HOW TO DO THINGS BY THEORY

Re-hallucinating the context: Paris – Belgrade
Last phase: Exchange with Deschooling Classroom project; January-February 2011

All the materials produced collectively during this programme, together with creative reports on the visits by the participants are published in the Journal des Laboratoires, April – August 2011 issue, and could be also downloaded here: Re-hallucinating the context: Exchange with Deschooling Classroom

In January and February we organized a valuable exchange between the participants of the research Re-hallucinating the contexts: Paris – Belgrade and the participants of Deschooling Classroom project (working group Cultural policy of the independent scene), organized by TkH, Belgrade and Kontrapunkt, Skopje (www.deschoolingclassroom.tkh-generator.net/).

The participants in the one-week working visits to Belgrade and Paris have been: from Re-hallucinating the context – Nathalie Rias, Delphine Jonas, Sabine Macher, Vanessa Theodoropoulou, and Virginie Bobin (les Laboratoires); from DSC (Cultural policy group) – Marijana Cvetkovic, Marina Laus, Nevena Jankovic, Biljana Dimitrova, Ksenija Cockova, Tamara Busterska, and Dragana Jovovic (TkH), plus Ana Vujanovic and Marta Popivoda, who coordinated the programme of the visits.

Program in Belgrade took place from 24-30 January. It was created together with the participants of DSC from Belgrade, and comprised visits to relevant venues, organizations, and institutions, discussions in each venue with invited guests, as well as internal work. During the week we visited: Interdisciplinary post-graduate studies of the University of Arts, where we discussed about education in culture for a new social and political context with Milena Dragićević-Šešić and Miško Šuvaković; Cultural center Magacin, where we organized a round table about bottom-up approach to cultural policy and self-organization with members of Other Scene (Druga Scena): Station (Marijana Cvetković), TkH platform (Ana Vujanović, Marta Popivoda), Prelom collective: (Dušan Grlja), and Kontekst Gallery (Vida Knežević, Marko Miletić); Cultural Center REX, where Dušica Parezanović and Milica Pekić talked about Collaboration and networking; Center for Cultural Decontamination CZKD, where we invited Borka Pavićević, Aleksandra Jovićević, and Jelena Vesić to elaborate on art and politics at the local scene; and the European Center for Culture and Debate GRAD, where Dejan Ubović, Ljudmila Stratimirović, and Nevena Janković presented this centre and spoke about hybrid cultural institutions. Apart from this, we have had few internal working sessions, as an opportunity to exchange about different cultural policies in Eastern and Western Europe. Motivated by the challenging atmosphere, the participants also decided to make a collaborative work as a result of the exchange – namely, a critical re-writing of the cultural policy document “Belgrade 2020: Cultural capital of Europe”.

Details »

[Here you can download booklet with diagrams: re-hallucinating context diagrams booklet]

The departure for the project of Walking Theory (TkH) at Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers in January 2010 – How to Do Things by Theory – are two cities, “the Belgrade” of TkH and “the Paris” of Les Labos – two dissimilar contexts, situations and realities, the power of whose margins and minorities are not evident. Bringing the contextual approach of TkH’s practice in Les Labos implied discerning a new context of operation, demanding its own line of investigation. Hence, we invited whomever felt interpellated to reflect and intervene in the context they considered (or wished) to belong to. The context entails a scene of acts and events, a site of discursive struggles and an atmosphere enveloping common sense. Its location and activity is delineated by the performing arts in Paris, and Belgrade. From the attempt to denominate this territory as “indepedent scene” – a discussion which revealed historical and conceptual differences and misunderstandings – we arrived at a more precise definition that replaced “independence” with “relative autonomy”. Relatively autonomous or semi-autonomous today are those individual artists, groups and collectives, projects, initiatives, organizations, movements, concepts and spaces, that seek to transform the conditions and terms of work and production, representation and distribution. We referred to our meetings as “re-hallucinating contexts”, whereby “re-hallucination” supposes a sight distinct from the common perception. For a moment things might appear unbelievably different, impossible seems more possible, and another play is played before our eyes. The same people could be recast in new roles, and new concerns and places emerge. Truthful representation of a territory is anyhow condemned to an infinite regress of mental maps of maps.

Details »

THE INDEX  HEREUNDER COMPRISES ENTRIES, MOST OF WHICH ARE REPRESENTED ON THE DIAGRAMS OF PARIS, WHICH YOU CAN DOWNLOAD HERE. MOST ITEMS ARE INTRODUCED AND EXPLAINED BY THE PARTICIPANTS OF RE-HALLUCINATING CONTEXTS. SOME ARE BRIEFLY MENTIONED WITHOUT EXPLANATION UNDER SIX CATEGORIES:

1. CULTURAL POLICY
2. PLACES, ORGANIZATION AND PRODUCTION FORMATS
3. DISCOURSES
4. TEMPORALITY
5. EVENTS

1. What are the approaches, actors, and methods of independence in

CULTURAL POLICY (both by the state-subsidized and the independent scene)?

• POLITIQUES CULTURELLES

Résumé  ultra-schématique des tendances contemporaines des politiques  culturelles et de leurs conséquences sur la notion d’autonomie  artistique.

La  politique menée par le Ministère de la Culture s’est caractérisée,  depuis ces dernières décennies, par une décentralisation du pouvoir. Une  autonomie de plus en plus large a été donnée aux collectivités locales  et territoriales (Région, Département, Communes, Villes) en matière de  soutien à des initiatives, à des structures artistiques et culturelles indépendantes, qui, de fait, ne sont plus indépendantes financièrement  mais qui conservent néanmoins une autonomie de discours et d’action. On  reste cependant dans le schéma “Etat providence” hérité de la Seconde  Guerre mondiale. Du fait de cette large politique de soutien, les  initiatives les plus innovantes et remarquables se sont trouvées  majoritairement soutenues par l’Etat et les collectivités. On peut même parler d’un paradoxe en France : l’indépendance et l’autonomie  artistique ont été jusqu’à présent garanties et rendues pérennes grâce aux différentes formes de soutien des politiques publiques. Les  laboratoires d’Aubervilliers illustrent de manière exemplaire ce phénomène, justement.

Details »

RE-HALLUCINATING CONTEXTS #4:

report from the session by Bojana Cvejic

Our fourth session began with Grégory and Alice informing us about a two-day event at Tate Modern where “independent artists” were invited to support their own representation in this space as “independent artists”, quite a cynical move of Tate Modern to co-opt even that which not only doesn’t belong to them but that explicitly counters their logic.

My introduction opened with a question: is it a map that we are making?

Preparing for this session, I researched the principles of cartography and artistic procedures of map-making. This was to distinguish and sharpen the direction and purpose of making a map of “relatively autonomous” scenes of Paris and Belgrade – a map we would publish and thereby suggest to be used by others. The decision to publish it begs the question: could our map guide a navigation that would really re-hallucinate the scenes? Especially as we planned the trip of exchange Belgrade-Paris. Could Parisians start with this map and Belgradians use this map instead of Pariscope?

Details »

RE-HALLUCINATING CONTEXTS #3:

report from the session by Bojana Cvejic

What are we talking about when we say “independent scene”?

The attribute “independent” is inappropriate for two reasons:

1)      independence suggests a fantasy about being “outside” institutions, isolation and self-sufficiency, as in autarchy (economic independence)

2)      the latter is related to the historical usage “independent artist” – the artist who produces her work through her own company, as opposed to the artist who is employed by a state institution. It’s associated today with the much contested status of the self-employed “free entrepreneur”, hence, has a liberal capitalist sense

Instead, I propose to replace “independence” with “relative autonomy”, and thus claim that in every context of the global world there are semi-autonomous artists, possibly also forming a relatively autonomous scene: relatively autonomous or semi-autonomous individual artists, groups and collectives, projects, initiatives, organizations, movements, spaces etc.

“Autonomy” is neither a problem-free term: like “independence”, it also begs for careful deliberation.

The idea and popular notion of “autonomy” dates back to the establishing of the aesthetic regime of art, to use Rancière’s scheme of division of mega-cultural and art epochs. Autonomy is the historical condition (ca. 1800) of separating art from the function of social service and establishing its function of not having a function (Adorno, Sociology of Music), purported in Kantian aesthetic judgment as disinterested pleasure. This notion of autonomy, which casts art in the extremes, either dedicated to self-perfection for its own sake and thus free from engagement with social reality, or accused for precisely the same reason of not engaging with realities outside of its medium.

Details »

RE-HALLUCINATING CONTEXTS #2:

notes by Ana Vujanović

CONTEXTUAL APPROACH TO/IN ART

Modern western art paradigm (from 18^th century on):

• art as praxis (not poiesis as it has been since ancient Greece: see Aristotle’s Poetics). But the notion praxis doesn’t mean a voluntary public act dedicated to the regulation and transformation of the social field and relations, but as an act of expression of an individual’s creative will.

• Reference: Agamben, Giorgio. The Man Without Content, Stanford Ca: Stanford University Press, 1999.

According to Agamben:

• “The metaphysics of will has penetrated our conception of art to such an extent that even the most radical critiques of aesthetics have not questioned its founding principle, that is, the idea that art is the expression of the artist’s creative will.”

Details »