Max Haiven

Max Haiven is Canada Research Chair in Culture, Media and Social Justice at Lakehead University in Northwest Ontario and director of the ReImagining Value Action Lab (RiVAL). He writes articles for both academic and general audiences and is the author of the books Crises of Imagination, Crises of Power: Capitalism, Creativity and the Commons (2014), The Radical Imagination: Social Movement Research in the Age of Austerity (with Alex Khasnabish, 2014) and Cultures of Financialization: Fictitious Capital in Popular Culture and Everyday Life (2014). His latest book, Art after Money, Money after Art: Creative Strategies Against Financialization, was published by Pluto in Fall 2018.

LECTURE ABSTRACT

The avenging imaginary

The reactionary and authoritarian revenge politics that today seem to dominate the globe are the natural if horrific result of a form of financialized global capitalism that is itself vengeful. From mass incarceration to climate chaos, from the disposability of "surplus populations" to the "dead zones" that form in oceans, cities and our own lives, revenge capitalism is at work. What is needed now, more than ever, is a radical imagination that can envision and catalyze collective movement towards a world fit for humanity. The stakes have never been higher. How can we move from isolating or vindictive revenge fantasies to a holistic and transformative avenging imaginary? How can we avenge what has been done to our lives and our planet is a way that generates, rather than destroys, the world we want to share?

WORKSHOP

In this workshop, Max Haiven will review some of the lessons learned from the Radical Imagination Project and its "convoking" methodology. He will also introduce the way we are employing aspects of this methodology in the "Public Library Rematriation and Decolonization" project, the latest initiative of the ReImagining Value Action Lab that he now co-directs."

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Bahia Shehab

Bahia Shehab is an artist, designer and art historian. She is associate professor of design and founder of the graphic design program at The American University in Cairo where she has developed a design curriculum mainly focused on the visual culture of the Arab world. She has taught over fourteen courses on the topic. Her artwork has been on display in exhibitions, galleries and streets internationally. The documentary Nefertiti's Daughters featuring her street artwork during the Egyptian uprising was released in 2015. Her work has received a number of international recognitions and awards; BBC 100 Women list (2013), TED Senior fellowship (2016) and a Prince Claus Award (2016) among others. She is the first Arab woman to receive the UNESCO-Sharjah Prize for Arab culture. Her publications include "A Thousand Times NO: The Visual History of Lam-Alif" and the co-authored book "A History of Arab Graphic Design."

LECTURE ABSTRACT

At The Corner of A Dream

In 2015 I decided to paint on the streets of cities around the world because the streets of Cairo were no longer accessible to me. I started painting different stanzas by the Palestinian poet of resistance Mahmoud Darwish. So far I have painted fourteen walls in fourteen different cities from Tokyo to Honolulu. It does not matter if my work is not in Cairo, there are no borders anymore, if my images can be uploaded online then the message will find its way. In this presentation I will share the work that started on the streets in Cairo during the 2011 uprising and how that work inspired the walls taht I am still painting today.

MURAL

"All the hearts of the people are my identity - release me of my passport" – a new typographic mural in Antwerp.

Together with Lebanese-Egyptian street artist Bahia Shehab, students of St Lucas School of Arts Antwerp and newcomers of The Connection will realize a new typographic design. We also warmly welcome other volunteers to join us. We’re very excited about the opportunity to collectively be part of Shehab’s carefully designed work in situ. Shehab has taken her subtle but clear resistance - using lines from Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish - to the streets of the world, from New York to Tokyo, Amsterdam to Honolulu. We are very honoured that Antwerp is next in line! The typographic mural embodies questions regarding identity. We’re very happy with the chosen stanza of Darwish as it connects identity to the heart as well as to (the problematics of) the passport. The quote is directly addressing and simultaneously touching an existential dimension. Please feel welcome to join us: for a selfie, to discuss the stanza, for general support, for painting, for joining or guiding side-activities,…

Where: Zirkstraat 36, 2000 Antwerp
When: from 4 till 8 November 2019
Please contact ruth.loos@kdg.be

Friday 8 November, 16h - 18h: festive inauguration of the wall
fameus.be/integrated

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Laetitia Sonami

Born in France, Laetitia Sonami settled in the United States in 1975 to pursue her interest in the then emerging field of electronic music. Sonami's sound performances, live-­‐film collaborations and sound installations focus on issues of presence and participation. She has devised new gestural controllers for performance and applies new technologies and appropriated media to achieve an expression of immediacy through sound, place and objects. Best known for her unique instrument, the lady's glove, which is fitted with an array of sensors tracking the slightest motion of her hand and body, Sonami recently developed a new instrument, the Spring Spyre, based on the application of neural networks to real-time audio synthesis.

LECTURE ABSTRACT

Out of Control.

More info soon.

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Dieter Roelstraete

Dieter Roelstraete is curator of the Neubauer Collegium at the University of Chicago, where he also teaches. He previously worked as a curator for documenta 14 in Kassel and Athens in 2017. From 2012 until 2015 he served as the Manilow Senior Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, where he organized The Way of the Shovel: Art as Archaeology (2013) and Kerry James Marshall: Mastry (2016) among others. From 2003 to 2011 Roelstraete worked at the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen, where he curated exhibitions featuring Chantal Akerman, Liam Gillick & Lawrence Weiner, and survey shows of contemporary art from Rio de Janeiro and Vancouver. He has published extensively on contemporary art and related philosophical issues.

Kerry James Marshall & Followers: Black Squares.
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Wood & Harrison

John Wood and Paul Harrison make single-channel videos, multi-screen video installations, prints, drawings, and sculptures that elegantly fuse advanced aesthetic research with existential comedy. The artists’ spare, to-the-point works feature the actions of their own bodies, a wide variety of static and moving props, or combinations of both to illustrate the triumphs and tribulations of making art and having a life.

LECTURE ABSTRACT

John Wood and Paul Harrison - Some things are hard to explain.

John Wood and Paul Harrison employ exuberant invention, subtle slapstick, and a touch of light-hearted melancholy to reveal the inspiration and perspiration — as well as the occasional hint of desperation — behind all creative acts. Talking about the past 25 years of collaboration and showing extracts from video works, Paul Harrison will no doubt prove that some things are hard to explain.

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Jennifer Walshe

“The most original compositional voice to emerge from Ireland in the past 20 years” (Irish Times) and “wild girl of Darmstadt” (Frankfurter Rundschau), composer and performer Jennifer Walshe was born in Dublin. Her music has been commissioned, broadcast and performed all over the world. She has been the recipient of fellowships and prizes from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, New York, the DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm, the Internationales Musikinstitut, Darmstadt and Akademie Schloss Solitude among others. Walshe has written a large number of operas and theatrical works, including XXX_LIVE_NUDE_GIRLS!!! an opera for Barbie dolls, and TIME TIME TIME, with the philosopher Timothy Morton, which the Wire described as “a sprawling opus that spans the history of the planet… like Robert Ashley meets Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life”. Her visual work has been exhibited in the Chelsea Art Museum, New York, Project Arts Centre, Dublin and the ICA, London.

LECTURE ABSTRACT

"Terroir, Digital Dualism and AI".

Jennifer Walshe will talk about her practice from the perspective of terroir. Terroir is a concept that originated with French winemakers, to describe how a wine is the product of a specific point in space and time, linked to climate, soil, geography, as well as the organisms that live in, on and around the vineyards. Walshe uses terroir as a way to expand the idea of writing from lived experience, at a point in time when we are enmeshed with and interpenetrated by digital technologies. Walshe will discuss recent projects including A Girl’s Book of Song, written for the Mädchenchor of the Sing-Akademie zu Berlin, and ULTRACHUNK, created in collaboration with Memo Akten, in which Walshe improvises with an AI version of herself.

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Lara Garcia Diaz

Lara Garcia Diaz is a cultural activist, Phd candidate at the Antwerp Research Institute for the Arts (ARIA) and part of the Culture Commons Quest Office (CCQO). Since 2016, and thanks to the prestigious Odysseus Grant of the Flemish Scientific Fund (FWO), she is investigating cultural practices with commons-based approaches via feminist theories. Lara has published in Academic journals such as Frame: Journal of Literary Studies (2017) or Art and Identity Politics (2018). She has contributed in books such as What’s the Use (Valiz, 2016), Exploring Commonism (Valiz, 2018) or Prekariart (Universidad del País Vasco, 2019). She often collaborates in exhibitions and conferences as lecturer/researcher such as The reBirth of Marx(ism): Haunting the Future (Dublin, 2018), This is not a Love Song (Amsterdam, 2018), Living Research: the Urgency of the Arts (London, 2019), Culture for Solidarity (Seville, 2019), Prelude Symposium (Oslo, 2019) or Historical Materialism (Barcelona, 2019).

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Loraine Furter

Loraine Furter is a graphic designer and researcher based in Brussels since 2007, specialized in editorial design, hybrid publishing and intersectional xfeminism. She designs and edits paper publications as well as web and digital ones, and is particularly interested in the interaction between these media.

LECTURE ABSTRACT

Fab feminist publications — a herstory.

This talk presents a selection of publications that form a counter-history to the dominant narratives on artists’ books. Loraine Furter brings attention to details from these stories and unfolds their feminist, speculative, radical materiality as well as the stories they tell, murmur, cry, whisper and shout… Going deeper into the herstories around artists’ books and publishing, hidden details re-surface and help shape a different narrative for and comprehension of this field.
In the fall of 2019 Loraine Furter will start a PhD at Sint Lucas Antwerp: “The politics of publishing; researching encounters between artists’ books and intersectional feminist tools.”

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Studio Renate Boere

Studio Renate Boere is a design studio that explores the latest graphic design practices. We like to work with students, artists, companies, agencies and governments on innovative products.
We develop and invent, apart from classical graphic design, interactive installations, hybrid publishing and self-initiated innovative products. Research into new channels to create visibility for these innovative products is an important part of our work.

LECTURE ABSTRACT

Wanted: multi-talented designer.

How can you, as a graphic designer, have an influence on society, or change something about the political landscape?
Nine years ago, this question drove Studio Renate Boere in the direction of generating self-initiated projects. After seeing a gradual increase of populism and polarization, we got involved in designing interactive installations to inform citizens about politics in a neutral and entertaining way in a.o. The Netherlands, Belgium and Germany. From this the desire to create self-initiated projects blossomed.
We discovered it’s all about generating visibility by telling a current and innovative story, timing, and a solid collaboration with stakeholders that have the knowledge, network and money you need to reach the your goal. We learned the hard way… Nowadays, we’ve managed to channel these findings into our own method which we use in our practice. From bookdesigns that put subjects on the political agenda (No Guts No Glory), to setting up a (hybrid) archive about the rise of the new protest generation (e.g. Youth for Climate), and from writing a book (I ask you to find your courage) to winning international design prizes. Every project is a designed trial and error process that simply starts with
a great idea.
During this lecture, Studio Renate Boere (Renate Boere and Quirine Dob) will take the audience through a 20 minute journey that investigates the limits of graphic design and beyond. With examples from our practice, Studio Renate Boere will show the struggles, the failures, the unexpected and the lessons learned whilst trying to launch self-initiated projects.

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Sandrine Teixedo

Sandrine Teixido is an author, researcher and artist living in Toulouse. She created the association Le Monde en Critique in 2009 and the publishing project ISSUE in 2015. She is Music curator at the ‘New Patrons’ initiative supported by Fondation de France, and holds a PHD in ethnology and social anthropology from Centre Georges Simmel at EHESS, in Paris. In collaboration with Geneva-based artist Aurélien Gamboni, she has had various artistic interventions at the 9th Mercosul Biennial in Porto Alegre (2013), the Théâtre de l’Usine in Geneva (2014-2015), the MAC Contemporary art museum in Niterói (2016) and the Centre de la Photographie in Geneva (2017).

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Seham Sultan

Seham Basel Sultan is a Yemeni graphic designer and an alumni of Tomorrow's Leaders; a program that targets students of Arab background who have the potential to become the community, business, and national leaders of the future. Seham graduated in 2017 from the American University in Cairo with honors, and a minor in sociology focusing on community development. Seham’s work merges design and research with the purpose of sending messages that ignite change and evoke thought. Seham is currently working as a Coordinator for the Graphic Design program at American University in Cairo and working on several projects that promote critical thinking and observational reflections of society.

LECTURE ABSTRACT

What the News?!; How the news reads you.

We are constantly being bombarded with news, yet the Yemeni crisis is largely neglected by the media.To tackle this issue “What the News !?” is an unconventional, interactive newspaper that alludes to the humanitarian crisis while reminding viewers of the various media fallacies and propaganda techniques. The aim of this project goes beyond the information in the newspaper where the publication acts as an educational tool, where every spread has different themes designed accordingly to the messages. It strives to keep the reader’s attention, teaching them about the techniques and media fallacies, encouraging the readers to research and attain the skills to handle the information in everyday life.

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Sue Spaid

Belgium-based philosopher Sue Spaid, Ph. D., has been active in the artworld as a collector, curator, art writer, university lecturer and museum director since 1984. Her traveling exhibition “Green Acres: Artists Farming Fields, Greenhouses, and Abandoned Lots,” funded by an Emily Hall Tremaine Exhibition Award, concluded its tour in 2013. While Executive Director at the Contemporary Museum, Spaid co-launched "Baltimore Liste," in support of younger artists and galleries, and wrote A Field Guide to Patricia Johanson’s Works: Proposed, Built, Published and Collected to accompany a touring retrospective.

A current contributor to H Art, she is a former member of the artUS Contributors Board. Between 1997 and 2010, she published 54 articles in this LA art publication and 12 in its predecessor ArtText. While Curator at the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati (1999-2002), she authored the book Ecovention: Current Art to Transform Ecologies that accompanied the 2002 exhibition she co-curated with Amy Lipton. In addition to having written three books on eco-art, she has published over 60 essays in exhibition catalogs or take-away brochures.

As an independent curator, she has organized well over 50 exhibitions for artist-run spaces, university galleries, commercial galleries and museums such as Santa Monica Museum of Art, Armory Center for the Arts, SPACES and the Abington Art Center and Sculpture Park. She has also served as curator of both the Bellevue Art Museum's "Pacific Northwest Annual" (2001) and the Mississippi Museum of Art's Mississippi Invitational (2006). During her “Yes Brainer Tour” (2005-2006), she traveled via car to 38 states presenting “The Gist of Isness” along the way. From 1990-1995, she ran Sue Spaid Fine Art, a scrappy Los Angeles gallery that launched dozens of local artists’ careers.

LECTURE ABSTRACT

The Aesthetic Enhancement Approach: Gauging Nature’s Wellbeing to Reverse Degradation.

Environmental aestheticians routinely wrestle with the asymmetry between aesthetic appreciation and nature’s wellbeing. For example, more information ought to cause people to appreciate swamps, mole hills, or wastelands that would otherwise find unappealing. And of course, this goes the other way around: humans find aspects of nature beautiful that they might otherwise consider abhorrent if they has sufficient information. The "Aesthetic Enchantment Approach" characterizes the way one’s appreciation of a thing or event increases when one is shown how it augments the “peaceful continuance of planetary life.”

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Catenation

CATENATION first evolved 1996, went on a hiatus for some time, and was remodelled in 2012 featuring the artists Sylvia Hinz and Jeanne Strieder. They combine improvisation, live performance, visual and audio art. Sylvia and Jeanne are both musicians who extravagate the worlds of Dissonant Art Music, Industrial, Noise, Electro and Metal. Jeanne Strieder (born 1980 in germany) is a composer and artist. The purpose of her work is to create solace and compassion for the invisible suffering of the many and the few. The results are individual aural bodies that seek connection with those who experience darkness. praised for her equally fierce and bold dramatic performance style, Sylvia Hinz is one of the leading recorder players worldwide, specialised in contemporary music and improvisation.

LECTURE ABSTRACT

[shrouded matter II]

Double bass recorder (live), voice (live) violoncello, synthesizer, distortion & fx
Catenation - Sylvia Hinz & Jeanne Strieder

In the wake of the uprising right-winged oppressors around the world, empowerment of women and the aim for equality is becoming more important every second. Inspired by feminism, we want to rouse the sleeping and offer solace to the suffering, to make those uneasy who want to keep others in the dark, to praise the resistance, to make it possible for the voice of doubt to sail through the world on the sounds of wind and air ... this is an ongoing and finished, yet unfinished project - for this concert, we will prepare tapes with nature sounds, with inaudible whispering of poems and reports. the tapes are going to be the basis for open concepts, in our very unique and special instrumentation, where a specific range of mictrotonal steps is used by us for the performance. Also, a few inaudible spoken words - in german, english, and spanish.

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Post Collective

The Post Collective is an autonomous platform of co-creation, co-learning and cultural activism for refugees, asylum seekers, sans papiers and accomplices. It seeks to introduce a range of artistic, cultural and work opportunities and to provide a collaborative environment for its members regardless of their legal status. The collective arose from the 2018 Open Design Course participants, KASK school of arts, Ghent. Generative modes of dialogue and storytelling form the basis to our speculative and experiential approaches to art+design. We aim to develop creative alternatives beyond the dominate systems of control and exclusion we are facing. This means facilitating the position where we do not struggle to be assimilated but instead rethink and re-conceptualize critically a future together as community.

LECTURE ABSTRACT

Invitation.

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Ine Vanoeveren

Belgian flutist and Doctor of Musical Arts, Ine Vanoeveren (b. 1986), is specialized in contemporary music performance. She obtained her Master’s degree at the Conservatoire Royal de Musique de Liège, in the class of prof. Toon Fret, a Master in Advanced Studies in Contemporary Music Performance and Interpretation in the class of Mario Caroli, at the Conservatorio della Svizzera Italiana and a DMA in Contemporary Music Performance in the class of Prof. John Fonville, at the University of California, San Diego.
Ine won awards at the Action Classics Competition, Benelux Fluitconcours and was rewarded with a Belgian American Educational Foundation grant in 2013, to continue her research in contemporary music performance in the US. In 2016 she was awarded with the Kranichsteiner Stipendienpreise for Interpretation by the Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt.

PERFORMANCE

Empty Mind I.

Empty Mind I is inspired by the work of the American artist Agnes Martin. The original version of the work was commissioned by ChampdAction and oboist Piet Van Bockstal. The development of electronics was done by Jorrit Tamminga. The work consists of 6 large parts (5+1), which can be performed in any order; the composer's main aim was to radically break open time and space. A strictly composed melody, based on microtonality, is repeatedly interrupted by free parts with extended techniques, such as multiphonics, glissandi, etc.

Especially for Ine Vanoeveren, Wim Henderickx made a version for various flutes and electronics. This version not only explores new playing techniques for these instruments, but also questions the role of the performer and the idiosyncrasy of the instrument. This version is not written for flute as such, but for flutist, in which the performer also incorporates elements and parameters from other performative disciplines.

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Wouter Gysemans

Born and raised in this world, now creating virtual ones.

LECTURE ABSTRACT

NAUSEA

How can I estrange someone from their reality with a newly constructed reality?
Creating an escapism in a virtual space, I aspired to disturb someone's reality through a screen. The result is a 360° video, made for VR, in which the viewer is immersed. Starting in an almost similar place as the original exhibition, the viewer recognizes this space as an altered reality which is almost immediately disturbed when the camera starts moving. Video and images of our visual culture accompany selfmade 3D scans and models. Together they form the means to break the bonds of the viewers, enabling them to escape Plato’s cave and re-evaluate their reality.
Pretentious I know.

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Complete Surrender

Louise Nelstrop is Director of Studies at the Margaret Beaufort Institute of Theology, Cambridge and College Lecturer in Theology at St Benet’s Hall, Oxford. She is a specialist in medieval mysticism. The film project, Complete Surrender, grew out of her research into the place of erotic desire in mysticism during an USCIA Scholarship at the Ruusbroec Institute at University of Antwerp.

Pol Herrmann is a Belgian-based film maker and cameraman, who trained at IAD. He has been involved in various films, documentaries and TV productions, most recently: Ennemi Public, Body and Soul (a documentary on love shot in India with Belgian teenagers) and Complete Surrender (his first role as director).

VIDEO SCREENING

Complete Surrender is a short documentary film that explores love and why five artists have turned to two female medieval mystics, Marguerite Porete and Hadewijch, finding in them kindred voices that help them express contemporary concerns, particularly around the issue of love.
The film follows five artists: Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven, an installation artist, Wim Henderickx, a composer, Aline Kiner, an author, An Pierlé, a pianist/singer-song writer, and Hendrik Vanden Abeele, a classically trained pianist, singer and leader of the vocal ensemble Psallentes, as they recount their engagement with these mystics on love and desire.

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Ignace Cami

O stories, they spread like a virus looking for symbiosis. A host in which they can hibernate, even if it’s for a short while. There they wait to be transformed. They can carry whatever their host injects into them before rereleasing them into the world. This is metamorphosis. A new generation of the story goes viral, carried by the wind of our words, landing on whomever wants to hear it. Ready to go through the cycle once more.

They say that the original story was whispered on the wings of birds and spread across the world. They say that it came falling from the sky on a fiery rock. They say it was born from the earth when man first lifted a stone from the ground to use as a tool. They say all stories are born of that very first one, of which the source is hidden or lost. Through retelling, the story shows its most versatile characteristic: the open source. It needs you to personalize and update it. It is even willing to be merged with other stories. It belongs to nobody. That is why it belongs to everybody. That is why I relaunch stories that latch on to me. That is why I create moments in which stories can spread.

Ignace Cami (Belgium, °1986) takes his heimat as starting point to make sculptures, performative objects, installations, storytelling and writings dealing with roots, symbols and the contemporary meaning of local history. He also hosts the artist run CRYING space with Ward Zwart and is a part of collaborative projects like Haas & Gaai, Boris & Kitchenknife and Nestvlieders.

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Jens Dawn

Last year Jens Dawn (1981) erased his portfolio-website as a revolt against the popular demand of hip graphic design, he replaced the pages with a chaos of graphic elements and this would be his portfolio. He still thinks this is the worst move he ever made. Jens Dawn is the perfect example how not to be a graphic designer. When he isn’t designing for clients he creates projects in arts and graphic design. Mostly his projects is to unite artist that work without a collective and to inspire people with art. He considers these projects not helpful at all for his graphic career. Oh well-- Buy the ticket, take the ride (Hunter S. Thompson).

LECTURE ABSTRACT

How not to be a graphic designer.

Jens Dawn isn’t a needed graphic designer.
Who needs an opinion about fonts, signage, logo’s,...
Fuck Jens Dawn. We need a strike. We need to rally campaigns against every form of Jens Dawn graphic Design. Together we can make an end to every graphic project Jens Dawn has ever made.
Anti-Dawn is our group of activist.
We stand for:
– Unity against Jens Dawn.
– Protect clients against the artistic habits of Jens Dawn.
– Stop Jens' experimental art-projects.
– Forbid Dawn to have future graphic projects.

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Kabinet Studio

kabinet.studio is founded by Freya Clijmans and An Onghena. We focus on visual communication and graphic design from print to digital. We design books, artist publications, brand identities, events design, poster and flyer design. We love to finish all projects from A to Z inhouse: from concept to creation preferable with our own risoprinter, that we welcomed in 2016. Apart from working for clients, we often do self-initiated projects, together, separately or with other artists, we also host workshops and masterclasses. In line with this we regularly discuss the status of the artist book and analogue printing technologies, as seen against the backdrop of increasing digitization.

INTERVENTION

The (new) wave in printing - a duplicating intervention.

To claim a voice, print has always supported minority groups. Above all, in the past it was mostly the only way to communicate or to spread information. Numerous variants of printing techniques have been developed. One of these printing techniques was the Stencil Duplicating Machine or the Mimeograph. The technique made it possible to quickly spead information amongst supporters, for example during World War II and made the first feminist wave possible.
Today we face the reality, a lot of communication is taken over by digital platforms. Despite of this, the way we deal with information remains the same. In both ways we still search for a way to claim a voice in favor of a more democratic society. It’s still important to recognize and learn from this progression. Without the evolution of print, the world as we know it would nowadays never have been the same.

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Marilli Mastrantoni

Performer, Director and Dramaturg, based in Athens-GR and working internationally. Founder of Theatre ENTROPIA and Artistic Director of the homonymous Contemporary Performing Arts Company. As an actress has participated in theatre and live art performances, films and TV productions in Greece and abroad. She’s the director and author of several theatre performances, interdisciplinary productions and international projects, exploring current socio-political issues and the urban environment. Her practice also includes writing, curating, producing, translating, lecturing and instructing seminars and workshops on performance, cultural policies and artivism. Her work has been so far produced and presented in Venues and Festivals in Belgium, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Palestine, Poland, Portugal, S. Africa, Turkey, U.K..

INTERVENTION

Occupy Fantasy!

“Occupy Fantasy!”, is an international research platform inspired by experiences both from real democracy movements and artistic experimentation on new ways of conversing and assembling as a form of socio-artistic engagement. It is conceived as a "social sculpture", that investigates imaginative ways of resistance and interference to centre-staged politics, attempting to generate radical future-oriented solutions for positive societal change. Through an Open Space format, and using as script a series of actions, paradigms and questions, this interactive presentation’s participants will be invited as a temporary community, to collectively investigate into clandestine, heterogeneous and silenced from the dominant public discourse narratives. The purpose is to amuse, provoke and even disturb, while addressing current emergencies and their subversive potential as opportunities for change through the intensification of civic culture and dissident imagination.

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Evening Class

Evening Class is a self-organised learning environment that has been running in London since 2016. Our format, aims and approach have gradually shifted over time, from replacing a Masters degree to ongoing learning, critical practice and, increasingly, prototyping viable alternatives to existing working structures within design. It was born out of a shared frustration among designers working in the cultural field but lacking scope in their workplaces to discuss practice and theory in an expansive way.

The group’s membership and structure is never fixed: over the past three years there have been 40 members in total. Currently, the group consists of 14 members. Our programme has taken the form of workshops, talks, reading groups, radio broadcasting, performances, walks, and occasionally, designing things. We often work in collaboration with other groups and activist organisations in order to contribute to wider discourses.

We currently operate through different working groups that feed research back into the collective. Some core themes that have informed our activities over time are collaboration, solidarity, care and support.

DISCUSSION GROUP TOPIC

Don’t start a studio, start a ___

‘Utopia cannot be defined as a static, perfect place; it is the ongoing attempts, the fiction, the theory and the striving for the perfect existence’ – MFK. We have previously collected and documented our shared experiences of the lack of emotional well-being that can seem endemic to creative work, and self-organising. As a way to move beyond consciousness-raising, we are interested in researching and identifying functional models of sustainable practices that take into account the interdependence of emotional labour and creative practices.

In this discussion group, we will explore how co-operative models for organising work and life can be imagined, encouraged and formalised.

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Institute of Radical Imagination

The Institute of Radical Imagination (IRI) is a think-tank inviting experts – political scientists, economists, lawyers, architects, hackers, activists, artists and cultural producers to share knowledge on a continuous base with the aim of defining and implementing zones of post-capitalism in Europe’s South and the Mediterranean. The think-tank works nomadically across the nodes of the network – Madrid, Athens, Istanbul, Cairo, Palestine, Naples – and connects with other nodes in “global south” – Eastern Europe, Latin America, South-East Asia. IRI is a hybrid between a travelling research centre, a refuge for intellectuals and artists at risk, a radical museum and a policy-making body generating ideas and applied knowledge that respond to specific urgent needs on the ground – more than a structure, an intellectual logistical infrastructure operating across existing arts, academic and activist networks.

Massimiliano (Mao) Mollona is an anthropologist affiliated with Goldsmiths College (London UK). He has a multidisciplinary background in economics and anthropology. Mollona is a founding member of the LUC Laboratory for the Urban Commons (LUC) in Athens. Giuseppe Micciarelli is a political philosopher and legal sociologist. He has written several essays on commoning, asylum, democracy, self-governance, art and politics.

DISCUSSION GROUP TOPIC

The “end of History” comes at the end of the Radical Imagination. A polyphonic reflection on Action-Research.

To think different, we must act different, but without critical thinking, actions are meaningless and easily subsumed to capitalism. We are proposing to reflect on what E.Bloch called as "concrete utopia”, questioning how unfolding radical theories we are able to sustain radical practices. We want to propose a panel to share ideas, acts, and methodologies on how academic, activist and artist can share action-research projects.
We are the INSTITUTE OF RADICAL IMAGINATION (IRI), a (non)-Think-Tank who share knowledge on a continuous base with the aim of defining and implementing zones of post-capitalism in Europe’s South and the Mediterranean. In one year we brought into conversation different people: in Madrid we brought into conversation occupied spaces, museums and cultural institutions; we are working in Athens the Solidarity School Network, in Istanbul with Academics for Peace, in Italy with the worker’s art movement.
Some questions, dead ends, ideas we found on our way that we want to talk about:
• What does it mean to be a grassroot think-tank, operating at the threshold of militant research, art and activism?
• Can methodologies of research intervention, workers’ enquiry and militant fieldwork support new epistemologies of struggle?
• What kind of research, enquires and practices – decolonised, decentered and non-anthropocentric – can be learned and shared for the prefiguration and enactment of life after capitalism?
• Art lets imagination free. But how do we liberate art? “Artistic critique” was unable to free from power of directors of theatres, festivals and biennials and rules of production... until now.

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Roeland Vanheesbeke

Roeland Vanheesbeke (°1994, Antwerp) believes that radical minds are needed in times of populism. Coming from a working class environment, he took the long road to obtaining his masters degree in graphic design at Sint Lucas 2019. He believes in letting design be a voice of thought and critical thinking. Equality, breaking rules and kindness are values close to his heart.

LECTURE ABSTRACT

Breaking The Waves.

Through his master project “Pangea”, Vanheesbeke opens up to discussion about the possibility of an utopian educational platform. How can we create a school that encourages a peaceful future in a world of crisis, togetherness in a time of separation and creativity in an era of content overload? One answer could be Pangea, the first floating world university. By uniting disciplines and ethnicities on one ship while sailing through time zones and cultures, students could get a wider perspective of what’s going on in the world and what could be done to bring it back together.

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Rosalien Helsen

Hi, I'm Rosalien, illustrator and animator. I studied at graphic design at Sint Lucas Antwerpen and finished my master year in 2019. Now I work as a freelance illustrator and animator for various companies and individuals. I love telling stories with visuals (this can be in book form or as a little film) about normal people who encounter a not-so-normal event in there lives. Also I try to combine several different disciplines in one project because I believe it brings a lot of opportunities and it will challenge your work proces and your mind.

LECTURE ABSTRACT

Frank & Chris.

I will be showing a stop motion short film (8:40 min) and maybe the 'making of- movie' I made as my master project. The film is a 'love letter' to repetition and the rhythm of boredom. I'm not sure yet if I will be introducing the film or just show it to the audience.

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Thomas Byttebier

Thomas Byttebier is the digital director at Base Design in Brussels. At Base he worked on digital experiences for brands like Studio Brussel, ING, Deezer, Bozar, Institut Français de la Mode, MoMu, Axel Vervoordt, Art and History Museum, La Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, Delvaux and more. Thomas also teaches the digital design studio at Luca School of Arts in Ghent.

LECTURE ABSTRACT

Beyond the interface: how to create more memorable digital experiences.

To get noticed, brands need to differentiate themselves from their competitors. However, the trend is clear: more and more brands start to look very similar. Especially in digital sameness is a thing. All websites and apps today look the same. How much of an issue is this? What can brands do to create more memorable digital experiences? A nuanced answer.

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Dries Wiewauters

Dries Wiewauters is a designer living in Belgium that is interested in typographic systems in all their facets, but especially their inherent restraints and how to by-pas those.
The studio helps people and brands develop a unique visual language based on type by developing typographic solutions that are befitting to the clients by drawing anything from custom lettering to extensive collections of fonts.
There are always multiple personal projects on the back burner that are developed into commercially available fonts with their own unique premise. Other skunkworks activities are developed with an XY-plotter.
Dries received his Masters in Graphic Design at LUCA School of Arts, Gent in 2008 and a Masters degree in Typography at the Werkplaats Typografie in 2010. He is an educator at the KASK School of Arts where he teaches Typography and Type Design since 2014.

LECTURE ABSTRACT

Circumventing typographic restraints.

If you design a typeface with a specific concept, you are bound to run into hard design choices. How do you keep consistency whilst balancing originality and readability? How do you answer this tricky mix of legibility and funkiness? We will crawl deep in the glyphs far beyond your regular A-Z + 0-9's, into glyphs that most designers will rarely use in their designs. What was the practical issue in the design of these and how was it circumvented with a radical, often witty, solution.
The presentation will go through a selection of glyphs explaining how certain problems were solved. How do these radical forms emerge and how does the system entice your imagination?

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Claire Cunningham

Claire Cunningham is a performer and creator of multi-disciplinary performance. One of the UK’s most acclaimed and internationally renowned disabled artists, Cunningham’s work is rooted in the study and use/misuse of her crutches with a conscious rejection of traditional dance techniques. Claire is currently Factory Artist with Tanzhaus, Düsseldorf and Work Place Artist with The Place. Her recent works Give Me a Reason to Live, Guide Gods and The Way You Look (at me) Tonight, have toured extensively across the globe. In July 2019, Claire premiered a new ensemble work, Thank You Very Much, at Manchester International Festival.

LECTURE ABSTRACT

4 Legs Good.

This lecture performance by multi-disciplinary artist Claire Cunningham explores her artistic practice- specifically the use/ misuse, study and distortion of crutches as artistic practice and how they shape her practice. In the widest sense her work has shifted from its explorations about the connection between the crutches and the body – what is possible in the combination of the crutches with her and other bodies- to how the crutches connect her to the world.

The lecture performance is audio described live in English language.

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Richard Niessen

Richard Niessen (1972) graduated from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam in 1996 and became known as a graphic designer for his colourful posters and expressive typography, innovative identities and his collaborations with other artists. In addition to working on commission, Niessen regularly initiates his own projects, such as the publication series '1:1:1' (2010-2016). In 2015, Richard Niessen launched 'The Palace of Typographic Masonry', a platform that aims to combine experiments and research, connect different disciplines and embed graphic design in a broader cultural and historical context.

LECTURE ABSTRACT

The Palace of Typographic Masonry.

Ideally, a society offers a rich and diverse range of stories and forms, something called the ‘greater narrative of culture’. Graphic designers contribute to this diverse collective imagination, relying on their imaginative capacity, visual rhetoric and skill to create new order through a range of approaches. In its formative role graphic design sets an interaction of images and counter-images in motion – greasing the wheels of social communication. The aim with The Palace of Typographic Masonry is to make a plea for this splendour and variety of the craft. A place where the intrinsic values of graphic design can be stored and cherished, a collective building that is entirely devoted to the profession’s abundance, poetry and digressions.

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Bruce Mau Design/Jelle Maréchal

Originally from Antwerp, Belgium, Jelle currently works as Associate Creative Director at Bruce Mau Design (BMD) in Toronto. Cherishing a complimentary background in design, advertising, and the art world, he uses graphic design to create meaningful solutions in visual identity, environmental and editorial projects. BMD brands the mission of organizations shaping the future of their respective industries worldwide. BMD is a strategic design studio, known for milestone publications and exhibitions like S,M,L,XL and Massive Change, and more recently for visual identity work for SONOS, ASICS and OCAD.
Jelle holds a master’s degree in Graphic Design from St. Lucas School of Arts in Antwerp and a master’s degree in Film Studies and Visual Culture from the University of Antwerp. His work has received accolades from D&AD, European Design Awards and Creative Belgium and has been published in books by Rizzoli, Thames & Hudson, Sandu and MER. Paper Kunsthalle.

LECTURE ABSTRACT

Where is Bruce?

“Where is Bruce Mau?” is a question our office manager hears regularly. Bruce Mau Design is a creative practice named after its founder. It is often confusing for people to hear that “Bruce left the company a long time ago”.
But, did he really? Or, “Is he even a real person?”, to quote one of our younger designers. An older generation of designers and architects know Bruce as a world renowned designer and the (co-)author of books like S,M,L,XL; Massive Change and Life Style. If anyone embodies “Radical Imagination”, it would be him. But what about the company bearing his name, BMD? Do his principles still live on in our current creative practice? The marriage of formal innovation and content development is more relevant than ever. In a time when design is mainly interactive and collaborative, “Style is merely the outside of content, and content the inside of style”, as Jean-Luc Godard once said. The intimate marriage of these two holds the key to new perspectives, to making the impossible happen. Because of the increasing complexity of the challenges our clients put forward, you could say that this has become an unquestionable prerequisite. Being radical has become self-evident. So where do we go from here? In a lighthearted and candid lecture, we examine what makes our current practice relevant. We shine a critical yet celebratory light on our work, our past and our future.

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Richard Pettifer

Richard Pettifer is an Australian theatre and opera director, critic, and researcher based in Berlin. He is part of the collective Atelierhaus Australiasche Botschaft OST, which is housed in the former Australian Embassy of East Berlin. He writes criticism on his critical writing platform Theaterstück, as well as for publications such as Samizdat (ROM) and Arterritory (LAT) and in academia. Previous themes of his work have been travelling from Australia to Germany without flying, using a live-feedback text display system based on Berthold Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt, and initiating a mass-jump into the Rhine River to protest lack of progress in Climate negotiations at COP23. His work often concerns climate change and art activism, emphasising our complicity with the global system through distancing mechanisms that exist in culture.

LECTURE ABSTRACT

‘The Artist is Absent’: Non-Human Agency in the Situation of the Theatre.

Recent trends among environmentalists and media theorists have centred on non-human agency: the concept of an other-than-human subjectivity acknowledgeable to human consciousness. Theorists such as Haraway, Braidotti, and others claim that the anthropocene demands equality of rights among humans, nature, and objects or concepts. Such decentralisation offers us a set of romantically attractive possibilities, what Donna Haraway calls “becom(ing) with each other” . Furthermore, as artificial intelligences become increasingly autonomous, and capable of (in a general sense) creating separate and possibly self-sustaining systems removed from human control and oversight, non-human agency becomes not only a possibility, but an unavoidable reality.
A recent project has seen me collaborating with experts at the European Commission on an opera, for which we are developing ‘Hans’ – a robot baritone singer more human than human, capable of endless renditions, repetitions, and self-harmonisation – to discuss the effects of technology on considerations of environment, through a critique of non-human agency.
From the non-human turn, questions of governance arise: in a situation where escapism is the dominant response to increasingly crisis-prone material conditions, at what point does nominal granting of agency to other entities amount to a further shedding of obligations of human governance? Is there middle ground, which only a robot – acting as mediator between the material and human worlds – can produce?
What would it REALLY mean to acknowledge non-human agency – beyond offering a brief reprieve from obsessing over our own destruction?

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Studio M

Studio M specializes in art direction, graphic design and branding and offers a 360° approach to print, video, and creative consulting. Prior to founding her own studio, Elisabeth Mestdagh studied design and visual communication in Antwerp, Ghent and Berlin. She trained with Base Design, assisted Paul Boudens and spent a year at Baron & Baron in New York City where she worked on projects for clients such as Dior, Maison Margiela, Nars and The Metropolitan Museum. Elisabeth is an experienced print designer and a frequent collaborator of the Antwerp Fashion Academy’s alumni.

LECTURE ABSTRACT

Elisabeth will speak in the name of Studio M about the collaboration between with her brother Quinten Mestdagh, master graduate at the Royal Academy of Antwerp Fashion department, which resulted in an extraordinary portfolio book. She will also present shortly the work she produces at Studio M for clients such as Dries Van Noten, Wouters & Hendrix, Axel Vervoordt, Gert Voorjans, Mugler and Max&Co.

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Els Dietvorst

Els Dietvorst (°1964) is a socially engaged artist, who uses her visual work as a means of creating social involvement. She graduates from the Sint Lucas School of Arts in Antwerp and holds a Master of Fine Art from the LUCA School of Arts in Brussels. Dietvorst lives and works in Ireland since 2010.
Even in her socially focussed work, Dietvorst finds ways of expressing herself in a highly personal manner, making use of an incredibly wide range of media; along with sculptures and installations, drawing, writing and recently through the creation of visual installations.
On this moment she is working on a Phd: ‘Partisans of the real’ at the Royal Academy/University of Antwerp.

VIDEO SCREENING

ACM lost and found*

Today it is 4 a clock and I am standing at Track 22.
ACM lost and found(*)

“I once found a black man staring,
sitting against a tree.
He owned nothing had put his hut together with branches he had found,
it was just big enough for him to lie in with his tall body
it was under a plum tree.
There was an apple tree too and some onion plants,
all overgrown with brambles and thorns,
a bit of nature imprisoned amongst the concrete.
In the past I was bold enough to collect apples and pick plums,
not any more, the fruit falls and rots, no one cares a jot.
What do I want to say,
listen he says.”(Monologue I am going to my chickens_ED)

…

A_Marcel

A_Marcel is a speculative conceptual artist based in the US. Their practice disregards discipline boundaries and draws from the vernacular of graphic design, critical and queer theory, playwriting, 80’s music videos, karoke and performance art. A_Marcel’s work is a play of text and image, a pitting of the real and surreal, and a disorienting jumble of fact and fiction. Marcel amplifies the language of the meme to counter the mimetic demands of the mundane. Their work is politically personal and personally political commentary. They’re obsessed with heterotopias and hot dogs. A_Marcel is a copy of a copy of a copy without an original.

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TIM —Discourse Around Artists

“I am TIM, we are TIM. Presenting you TIM, publishing TIM—TIM is a labour of love.” TIM is FOR you and it’s there for you, TIM WANTS YOU!

TIM, with its full name: “TIM, Discourse Around Artists” is a young magazine shaped for, and by artists. Born out of frustration with the current discourse around art as commodities, we propose a discourse around artists. It is an effort to bring together our peer group of recent graduates and young emerging artists to offer them a platform where they can advertise their work and provide them with specialized content. We all know how to talk and think about art, let’s get personal instead!

TIM wants to hear from you! We can feature your project, participate in our open call! TIM has no limits.

LECTURE ABSTRACT

TIM—Discourse Around Artists.

We want to present our magazine to the public, this will be the first public moment so we're launching the concept. We will also launch our open call. We will launch the website and pre-subscriptions.

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BRUiTAL

BRUiTAL, a brutal bunch of underground noise makers!
BRUiTAL: 4 acoustic trance percussionists and 4 lo-fi electro-totem bearers generating a whole new soundscape. They balance between power and vulnerability, resistance and surrender, order and chaos. Their energies clash, grind, melt and combine to create one subversive universe of sound vibrating with pure energy.

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Valiz

Valiz is an independent international publisher on contemporary art, theory, critique, design and urban affairs. Our books offer critical reflection, interdisciplinary inspiration, and often establish a connection between cultural disciplines and socio-political questions. We publish these books out of our commitment to their content, to artistic and social issues and to the artists, designers and authors.
Apart from publishing Valiz organizes lectures, debates and other cultural projects in which certain topics in contemporary art are explored.

DISCUSSION GROUP TOPIC

Innovative models within the book trade.

Valiz will invite several Dutch and Flemish experts from the field of publishing who have a different and exciting new view on book publishing and working together, connecting with the commons or looking for different ways and models to make books and questioning the ‘traditional’ way of book publishing. Sitting together for a round table discussion, these parties will reflect on their practice and look for an inspiring future.

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Janwillem Schrofer

Former director of the Rijksakademie (Amsterdam 1982 – 2010), Schrofer knows from practical experience the complexity of the artist's questions and dilemmas, and has combined these insights in Plan and Play, Play and Plan, a book published last year by Valiz.

WORKSHOP TOPIC

At Integrated 2019 he will lead a workshop which invites artists and those who wish to become artists, as well as anyone who works with artists, to explore the essential elements of a sustainable practice. ‘Visual artist’ is a term with untold interpretations, nuances and meanings. But how, as an artist (or designer, photographer, or other ‘independent creator’), do you become who you are and who you would like to be? What fundamental questions, characteristics, dilemmas, ambitions, restrictions and realities play a part? How can you guide your artistic practice, the main criterion being to answer the question: ‘where do I stand and what do I stand for?’
The workshop comprises a series of exercises that do not provide ‘recipes’ or simple solutions to the challenges of being an artist and will discuss these and so delve into the very fibre of the artist’s profession.

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Marko Ciciliani

Marko Ciciliani is a composer, audiovisual artist, performer and researcher based in Austria. The focus of his work lies in the composition of performative electronic music, mostly in audiovisual and interdisciplinary contexts.
His work has been performed in more than forty-five countries across Eurasia, Oceania and the Americas. It has been released on five full-length CDs and two multimedia books.
Ciciliani is Professor for Computer Music Composition and Sound Design at the Institute for Electronic Music and Acoustics (IEM) of the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz. Since 2016 he is head of the Artistic Research project GAPPP – “Gamified Audiovisual Performance and Performance Practice”, funded by the Austrian Science Fund.

LECTURE ABSTRACT

LAbO - a laboratory for young creators.

ChampdAction.LAbO is a laboratory for young creators, organized by Antwerp-based production platform for new music and interdisciplinary arts ChampdAction, and part of deSingel's International Summer School. Its main purpose is creation through means of communication and interaction between the various arts disciplines: dance, music, fine arts and others.
This talk will look back at LAbO's 10 year history and describe a vision of it's future.

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Marjanne van Helvert

Marjanne van Helvert is a textile designer, researcher, writer, and educator. After an MA in Cultural Studies at the Radboud University in Nijmegen, she received a BA in Textile Design from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie Amsterdam. In her work, Van Helvert delves into the dynamics between design theory and practice with a special focus on the relation between ethics and aesthetics in design. Her Dirty Design Manifesto and publication The Responsible Object are examples of Van Helvert’s quest for the role of the idealistic contemporary designer.

LECTURE ABSTRACT

Designing Degrowth Is Our Only Option.

We no longer have the option to imagine open-ended futures. The last few decades we have decided our collective future: it will be a future of mass extinction of both human and non-human life. This future has already begun. The only question that is left for us to answer is how we are going to design this extinction. Will it be an uncontrolled downfall of our civilization, our economy, our environment, and eventually our population? Will it include suffering, wars, scarcities, and death? Or will it be designed to minimize the crimes and suffering that a minority of rich people (most of us here amongst them) have bestowed upon all life around us, both human and non-human?

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You?

Our speakers' corner (in deSingel's stairwell) is the open platform for any kind of intervention. For you as a participant. You can show a project, do a performance, sing, recite, preach, whatever.
Would you like to reserve a lock (10 minutes)? Please contact us immediately at: submit

We will discuss your plan and add you to the program. But don't wait too long! The number of free slots is limited.

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Laura Broux

Up until her 17th birthday Laura Broux (°1989) was mostly passionate about dancing and playing classical music, before she fell in love with graphic design. In 2011 she graduated as a Master in Graphic Design at Sint Lucas School of Art Antwerp with an experimental project based on ‘Vampyr’, a classic piece for electric guitar by Tristan Murail.
After designing for several creative advertising agencies she switched to fashion in 2015. At Scotch & Soda in Amsterdam she worked as a Trims & Accessories designer. Currently she is the Concept & Graphic Design Coordinator at CKS - FNG Group.

Laura will moderate the keynote and short lectures together with Mieke Hooghe.

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Mieke Hooghe

Mieke Hooghe (°1988, Kortrijk) graduated from St Lucas School of Arts Antwerp as a master in Graphic Design in 2015 and followed that up with a postgraduate degree in Research in Art and Design in 2017. She currently works as a designer and illustrator, and teaches at the KdG University College Antwerp. She is fascinated by the ethical and social responsabilities inherent in being a designer, by the importance of saying no, and by the (perceived) differences between art and design. (Not to mention the differences between the artist and the designer.)
She is a strong believer in the paradoxical usefulness of creating utterly useless things and considers boredom a rare and valuable commodity.

Mieke will moderate the keynote and short lectures together with Hans Depelchin.

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Pascal Gielen

Pascal Gielen (1970) is professor of sociology of culture and politics at the Antwerp Research Institute for the Arts (Antwerp University - Belgium) where he leads the Culture Commons Quest Office (CCQO). Gielen is editor of the international book series Antennae - Arts in Society (Valiz). In 2016 he became laureate of the Odysseus grant for excellent international scientific research of the Fund for Scientific Research Flanders in Belgium. Gielen has published many books which are translated in Chinese, English, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish and Ukrainian. His research focuses on creative labour, the common, urban and cultural politics. Gielen works and lives in Antwerp, Belgium.

Pascal is your host together with Bart Eeckhout and Hugo Puttaert.

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Bart Eeckhout

Bart Eeckhout (1964) is professor of English and American literature at the University of Antwerp and chair of the Antwerp Research Institute for the Arts. Eeckhout is a specialist in the writings of the American modernist poet Wallace Stevens and edits The Wallace Stevens Journal. He has authored and edited 35 books and journal issues, and supervises several PhDs in the arts. He studied and taught at various New York universities, including Columbia University and NYU, and has been a Fellow in Residence at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in Amsterdam.

Bart is your host together with Pascal Gielen and Hugo Puttaert.

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Hugo Puttaert

Hugo Puttaert (°1960) is a graphic designer, writer, organiser and editor based in Brussels. He graduated from the Fine Arts department of LUCA Brussels and teacher training at LUCA Ghent and worked as an artist for several years before setting up his own design studio 'visionandfactory ' in 1990. Hugo is also professor and researcher at the St Lucas School of Arts Antwerp and the initiator of the Integrated Conferences.
Hugo spoke at various international design conferences and was editor-in-chief of Addmagazine.eu, a magazine on contemporary graphic design, until 2016. With his staff he has worked for a wide range of companies and cultural organisations all over the world.

Hugo is your host together with Bart Eeckhout and Pascal Gielen.
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Daniel Cabral

Daniel Cabral is a visual artist and video maker based in Brussels. His practice is concerned with speech and discourse, private/public spheres, context, repetition and the artists’ own condition in society. Involving extensive research, his works often result in multimedia installations. The field of International Relations has become a source of references which are embodied in his practice through the appropriation of its themes and aesthetics. Cabral earned a B.A. in International Relations in 2012, before making the autonomous transition to the Visual Arts. Since then, he studied Critical Theory at Chelsea College of Arts, London (2015) and currently pursues the Master in Visual Arts in Sint-Lucas Antwerp.

VIDEO SCREENING

Interview with a chair (2019).

The artist and an empty chair discuss current issues of art and art making. In this conversation, however, it’s not speech but silence the protagonist. The neutral element of the chair in the space of an interview frustrates all expectations of subjective investigation from this mode of inquiry. Instead, by not participating in the binaries that structure dialectics, the dialogue challenges the expected common ground expected of a conversation. Speech does not pass from one speaker to another, but rather, speech and silence alternate sequentially and it is actually this exchange that promotes understanding and creates meaning in this conversion. One more puzzling than the expected extraction of knowledge, at least.

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Wouter Hillaert & rekto:verso

rekto:verso reflects on art and culture. We work online and live and publish a magazine. We give opinions on music, performing arts, film, literature, television, visual arts etc. We do not distinguish between high and low, but we do know that we need accessible reflections for a broad, culturally interested audience in Flanders and the Netherlands. As a magazine for culture and criticism, we want to achieve that society gets more attention for art and that art gets more attention for society.

DISCUSSION GROUP TOPIC

Higher Arts Education: Time for Radical Change.

On Tuesday 22 October, Rekto:Verso published a research article on the experiences of students and teachers with racism, sexism and the absence of decolonisation in Higher Art Education in Flanders. Rekto:Verso has a heart for art and culture: if things go wrong in art education, they go wrong everywhere.
Rekto:Verso therefore organises the discussion group: Higher Art Education: Time for Radical Change? We want to discuss the findings of this research article and think constructively ahead: How can we work on change across educational institutions? We invite the Flemish art school directors and deans to participate in this discussion. Many teachers and students are working for change, but change is desperately in need of the ‘coming out’ for change of the art school directors.
The discussion will be introduced by Anissa Boujdaini, who will summarise the findings of the research she herself was involved in. After the reactions of the directors, Ama Koranteng-Kumi will give a response. After which we will discuss a concrete and radical action plan. Wouter HIllaert of Rekto:Verso will moderate the discussion group.

Racism and sexism in art education: a subjective mapping

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Crystal Z Campbell

Crystal Z Campbell is a multidisciplinary artist and writer of African-American, Filipino, & Chinese descents. Campbell's practice is an excavation of public secrets, shared as performance, installation, sound, paintings, and film/video. Recent works include extractions of unsettled historical narratives including connotations of value around Henrietta Lacks' immortal cell line; a 35mm movie film salvaged from a now demolished black civil rights theater in Brooklyn as a relic of gentrification; and a current long-term project around the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. Politics of witnessing and perception are explored through combinations of archival research, rumor, found footage, constructed imagery, and site history. Campbell exhibits internationally and is a concurrent Drawing Center Open Sessions Fellow and fourth-year Tulsa Artist Fellow, who lives and works in Tulsa, Oklahoma (US).

VIDEO SCREENING

Currency.

Currency is a performance film of refusal––a woman wears bygone forms of currency on the tips of her hair while preserving the greatest currency for herself.
Director: Crystal Z Campbell - performer: Angela Renee Davis - videography: David Wayne Reed - typography: Angela Davis Johnson.

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Maud Vanhauwaert & Rooftoptiger

Maud Vanhauwaert is a writer and theatre maker. In her work she searches for playful theatrical forms to make poetry public. She wrote the collections 'Ik ben mogelijk', 'Wij zijn parallel_' and 'Ik ben weer velen', and was awarded several literary prizes. Currently she is touring, together with mentalist Kurt Demey, with the theatre performance 'Wij zijn mogelijk', a collection of wordless poems. In 2018-2019 she is the city poet of Antwerp.

Sara Dandois is part of RoofTopTiger, together with Bram Rombouts they are the initiators of this Antwerp artist collective. Participative and performative installations in public space are the core media they use to create both artistic and community arts processes and projects. The installations are made up of recycled and local materials that are found in the vicinity of the temporarily occupied workplaces. Their scenographic projects grow out of the hunger for autonomy, freedom, encounter and wild aesthetics. They enter into a debate with current themes in our society. The most important concept in their work is that of The Machine, she is the main character and carries the content/vision. The installations are often embedded in the environment and by means of interventions they try to seduce people into acting as the playful and critical designer of their own city. The Machine is actually an anti-machine, it spreads different experiences and conditions, works on human energy and lets you feel, smell, taste and hear. Their spectacular installations became known both nationally and internationally.

LECTURE PERFORMANCE

Tower of Babel.

This summer the artists' collective Rooftoptiger and Maud Vanhauwaert, city poet of Antwerp, joined forces. Together with dozens of organisations and hundreds of helping hands, they built a monumental Tower of Babel in the city. It became a project across many borders: borders between languages, between art forms and between the so-called highbrow and lowbrow. Sara Dandois, from Rooftoptiger, and Maud Vanhauwaert will talk about their own journey, and about the crazy collaboration.

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Christina Phoebe

Christina Phoebe works in performance, film/video, installation, writing, photography and drawing. In her practice she explores the personal and political in the everyday through playful experimentations. Diaspora and exile are recurring themes in her work. Her first feature film Amygdaliá (2019) premiered in the International Competition of the 21st Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival in March 2019. Her work has shown internationally at Flux Factory (NY), The Greek Film Archive (Athens), YNKB (Copenhagen), Abofoun Gallery (Accra), the 15th Venice Biennale of Architecture and Jeu de Paume’s le magazine amongst others. She has received a NEON grant for her work in 2017-2018 and was George Stoney Fellow at the 2018 Flaherty Film Seminar. She lives in Athens, Greece.

VIDEO SCREENING

Nur's Nose Remembers

How far can you travel on (a) scent? A performance-postcard from Athens to the busy markets of Mombasa, as Nur's nose remembers what it once was to be an outsider child. And how children love to play: a blindfold, random acquaintances and plenty of fish make up for this intriguing local game that can take you around the world.

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Bie Michels

In her work Bie Michels (b. 1960, Kimwenza, Congo, lives and works in Antwerp) centers on observing, registering, and questioning the representation of the ‘other’. Her paintings, installations and films not only question her own position with regard to the subject, but in the process of her creation she allows others to collaborate or comment on them. These may be artists, experts or labourers, but also people closely involved. Besides the complex relations (culturally, historically, interpersonal,...) of people with objects, she is since her two last projects interested in (post)colonial questions and decolonisation. Her work has been shown in Contour Biennale 9 (B), Magasin des Horizons (F), Argos (B), M HKA (Museum for contemporary art, B), Netwerk Aalst (B), Fei Contemporary Art Centre (Shanghai, CH), Dunkerque (F), Hastings (GB) and Lokaal 01 (Breda, NL).

VIDEO SCREENING

(Pas) Mon Pays, Part I and II.

Bie Michels was born and raised in Congo, in a house on the campus of the current University of Kinshasa (former ‘Lovanium’, the first university in the country, 1954-1971). As the title indicates, ‘(Pas) Mon Pays, Part I and II’, is in two parts. The first talks about a colonial monument in Mechelen and Michels’ efforts to decolonize this statue with a group of Belgian citizens with Congolese roots. The second shows the artist’s visit to Congo. ‘(Pas) Mon Pays’ is based on her personal history, as an attempt to let the past encounter the present and see further into the future of the postcolonial situation, in both Congo and Mechelen.

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Champ d'Action

Champ d'Action is an interdisciplinary development and production platform for creators. ChampdAction was originally founded in 1988 as a contemporary music ensemble by composer Serge Verstockt. Today, it is an interdisciplinary development and production platform for creators, residing in ChampdAction.Studio at deSingel in Antwerp. Its current operations are focused on the creative and developmental processes of an ever-growing number of artists in residence wishing to create an interdisciplinary project. These artists embody a variety of different disciplines, including those of music, sound art, video art and the fine arts.
Conscious of contemporary tensions between culture, technology and society, ChampdAction generates and stimulates new artistic responses. ChampdAction offers professional artistic, technical and business frameworks for creators and performers, from the conception of an artistic idea to the realization and distribution of artistic output. In-house creations go hand in hand with collaborative projects, ranging from cooperations with individual artists to different groups, ensembles, art organizations, art colleges etc.
ChampdAction is a creative and critical artistic crossroads of debate and action. It plays a pioneering role in artistic emancipation and participation of diverse target groups, ranging from children, adolescents to amateur artists and audiences in general. ChampdAction takes a proactive position in the art landscape, encouraging young talent and striving for intensive interactions with both new and established artists.

VIDEO SCREENING

LAbO - a laboratory for young creators.

ChampdAction.LAbO is a laboratory for young creators, organized by Antwerp-based production platform for new music and interdisciplinary arts ChampdAction, and part of deSingel's International Summer School. Its main purpose is creation through means of communication and interaction between the various arts disciplines: dance, music, fine arts and others.

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Thomas Jacobs

Thomas François Jacobs (1989, Gent) is a model, actor and dance teacher who graduated from Codarts, Rotterdam Dance Academy. He has hosted shows and platforms such as the multi disciplinary arts festival “The big day” in De Doelen in Rotterdam, “Carscoop” and “Robinsontheroad” an online video series together with StarskyTV and is a reporter for ATV hosting the ins and outs happening in Antwerp in “Stadsreportages”.
In 2018 he was one of the contestants on the popular tv show “Expeditie Robinson” known worldwide as “Survivor”. Traveling across the globe and growing up and living in cities as New-York and Shanghai he’s a believer in the strong value of being yourself in a true multicultural environment and the effect it brings onto people, the arts and society.

Thomas will moderate the Speakers' Corner.
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Annelies Rasker

I recently graduated as a Master Costume Design at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Antwerp. I got the privilege to do a performance in 4 locations so far. In the MAS museum Antwerp as kick-off act of De Kotroute. In the Royal Academy of Fine Arts as opening act of the Antwerp Art Weekend. At HET BOS Antwerp where I performed twice at the Graduation Show of Costume Design. And at the end of the expo ‘Thank you, Come again’ Hopland, Antwerp. I’m continuing my studies with a Master in Fine Arts at Sint-Lucas Antwerp.
The subconscious, emotions, fears and gender are some of the themes that keep me occupied. Themes that are difficult to comprehend, that contain mystery, that keep me sitting on the edge of my chair. As I feel uncomfortable expressing myself verbally, I look for other ways to share my thoughts, fears and emotions. These are drawn on different media like paper, textile, mousse, canvas etc. I search for different worlds to be and reinvent myself. Each one of my works is inexplicable and transmits the atmosphere that I experience in my body, my inner persona. HUGO. Besides that, my work shows how I live my life, or how life really is in the eyes of Annelies.

PERFORMANCE

HUGO

HUGO puts his emotions, fears and thoughts on display through a live performance. Hugo is my third name, but on official documents, like my passport, only the first letter ‘H.’ is shown. I designed 6 different costumes and masks for HUGO. By wearing the mask, HUGO gains anonymity and feels no shame. The masks and costumes have a certain punk content, which gives HUGO strength and the appearance of a fighter. I associate painting with fighting in this case, since HUGO expresses emotions and fears in a direct way.

Max Greyson

Max Greyson (1988) is a poet, theatre writer and spoken word performer from Antwerp. Max is a member of the international dance theatre ensemble Un-Label, an international cultural project in which artists with and without disability from seven European countries conduct artistic research around inclusive and innovative working methods for the performing arts. He also carries out research into artistic methods for inclusiveness within the ImPArt project of Un-Label, an investigation that he will embed in his research at the Royal Conservatoire of Antwerp into the artistic integration of audio-description in music theatre.

WORKSHOP TOPIC

Description in the present.

Over the course of three days, this will be an exploration of identity by description. We pose
ourselves the question: how does describing something or someone affect our own identity? How
does describing invoke speech, sound and movement? How does a description become a bridge for
communication, a two-way connection, a collective awareness of the physical presence?
There’s no active participation.