not to occupy but to learn and become part of.
4. In thinking through the body, it is possible to examine how we come together and recognize knowledge not as a one-way transmission but as a form of exchange that can be circulated. (inspired in AnEducation)
5. Eating together can save us from our lonely selves.

We will discuss these topics, read for each other, dig and eat. Bring warm clothes to get dirty and a water bottle.

///Paloma Ayala (b.1980, Matamoros, Mexico) is a visual artist interested in fiction as a strategy to analyze, critique and re-articulate historical, ecological or social problematics. Her work takes the form of publications, videos, installations, reading/cooking sessions, and workshops. Paloma´s projects nourish visions of connection dreams of emancipation and emphasize care practices. Her favorite spaces to work range from kitchen to river shore, from international crossing-bridge to agricultural land, from community meeting to aquelarre. Paloma’s work is rooted in the eastern MX/US border ecologies, simultaneously blooming in her current base in Zurich.

 

Is Body A colorless term?
A POLITICS OF LOCATION
[ /ə/  /ˈpɒl.ə.tɪks/  /əv/  /ləʊˈkeɪ.ʃən/ ]

Kamran Behrouz

noun

  1. Neither aesthetic nor Body is a neutral term. In Blood, Bread, and Poetry, Adrienne Rich asks: “who is we?” (1984) and emphasizes on the situatedness of black queer feminism by referring to works of Audre Lorde, Gloria Joseph, and Barbara Smith. She coined the phrase "a politics of location” as a proposition to move away from a hegemonic [white] feminism that universalizes all women's experiences and [re]produces a normative and exclusionary image of being in the world.

verb

  1. Politics of location is a decolonial proposition to bring back theory to its materiality, to reconnect thinking and speaking with a situated experience, a geography, a body— Body as a vivid term, and location as the place of experienced intersections—through historical relations, translations, and displacements.
  • What does Politics of location mean when the location is virtual, communication is electronic, and body is digitalized? How does the internet impact our daily aesthetic and politics?
  • What is the impact of our digital bodies on the internet itself?- If meme culture effects AI(artificial intelligence) and machine-learning?
  • What does it mean for the future of our decolonial practices? 

///Kamran Behrouz (1984) is a Visual Artist-researcher, born and raised in Tehran, working and living in Zurich for the past decade. Their PhD, entitled ‘Cosmopolitics of the Body’, uses posthuman critical theory as a navigation map and untranslatability as a compass to examine the boundaries of bodies and humanity’s embedded and embodied cultures. They work with multiple medias and combines the act of painting with animation, installations, motion capture, and (virtual)performance. Politics of image center their visual practices, transfigured in their theoretical works, as cultural translations, coding, and textual trafficking.

 

What is What – Deconstruct an Identification
Valérie Félix

How do we learn to read visual information around us? Identification is the main goal in the way we are learning images since we are a child. This perception is modelling our manner to connect and encounter our environment – What is What… Couldn’t we read underneath, besides, between, in transparency, in layers? This workshop will explore and try to deconstruct our (unique) look on what we are perceiving while questioning our (unique) stance regarding our environment, by de(self)centralized it, deindividualized it, to reconnect. Giving back the place to exchanges where body and reflection are meeting – within art history, digital language, and all public spaces.

///Valérie Félix is an art historian, artist, curator and researcher in digital and cultural studies. Her interests are mainly oriented toward the decentralization of research and the reintegration of the subversive artistic action as a breeding ground for a collective consciousness. Bringing together an applied and theoretical practice, she strongly believes in the relevance of art as a research device. In this way, she set up in 2017 Code (codedigitalart.ch) – an interdisciplinary and collaborative research project that aims to develop questions about the digital society. She teaches at EDHEA (Valais School of Art) in Sierre, Switzerland. She is currently completing a PhD in Art and Art Sciences on the question of algorithms at ULB (Université Libre de Bruxelles) and La Cambre, Belgium.

 

Interstices of the Archives
Anne-Laure Franchette

Since 2013, we have built with VOLUMES a collection of art books, zines and magazines, thanks to the many donations received annually for our international open call exhibition. Taking this library as a site of investigation, we have been asking ourselves what constitutes and can be read as an archive? Archives are generally understood as a coherent form of organization, having as objectives to unify, identify, classify the elements within a determined body of documents, objects, etc. The workshop will look at the normative and alternative systems of library catalogues. What is the role and responsibility of a library? What should be in the library, and how should we deal with it? How can we contextualise categories? We will look for forms of categorization and activation that take differences, associations, interstices and lacunas as categories to re-think the paradigm of the archive and permit us to develop new appropriate tools, asking how knowledge can be produced by libraries and archives.

///Anne-Laure Franchette is an artist based in Zurich. After studying Fine Arts (MFA Zhdk Zurich, CH) and Art History (DEA Paris 10, FR), she currently works as a research assistant at Luzern University. Her work focuses on labor, hierarchies of dignity, strategies of self-organisation and representation. She is part of the interdisciplinary study group TETI (textures and experiences of trans-industriality), whose activity involves workshops, exhibitions, talks, walks, cooking and publications. In 2013 she initiated the Zurich Art Space Guide, a listing of alternative art spaces and initiatives, and VOLUMES, an organisation researching and showcasing art publishing practices. 

 

How do we look at animals?
Ronny Hardliz

Are there documentary ways of relating to animals other than ‘looking at’ as in ‘to observe’ or ‘to investigate’? The workshop draws from the research project De-Doc-Donkeywork: Decolonising Documentary Art Practices and the Global Crisis for Donkeys, connecting disciplines’ decaying borders with the possibilities of decolonising human relations to animals and proposing the documental as an epistemic practice capable of organising resources into collaborating collectives. Aiming at a visual manifesto that makes the political act of ‘staying with’ or ‘being looked at or being witnessed’ sensible, we explore three camera paradigms, summarizing existing positions as Camera-Eye and Camera-Pen, and suggesting the possibility of a Camera-Conductor.

///Dr Ronny Hardliz (*1971) is an art practitioner based in Bern, Switzerland. He works as an artistic researcher on his SNSF-Postdoc. Mobility project De-Doc-Donkeywork: Decolonising Documentary Art Practices and the Global Crisis for Donkeys in collaboration with the Film, Photo and Literary Composition Unit of HDK-Valand, Gothenburg University. He studied architecture and urbanism at EPFL and Carnegie Mellon University (PA) and film at Pittsburgh Filmmakers and Hochschule der Künste Bern. He was associated with Lucerne School of Art and Design and a research fellow at ETHZ and Goldsmiths for his PhD studies. He obtained his PhD from Middlesex University, London, in 2018. Through his curating, exhibiting, teaching and publishing activities, he is involved in discourses on art-space-media-public relations.

École cantonale d'art de Lausanne / ECAL

HOW SOON IS NOW? HISTORIES AND FIGURES OF YOUTH

ECAL/Ecole cantonale d'art de Lausanne

Master European Art Ensemble

Symposium 

Monday 28 March 2022

9am - 5pm

Ikea Auditorium

This symposium is the first stage of the research project How Soon Is Now? Histories and Figures of Youth. It questions “youth” as a conceptual, aesthetic, and political figure born with modernity in the visual arts, popular culture, and the humanities. At the same time, this project proposes to examine the implications of the problematic category of "youth" in contemporary art and thought. By exploring the processes in which youth is constituted through its forms of representation, this project intends to render intelligible the aesthetic and political dimensions of youth, and to grasp it as a historical allegory allowing for a reconsideration of the contemporary in the light of its most lively site.

What image(s) does the notion of youth carry with it? What idea does it have of itself? How can we talk about it beyond ingrained ideas and the fantasies that society projects on it (at least in Western culture), making it simultaneously a force, a market, an age, a culture, a piece of a history which which we only began writing in the twentieth-century, and which today has reached its critical stage? In recent history, the notion of youth has so often been conflated with “bringing down the house” that we now expect everything from it: to reinvent us, to shake us up, to carry us, to succeed in what others have failed at (establishing the most open communities possible), to build bridges for the future, to be radical, to be uncompromising where anyone outside of youth has already given up, to be desirable where others are overwhelmed. But with what means? If not those that young people make themselves, for themselves, with elements that they alone will have chosen? With their culture, their places, their clandestinity. Because that which is not yet over happens in the shadows of the world. Youth is a secret. “How Soon Is Now?”, The Smiths once asked. When is it, now?

9am

Welcome coffee

9.30am

Welcome, Stéphanie Moisdon

Introduction, Philippe Azoury and Vincent Normand

10am

Representing Youth / Experiencing It. A Historical Perspective

Ludivine Bantigny

11am

Break

11.30am

"Will You Love Me When I'm Sixty Four?" Pop Music as an Art of Ages

Agnès Gayraud

12.30pm

Ludivine Bantigny and Agnès Gayraud in conversation

1pm

Lunch break

2pm

The Rave Continuum. Researching Plot and Politics of "Europe's Last Youth Culture"

Persis Bekkering

3pm

Break

3.30pm

About Bébé Colère

Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel

4.30pm

Conclusion

Apéro

 

 

Ludivine Bantigny

Representing Youth / Experiencing It. A Historical Perspective

The representations, discourses and other obsessions about "youth" often say less about young people than about the authorities that forge them: politicians, institutions, media, artists... In themselves, these representations are interesting: they express anxieties, doubts and hopes, but also strong opinions, sometimes peremptory visions that often translate fantasies. In such a landscape, cinema in particular is an excellent medium when it projects its lights and cameras on youth. It is these ways of telling the story of youth that this presentation addresses. But it does not stop there. For beyond the representations, what remains the most fascinating are the modalities of socialization that young people know and come across, in all their diversity. In this sense, this presentation will also question the relationship to time, historicity as an awareness of taking part in history and situating oneself in it, age identities, and generational belonging. 

Ludivine Bantigny is a historian, teacher and researcher attached to the Laboratory of History of the University of Rouen-Normandy. She works on the history of commitments, social movements, insurrections and revolutions, but has also devoted numerous books and articles to the history of youth and generations. She has published Le Plus Bel Âge ? Jeunes et jeunesse en France de l’aube des « Trente Glorieuses » à la guerre d’Algérie (Fayard, 2007), La France à l’heure du monde (Seuil, 2017, rééd. 2019), 1968. De grands soirs en petits matins (Seuil, 2018, rééd. 2020), Révolution (Anamosa, 2019), « La plus belle avenue du monde ». Une histoire sociale et politique des Champs-Élysées (La Découverte, 2020) and La Commune au présent. Une correspondance par-delà le temps (La Découverte, 2021).

Agnès Gayraud

"Will You Love Me When I'm Sixty Four?" Pop Music as an Art of Ages

Folklore has long been interpreted as the "childhood of art", a form of expression invented by popular classes and considered as the living vestige of humanity’s childhood. From its outset, recorded folk music has been appreciated as a form of "primaverism", the conviction that things in their prime are the most valuable, that authenticity stems not only from the origin but from the beginning.

A recording fixes individual voices and their organic idiosyncrasies at the moment of their expression, and in so doing, it captures the aura of a primitive past. The fixed expressivity of recorded voices represents countless individual incarnations, and this has made pop music the most powerful musical art form to bear witness to all ages of life, not just childhood or youth. Rather than associating pop music with a particular stage of life, with a phase of inexperience (innocence, naivety, regression or youth), it is tempting to question its rooting in the expression of ages in general.

Contemporary musicians such as Angèle, Oklou, and Arca accurately represent post-adolescence, sexual maturity, and the pleasure of finally flirting with the pornographic category of "adult" content, all while reflecting on youthism, contemporary ageism, and sexist domination. Here, individual embodiment takes as its theme its own situated expression. In contrast to these younger artists, Bob Dylan sang  later in his life,"It's not dark yet but it's getting there". This priority given to the expression of individuality at various ages (one’s body, one’s sexuality, one’s race, which make sense only by situating a generation in terms of someone's legal and physiological age), is what binds deeply popular recorded music to what the history of western musical art has at some point thought to have overcome during the 20th century: the romantic confidence in situated individualities, in particular incarnations, in singularities. In the contemporary artistic field, reflexive forms of art only recognize their historical age. Individual age is not a key to understanding the content of their gesture, one deciphers it rather in light of their epoch. Popular music, to the contrary, presents itself as a musical art powerfully carried by the expressiveness of the ages, even if it means sometimes to render eternal a youth whose legal status as such proceeds from the whole liberal system.

Agnès Gayraud was born in Tarbes in 1979. Under the name La Féline, she is the author and composer of several pop records released since 2014 by Kwaidan Records, including the albums Adieu l'enfance, Triomphe, and Vie Future, as well as other contributions under the moniker GRIVE. She published a book of aesthetic philosophy, Dialectic of Pop (Urbanomic, 2019), dealing with the expressive changes induced by the advent of recorded popular music since the beginning of the twentieth  century. She is currently professor of art and theory at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts de Lyon.

Persis Bekkering

The Rave Continuum. Researching Plot and Politics of "Europe's Last Youth Culture"

As much as any experience fails to be adequately grasped by language, the experience of the rave presents the storyteller with a specific, intriguing challenge. As the narrator in Rainald Goetz' experimental novel Rave (1998) remembers: "It was the wordless time, when we were always looking around with our big eyes so strangely in every possible situation, shaking our heads, and could almost never say anything but: speechless – pf –"

The rave, at its best, is a wordless suspension of time; a limit experience; an event blurring linear understandings of time and space, proposing its own logic. As music theorist Simon Reynolds once quoted the (unbelievably perfect) shouts of an MC at a hardcore party: 'We've lost the plot'. What does this mean if one tries to translate the rave into narrative? How to grasp its thwarted, warped, halted temporality?

For her last novel Exces, part of which is published in English as the novella Last Utopia, writer Persis Bekkering has attempted to find an answer to these problems. The questions of narrative structure and temporality of the rave may look like purely formal ones, but they are closely tied to bigger, historical or even philosophical questions: how to understand the rave and the emergence of rave culture, at the end of the 1980s, in its time? Why did it emerge at that peculiar historical moment, when the end of history and telos of progress was famously declared, utopian ideologies lost their claim, and capitalism entered a new phase? And what did the rave propose to it: resistance or acceleration? Maybe both?

In her presentation, Bekkering takes us through a meandering journey along her ongoing artistic and literary research, sharing images, texts, fragments and shouts in the dark, from her archive. Throughout the various parts and fragments, one can hear the constant drone of the search for the aesthetic expression of the permanent presence of crisis in our time. 

Persis Bekkering is a metamorphic writer, engaging with a wide spectrum of artistic disciplines. She is interested in the emotional landscape of the contemporary, searching for new narrative forms that reflect a present permanently marked by crisis. Her recent publications include (fictocritical) essays, art criticism and fiction. Her debut novel Een heldenleven (The Life of a Hero), published in 2018, was shortlisted for the ANV Debut Prize. Her second novel Exces, shortlisted for the BNG Bank Prize for Literature, was published in 2021, part of which has been translated in English as Last Utopia by the Jan Van Eyck Academy in Maastricht. Recent and forthcoming publications include texts for M HKA Antwerp, Girls Like Us, Extra Extra and NRC Handelsblad. With choreographer Ula Sickle she worked as dramaturg on the concert performances The Sadness (2020) and Echoic Choir (2021). She also teaches at the Creative Writing department of ArtEZ University of the Arts in Arnhem.

Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel

About Bébé Colère

Screening of the film followed by a round table discussion.

For more than ten years now, Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel have been weaving together a body of work that has no equivalent within French cinema. Whether through their first feature film Jessica forever (2018), or through their numerous short and medium-length films, (Martin pleure, 2017; Notre héritage, 2015; or Tant qu'il nous restera des fusils à pompe, 2014, which won the Golden Bear at the 2014 Berlin International Film Festival), they follow the destiny of their own generation (they are both less than 35 years old). This is a generation which feeds on heroism through the virtual, a generation that met porn before love and online violence before friendship, a generation for which the video game is its lost paradise. 

Yet they draw from it, and this is their strength, a form of romanticism, which never wants to believe in the end of emotions. Their lyricism is unprecedented because it comes after: after the images, after the clichés, after the disillusionment, after they have been told that “no, really, sorry, there is nothing left to expect from anything, everything has been played out”. In the spring of 2020, when the earth had just come to a halt due to the Covid pandemic, Jonathan and Caroline retreated to Corsica where they dreamed of an unseen body that escaped from a video game: Bébé Colère [Baby Anger]. Bébé Colère denies his parents, Bébé Colère has no friends, Bébé Colère vomits the world and feeds on emptiness.

In 13 minutes, Bébé Colère is an irreducible work that paints a portrait of a 2.0 youth caught in disarray. A post-human body, which has denied its origins and only sees the future through the features of an avatar.

Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel will discuss the possibility of romanticism today, and the conditions that allow them to invent new characters, generating their own disordered chronology. They will also talk about their aesthetic relationship with video games: the baby in Bébé Colère is a pre-programmed asset purchased online to be animated and then integrated into the film. In close collaboration with Lucien Krampf, they are also currently developing a project conceived inside a game engine. In their work, they consider the game as a new narrative track while also using pre-existing elements.

The conversation will take place in French.

 

Jonathan Vinel, born in Toulouse in 1988, studied editing at the Fémis. Caroline Poggi, born in 1990 in Ajaccio, studied at the University of Paris-Sorbonne (Paris-IV) and at the University of Corsica (CREATACC degree). They have directed several films, separately (Chiens for Caroline, Notre amour est assez puissant for Jonathan) and together. Their short film Tant qu'il nous reste des fusils à pompe received the Golden Bear at the 2014 Berlin International Film Festival. They then directed Notre héritage, also selected at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2015, followed by their first feature film Jessica Forever in 2018. They are currently working on their second feature film entitled Eat the Night.

 

 

 

Concept  and organization

Philippe Azoury, Vincent Normand, Shirin Yousefi

For registration or further information please contact: 

shirin.yousefi@ecal.ch

- -

How Soon Is Now? Histories and Figures of Youth is a research project supported by ECAL/University of Art and Design Lausanne and HES-SO/University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland.

Haute école d'art et de design – Genève / HEAD

Value and Noise: Inhabitation at High Dimensions

 

Symposium conceptualized and coordinated by Patricia Reed.

 

March 30, 2022 | 10:00-18:00 | Online

 

Full program : https://head.hesge.ch/ccc/turbulence/en/noise-and-value/

 

 

As Sylvia Wynter’s genealogy outlines, the historical sedimentations unleashed since early Euromodernity have culminated in an unprecedented situation for human forms of life: the need to navigate a planetary environment in common. Such scales of coexistence, often characterized by concepts of “interdependence” and “entanglement”, are not synonymous with sheer enormity, yet what they inherently do is disrupt familiar perspectival frameworks bound to the specificity of location. For Denise Ferreira da Silva, ‘entanglement’ contests the very social and epistemological foundations of Euromodernity as underwritten by a paradigm of separability, summoning a prompt to conceptualize ‘difference without separability’. If the world as we know it, has been spurred on through the invention of a spatializing framework (traceable to Renaissance perspectivalism, through to the ubiquitous grid found in most modeling software), how are we to refigure the very spatiality of inseparability that embeds the possibility for planetary forms of inhabitation? What does it mean to sense from, and inhabit conditions of inseparable spatiality that does not presuppose homogenisation of particularity? For the planetary to denote a substantial, cosmological shift in orientation, discovering location and orientation within our socio-technical milieu demands a conceptual and perceptual recalibration of the spaces we concretely inhabit. Why? Because said alterations affect understandings of agency (doing things in a world), and accountability (relational consequences for those doings). 

 

In this symposium we will depart from the premise that planetary entanglement is a noisy, inseparable space, in both acoustic and informational understandings of the term, looking at how the arts can participate in projects of perspectival recalibration, otherwise said, in processes of localisation.  

 

The day will unfold in broadcast form, with contributions in various formats from lectures, annotated listening sessions, screenings, dialogues, with student interventions as glossary and diagrammatic intervals to guide the episodes. 

 

Full program : https://head.hesge.ch/ccc/turbulence/en/noise-and-value/

 

Confirmed participants:

Rana Hamadeh, Su Yu Hsin, Jessika Kharzik & Ahmad Beydoun, Cecile Malaspina, Sahej Rahal, Martina Raponi, Jan St. Werner, Inigo Wilkins

 

Master Symposium of the Visual Arts Department at HEAD Genève 2022 is coordinated by the CCC in conversation with TRANS and work.master––at HEAD Genève, 30 March 2022.

 

The Symposium will be held online on our Twitch Channel : https://www.twitch.tv/cccrp

Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst in Basel / FHNW

Age of Receivership

Age of Receivership

On generous Listening, equality and gender

Moderated by Quinn Latimer and Chus Mart nez, the two day Spring

symposium will be dedicated to active listening. While hearing is a

passive act, listening is an active act of engaging with the other, with

oneself and with nature. There is a gender assumption as well that

subscribes listening and story telling to women and elderly, while

agency and production is subscribe to  the male. The symposium will

address the importance of surpassing those binary divisions, while

addressing listening as a key element in reaching equality goals, in

democracy building and in mental health. Through exercises,

performances and talks the symposium will discover an artistic

practice and research engaged in creating active forms of response to

one another.