Against the pace of infinite urgencies surrounding AI and gender inequality, deceleration is embraced to read together slowly. Rather than streamlining for clarity, SLOW READERS persistently move through and engage with the quagmire.
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Fellowship at V2: Lab for the Unstable Media
As of 2021, I am a Fellow at V2: Lab for Unstable Media. In the V2_Fellowships artists, curators and theorists work together with V2_, pursuing mutual knowledge and practices. The V2_fellowship program aims at advancing the work of mid-career artists, curators and theorists. Fellows are invited to launch a project or deepen their research in association with V2_ Lab, based on their expertise and their specific views on relevant discourses in the field of art, technology and society.
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Take care and see you soon on the other side of the quarantine,
Pedagogies: Committed, Critical, In the Plural, Feral, Resistant, De-colonial, Adaptive, Tactical, Practiced, Engaged, Transformative, Listening, Situated, A Work in Process, Ecological, Embodied, Embracing, Whispering, Observant, Hidden… Finding ourselves in quarantine, I made a digital scrapbook for my Critically Committed Pedagogy students reflecting on a January day we spent in my garden. In retrospect, it felt…
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Researcher at RASL
RASL, Rotterdam Arts and Sciences Lab, is a consortium between Codarts, Arts & Culture Studies (EUR), Erasmus University College (EUR) and the Willem de Kooning Academy. Part of the work I do within RASL is to work with other partner institutes on an Erasmus + awarded body of research exploring transdisciplinary education combining the arts, humanities and sciences.
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Panel Discussion: Framing and Reframing Archives
Framing and Reframing Archives: Panel discussion moderated by Alice Twemlow with Renée Turner, Lauren Alexander, Dr. Andrea Stultiens
Some of the issues raised: What does the artist bring to the archive, what are the ethics of subjective interventions and how does epistolary work as a research methodology.
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Weaving, Knots And Other Entanglements
Histories are woven, knotted, and impossible to disentangle. This is especially true when working through the recent past with linked threads to the present. Moving through Gisèle’s clothing and photographic archive, Turner reflects on the epistemology of the closet, the pitfalls of taxonomical fervour, and the complexity of entangled histories.
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Corona Chronicles: when life became a (gif)t
loop during the Covid-19 lockdown. The project is a meditation on routines, and peculiarities of our previously known dailies interrupted. With animations done by Cesare Davolio, script by Renée Turner, and music by Eliot Davolio; in other words, a family endeavor, we reflect on a moment when life was no longer taken for granted, but instead became a (gif)t.
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Published in Daisyworld Magazine
‘To Sanne’ is a short text featured in Daisyworld Magazine, a seasonal art publication by Zazie Stevens. Originally, it was written on an assessment form and is an attempt to understand evaluation as an act of care rather than simply grading.
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Fault Lines: KABK Research Symposium 2019
This one-day symposium, presented by the KABK Design Lectorate, features projects being developed through the KABK Research Group 2019, with an emphasis on practice-led research. Art and design research methods to be explored include: activism, collaboration, collective making, corresponding, diagramming, drawing, enactment, filmmaking, framing, juxtaposition, letter-writing, mapping, movement, notation, pedagogy, performance, re-archiving, re-narration, salvaging, speculation, translation, visual analysis, zooming in, and more.
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Reflections on the 15th ELIA Biennial Conference
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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European Academy of Participation: Cooking & Conviviality
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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Setting the Interconnected Table
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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ELIA Biennial Conference selected presentations from the Thematic Mobile Sessions
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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Presentation at Het Nieuwe Instituut: Speculative Archives
Moving through The Warp and Weft of Memory, an online archive of artist Gisèle van der Gracht’s closet, Renée Turner and Cristina Cochior will be discussing the porous border between enumeration and narration. Understanding the database as a form of writing, they will read through elements of the site and recount the making of the archive. Key to their approach is the language of weaving and the use of the Semantic MediaWiki to create a narrative tapestry.
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Interview by Amy Pickles with Renée Turner for the Rotterdam Arts & Sciences Lab
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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Dieuwertje Hehewerth in conversation with Renée Turner for Pandemic
Dieuwertje Hehewerth: This letter-writing, paired with the focus on clothes, makes the research focus on, and work through, ephemeral forms. They are objects that have a transitory quality – a quality of carrying and covering – of existing as an in between. I’m curious if you see these relations? And more directly in relation to…
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Folding
One of the challenges of making The Warp and Weft of Memory was bringing a sense of materiality to the digital. After all, clothing and textiles are tactile. Taffetas are crisp and rustle when moved, wool is rough or soft depending on how it has been treated, and silk is smooth and light to the touch.
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Opening of The Warp and Weft of Memory at H401
The exhibition took place in Gisèle van Waterschoot van der Gracht, where her work still hangs. The opening took place on August 24th and the exhibition ran until October 2, 2018.
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The Warp and Weft of Memory publication
There are other stains too. Her sweat has turned brown with time and its acid has etched itself into her white cotton shirts and the lining of dresses.
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The Warp and Weft of Memory (online narrative archive)
Combining writing, photographs of her clothes, videos, and illustrations, Renée Turner reflects on her direct encounter with Gisèle’s belongings, the intimacy of the closet, and how its content reflects her life, the history of the Netherlands before, during, and after the war, women and their clothing, the privileges of class, and the persona of the female artist. While each garment has its own story, it can be woven into a larger tapestry of other narratives, past and present.
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