From November 21st through the 24th, the Willem de Kooning Academy and Codarts hosted the 15th ELIA Biennial Conference in Rotterdam. Two years in the planning, we welcomed over 460 delegates from art academies across the world. The conference titled Resilience and the City: Art, Education & Urbanism explored four wide-ranging themes: Shifting Centres, Shifting Margins; Art and Social Cohesion; Art and Economy and Art and Innovation.
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As a part of the European Academy of Participation hosted at Herengracht 401 a group formed to take care of the very simple and practical task of preparing lunch and dinner for all those who attended. While chopping, stewing, and stirring, certain thematic trajectories intuitively emerged and were explored: Limits as possibilities Cultures of cooking…
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Networks of people, things, and places don’t emerge from thin air. They are choreographed, staged, plotted, and planned. This workshop, within the context of The Autonomous Fabric research at the Willem de Kooning Academy, explored the table as a scene. It looked at the ritual of eating together as a catalyst for exchange. Working with…
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While this publication by no means represents the sum of the conference, which included performances, keynote speakers and panels, it nonetheless offers an impression of the Thematic Mobile Sessions which took place at different venues across the city.
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You know, one of the things I like about writing in a digital environment is that there is no master narrative, only tentative propositions, networked connections that can be followed or ignored. Maybe as a form, it suits my own inability to prioritise and make decisions and my desire to circle around things without really landing on a single point or conclusion.
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This series of lectures entitled, Critically Committed Pedagogies: Learning Otherwise, examines unexpected sites and paradigms of learning, with the aim of plotting spaces for maneuverability, if not resistance or possibilities for imagining and acting otherwise in the present.
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International Conference: LIVING AS FORM
First day with keynotes by: Renzo Martens, Patricia Kaersenhout and Pierluigi Sacco.
On 2nd day ‘Open Space Technology’ facilitated by Mahir Namur, with contributions by Tandem (ECF, Breg Horemans), A Sharing Academy (Merlijn Twaalfhoven), University of Utrecht, dept. Community Art: Practice and Theory (Eugène van Erven), DasArt Creative Producer (Barbara van Lindt), Willem de Kooning Academy (Renee Turner), University of the Arts Utrecht (Thera Jonker), Sandberg Institut (Thomas Spijkermann)
Studium Generale, lecture by Jan Verwoert on “appropriation–>invocation–>supercommodification”
Jan Verwoert is a critic and writer on contemporary art and cultural theory, based in Berlin. He is a contributing editor of frieze magazine, his writing has appeared in different journals, anthologies and monographs. He teaches at the Piet Zwart Institute Rotterdam, the de Appel curatorial programme and the Oslo National Academy of the Arts.
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As my eyes catch yours in passing, I think about the Black Mountain College, and what it must have been like. Did you even use the word ‘curriculum’, or was there simply an unspoken symbiotic flow between lessons and like minds? I can’t imagine what it must have been like to work alongside Josef and Anni Albers – his disciplined studies on colour and her textiles and weaving.
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For me, the two most timely and memorable quotes of the evening were from The Stuart Hall Project, where Hall says “Race is the lens through which people come to perceive that a crisis is developing.” In the wake of Ferguson, no truer words could be spoken about current economic and social divides.
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