Events

Saturday November 26 from 2 p.m to 6 p.m

DISQUIET OBJECTS, MINING REIFICATION

A study day orga­nized by Lotte Arndt (the­o­reti­cian, Goethe Institut Fellow at Villa Vassilieff). The event will take place in English.

Plaster mold from World War I, Museum of Natural History, Vienna, Image : Britta Lange

With Bianca Baldi (artist), David Dibosa (art his­to­rian, curator), Britta Lange (researcher), Kerstin Stoll (artist), and Elsa Michaud & Gabriel Gauthier (artists).

« If the museum is a place of pet­ri­fied con­flicts, how can we kiss them awake, and how can they kiss us awake [1] ? »

When entering the realm of museums and exhi­bi­tions, arti­facts undergo a trans­la­tion from one sig­ni­fying order to another. Their new status as semio­phores (Krzysztof Pomian), as museum objects that mediate between their mate­rial appear­ance and the cul­tural meaning that they are embodying, easily brings to dis­ap­pear­ance the social rela­tions that the object par­tic­i­pates in. This era­sure con­cerns the his­tor­ical con­text of its fab­ri­ca­tion and col­lec­tion, the biog­raphy of the object (Igor Kopytoff), including the dif­ferent appro­pri­a­tions, re-sig­ni­fi­ca­tions, and phys­ical relo­ca­tions that are exe­cuted on it. In the frame of national col­lec­tions, the arti­fact is pat­ri­mo­ni­alised, becoming through this oper­a­tion part of the national cul­tural nar­ra­tive under offi­cial authority. Paradoxically, aurati­sa­tion, as the pro­duc­tion of unique­ness, and its oppo­site, the inte­gra­tion in objec­ti­fying typolo­gies that sub­sti­tutes sub­jec­tiv­i­ties by species rep­re­sen­ta­tion can both occur under the same regime. The latter is par­tic­u­larly striking when it comes to human remains and stuffed ani­mals, that can be con­sid­ered as boundary objects [2], belonging as ves­tiges of former sub­jec­tiv­i­ties to the realm of the living, while pre­sent in the form of inan­i­mate bones.

The study day will bring into dia­logue dif­ferent approaches that allow to call into ques­tion the “ob­ject-cen­tered and objec­ti­fying modes of instal­la­tion [that despite three decades of post­struc­turalist and post­colo­nial cri­tique con­tinue to retain] their exclu­sive holds on museum dis­plays” as Ruth Phillips records.

Among these approaches Latourian and new mate­ri­alist con­cep­tions break with the clas­sical museo­graphic under­standing of objects by con­sid­ering them as agents; that means as trou­ble­some and pol­y­semic enti­ties that interact with their envi­ron­ment and impose a resis­tance to their author­i­tarian inte­gra­tion in dis­plays and clas­si­fi­ca­tions. Propositions based on dias­poric theory allow for under­mining the inte­gra­tion of the objects into uni­fying national nar­ra­tives. If we are ques­tioning the nature/cul­ture divide as a Eurocentric the­o­ret­ical assump­tion, the treat­ment of ani­mals as mere rep­re­sen­ta­tives of a species becomes inde­fen­sible. Last but not least, strug­gles led by often hetero­ge­neous groups of stake­holders claiming the account­ability of the insti­tu­tions for the objects that they house, including prove­nance research and the finan­cial respon­si­bility in poten­tial resti­tu­tion cases, are key in order to shift existing power rela­tions.

— Lotte Arndt

Lotte Arndt’s seminar "Disquiet Objects, Mining Reification", on November 26, 2016.

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PROGRAM

2-2.10 p.m. : Welcome by Villa Vassilieff

2.10-2.25 p.m. : Introduction by Lotte Arndt (the­o­reti­cian, Goethe Institut Fellow à la Villa Vassilieff)

2.25-2.55 p.m. : Britta Lange (researcher in Cultural Studies, Berlin)
“Ra­cial Casts” as sen­si­tive col­lec­tions. In con­ver­sa­tion with Kerstin Stoll (artist).

Plaster casts of “for­eign”, “nat­ural” and col­o­nized people from the nine­teenth and late 20th cen­tury are part of many European anthro­po­log­ical col­lec­tions, museums and aca­demic insti­tutes. These “race rep­re­sen­ta­tions” served as sci­en­tific objects to e.g. mor­pho­log­ical studies, and as spec­tac­ular show­pieces to the public in European metropoles. As the casts were pro­duced from living people under pre­car­ious con­di­tions, they should be con­sid­ered as sen­si­tive col­lec­tions that today require a sen­si­tive dis­cus­sion. Britta Lange’s con­tri­bu­tion will elab­o­rate the case of plaster casts made by Otto Finsch in “Mi­cronesia” in 1882, just before the offi­cial German col­o­niza­tion. The neg­a­tive forms of the casts are today kept in Berlin whereas copies of the pos­i­tives might cir­cu­late in other places.

2.55-3.10 p.m. : Discussion with the audi­ence

3.10-3.40 p.m. : Bianca Baldi (artist, Brussels)
De Brazza’s Monkey

In her ongoing artistic research Bianca Baldi unfolds a face to face sit­u­a­tion between an unequal duo, held together by a shared name. Zero Latitude, a work that the artist pur­sues since 2014, focuses on the French explorer Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza (1852-1905) and a pri­mate that was named after him. Brazzas Monkey, or Cercopithecus neglectus is an Old World monkey endemic to the wet­lands of cen­tral Africa. While de Brazza tra­verses cen­tral Africa with a lot of equip­ment that takes the fore­ground of the pic­tures, the monkey observes the trip. The fea­tures attributed to the trav­eling European with his col­o­nizing mis­sion (such as the care­fully deployed field-bed designed by Louis Vuitton), are designed to oppose the explorer to the monkey, as part of nature, the jungle. Still, as Baldi remarks, “the crea­tures scent reminds him of his own” and in moments of inat­ten­tion, a “like­ness without social restric­tion” occurs.

3.40-3.55 p.m. : Discussion with the audi­ence

3.55-4.10 p.m. : Break

4.10-4.40 p.m. : David Dibosa (art his­to­rian and curator, London)
Return to La Javanaise: Ethnographic museums as spaces of trac­tion

How can we envisage museums as spaces that not only uphold existing rela­tions but also point towards con­nec­tions not yet made pos­sible? In his pre­sen­ta­tion, cul­tural the­o­rist David Dibosa dis­cusses the moving-image work, La Javanaise (2012). Directed by Dutch moving-image artist, Wendelien van Oldenborgh, the work is set in Amsterdam’s Tropen Museum. Dibosa will put for­ward a notion of ’object trac­tion’ - the idea that by working against museum con­tex­tu­al­i­sa­tion, objects can be seen as con­sti­tu­tive of their own dis­course: drawing people towards them to pro­duce unex­pected rela­tions, based on their speci­fici­ties.

4.40-5.00 p.m. : Discussion with the audi­ence

5.00-5.30 p.m. : PIT : Previously In Tomorrow (season 1) is a con­tem­po­rary art sitcom airing live cre­ated by Elsa Michaud & Gabriel Gauthier, in which the exposed pro­tag­o­nists attempt to pro­pose forms as they go along. By keenly pre­senting an inven­tory of their last expe­ri­ences and ref­er­ences alto­gether, the per­formers aim at pro­gram­ming a per­for­mance reper­tory for an imma­te­rial art center.

5.30-6.00 p.m. : Public dis­cus­sion mod­er­ated by Lotte Arndt

6.00 p.m. : Drinks

The participants Lotte Arndt, Kerstin Stoll, Britta Lange and David Dibosa during the seminar "Disquiet Objects, Mining reification", on November 26, 2016.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Bianca Baldi (1985, Johannesburg, South Africa) is an artist who lives and works in Brussels and Frankfurt. She com­pleted her Bachelor’s of Art at the The Michaelis School of Fine Art, Cape Town, and pur­sued her post­grad­uate studies at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main. Her video instal­la­tions reveal over-looked nar­ra­tive strands and the hidden struc­tures of power. By focusing on specific cul­tural or soci­o­log­ical arte­facts, in Baldi’s work his­tor­ical plots reveal com­plex webs of polit­ical, eco­nomic and cul­tural influ­ence.
Recent and upcoming exhi­bi­tions include; 11th Shanghai Biennale, Shanghai (CN)(2016) Pure Breaths, Swimming Pool Projects, Sofia (BG) (2016), Eyes in the back of your head (an incan­ta­tion), Slovenian Ethnographic Museum, (SL) (2016), The Image Generator II, Extra City Kunsthal, Antwerp (BE) (2016), Open House, Kunstverein Braunschweig (DE) (2015), 19th Contemporary Art Festival SESC Videobrasil, São Paolo (BR) (2015), Sightings, KZNSA, Durban (ZA) (2015),The 8th Berlin Biennale of Contemporary Art at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (DE) (2014), Zero Latitude at the Goethe Institut, Johannesburg (ZA)(2014).

Britta Lange received her Phd in cul­tural science from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin in 2005, where she also com­pleted her Habilitation in 2012. She was a post-doc­toral research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin (2005-07) and a Lise Meitner research fellow at the Institute of Social Anthropology at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna (2008-2010). Since 2014 she is a lec­turer at the Institute for the History and Theory of Culture at Humboldt-Universität Berlin. During the term 2015/16 she covers the pro­fes­sor­ship for Wolfgang Schäffner, his­tory of knowl­edge and cul­ture.
Her research focuses on cul­tural his­tory and cul­tural tech­niques, colo­nialism and post­colo­nial approaches, early photo, film and sound doc­u­ments. She pub­lished widely on the his­tory and theory of col­lec­tions, among others together with Margit Berner and Anette Hoffmann: Sensible Sammlungen. Aus dem anthro­pol­o­gis­chen Depot (2011), and in 2013, Die Wiener Forschungen an Kriegsgefangenen 1915-1918. Anthropologische und ethno­grafische Verfahren im Lager.

Dr. David Dibosa is co-author of Post-Critical Museology: Theory and Practice in the Art Museum (Routledge, 2013). He trained as a curator, after receiving his first degree from Girton College, Cambridge. He was awarded his PhD in Art History from Goldsmiths, University of London, for a thesis titled, Reclaiming Remembrance: Art, Shame and Commemoration. During the 1990s, David curated public art pro­jects, including In Sight In View, a bill­board pro­ject in Birmingham City, England, as well as a sculp­ture park in the English West Midlands. From 2004-2008, he was Senior Lecturer in Fine Art Theory at Wimbledon College of Art, University of the Arts London. He remains at UAL, where he is now Reader in Museology and Course Leader for MA Curating & Collections at Chelsea College of Arts.

Lotte Arndt’s seminar "Disquiet Objects, Mining Reification", on November 26, 2016.

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Saturday December 10 from 2 p.m to 7 p.m

« POUR PARLER DE MA DEMEURE, IL ME FAUT AUSSI PARLER DE LA DEMEURE DE L’AUTRE [3].”
(Speaking about my home, I also must speak of the other’s home)

 Open roundtable dis­cus­sion on wel­coming and sharing

Still from Hamedine Kane’s film, Habiter le monde, 2016.

A dis­cus­sion pep­pered with ques­tions by Lotte Arndt (the­o­rist, Goethe-Institut Fellow at Villa Vassilieff), Emmanuelle Chérel (Doctor in Art History, Professor in Art History at École des Beaux-Arts de Nantes), Peggy Pierrot (researcher and inde­pen­dent coun­selor in soft­ware studies and spec­u­la­tive nar­ra­tions) and Virginie Bobin (Head of Programs, Villa Vassilieff).

With the par­tic­i­pa­tion of, among others, Thelma Cappello and Rafael Moreno (artists), Maxime Jean-Baptiste (artist), Hamedine Kane (artist and director), Elsa Michaud and Gabriel Gauthier (artists), Victorine Grataloup (curator, pro­ject coor­di­nator at Villa Vassilieff), Mohammed Jamous (Refugees of Rap), Nathalie Muchamad (artist), Hélène Deléan (SPEAP), Dimitri Rimsky (artist ; Une autre mairie de Calais/SPEAP), Myriam Suchet (researcher, author of "Indiscipline"), The Cheapest University....

During World War One, Marie Vassilieff opened a can­teen in her studio. This place, where the impov­er­ished artists from the Montparnasse area could receive a warm meal, evolved rapidly into a loca­tion for socia­bility, for encoun­ters with old con­nais­sances and people who still were to become friends. Declared as a pri­vate club, the studio could escape the restric­tive opening hours of the curfew.
 
Several aspects in this story prove to be inter­esting for our pre­sent sit­u­a­tion: Vassilieff uses the pecu­liar pri­vate working space that is the artist studio and trans­forms it into a public resource. As it has been an impor­tant stake in fem­i­nist move­ments for long, she slyly sub­verts the bor­ders of the often clearly traced divi­sion between pri­vate and public. Where the emer­gency leg­is­la­tion of the war tended to sep­a­rate and divide people, she cre­ated a new social center. May this strategy indi­cate a direc­tion to counter the pro­gres­sive trans­for­ma­tion of public resources into pri­vate wealth? A path to follow when the restricted public free­doms and the needs of the ever growing number of des­ti­tute people in the city sharpens the social crisis everyday?
 
According to Emmanuel Levinas, the house has a key role to play in this rela­tion, as it points to the inside and the out­side alike: “Le rôle priv­ilégié de la maison ne con­siste pas à être la fin de l’activité humaine, mais à en être la con­di­tion. […] Simultanément dehors et dedans, [l’humain] va au dehors à partir d’une intimité. D’autre part cette intimité s’ouvre dans une maison, laquelle se situe dans ce dehors [4].”
 
In that sense, a house means, rather than a phys­ical place, a struc­ture that is able to wel­come and to shelter. From here we may leave behind an object-focused con­cep­tion of artistic prac­tice and think about reciprocity in the frame of the city. In that regard, Henri Lefebvre states that: « La ville est œuvre, à rap­procher de l’œuvre d’art plus que du simple pro­duit matériel. S’il y a pro­duc­tion de la ville et des rap­ports sociaux dans la ville, c’est une pro­duc­tion et repro­duc­tion d’êtres humains par des êtres humains, plus qu’une pro­duc­tion d’objets [5]. »
What can it mean for our prac­tice to con­ceive of the inti­mate and the public as nec­es­sarily imbri­cated? As art spaces are strongly marked in terms of their social exclu­sivity, the eso­teri­cism of the esthetic and the­o­ret­ical lan­guage and the high sym­bolic bor­ders of their entry-thresh­olds, how can we dis­place these limits, trans­late our prac­tice and bring it away from the con­trol­lable and well-know con­texts that we are used to evolve in?
 
If one key polit­ical ques­tion lies in the capacity of soci­eties to recip­ro­cate resources, proposing a place for sharing ideas, sol­i­dar­i­ties, or a meal estab­lishes a fun­da­mental con­di­tion for any social tie. It is not by chance that uncount­able artists throughout the twen­tieth cen­tury have pro­posed set­tings for sharing. What can it mean for cul­tural insti­tu­tions and prac­ti­tioners to enact hos­pi­tality? How can the unequal resources in the art-world be redis­tributed in the frame of our everyday prac­tices?

For this study day, we will engage in direct dis­cus­sions and exchanges: rather than inviting a small number of speakers to expose and dis­cuss their ideas with the public, we aim at gath­ering a diverse assembly, hoping to encourage inter­ven­tions based on dif­ferent prac­tices and expe­ri­ences. The con­trib­u­tors are all con­nected to the « Tomorrow Is An Island » exhi­bi­tion and partly work at inventing new rare and nec­es­sary forms of wel­coming in con­texts that stretch from Calais camp to Villa Vassilieff, or ques­tion eco­nomic con­di­tions and the gen­dered rela­tions within the struc­tures we work in.
 
Artists Thelma Cappello and Rafael Moreno will offer a diner at the end of the dis­cus­sion.