Kunsthof Zürich
Bachelor Medien & Kunst, Vertiefung Bildende Kunst
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This is the third in a series of events this summer and autumn 2013 as part of
Opportunities for Outdoor Play? Playgrounds – New Spaces of Liberty (The Question of Form)
Psychogeography: From Urbanism to Everyday Places
Amélie Brisson-Darveau, Mortimer Chen, Zoë Darling, Benjamin Egger, Petra Elena Köhle, Sandra Lang, Konstantinos Manolakis, Cat Tuong Nguyen, Kika Nicolela, Jacqueline Poloni, Romy Rüegger, Riikka Tauriainen, Navid Tschopp, Nicolas Vermot Petit-Outhenin. Coordination: Dimitrina Sevova
DJ Set by Dott at Kunsthof after 22:30
The event is composed of urban interventions, drifting walks, strolls and performative situations and other means of cacophonic molecular machinic becoming, affected by dramatizing and diagrammatizing practices of the political forms of coordination mapping singularities. The event is oriented towards the politics of location and micropolitical locomotion as an a-signifying process animating the vital multiplicity of organization of ethico-aesthetic living forms.
Reality flows; we flow with it; and we call true any affirmation which, in guiding us through moving reality, gives us grip upon it and places us under more favorable conditions for acting. (Henri Bergson)
The unconscious no longer deals with persons and objects, but with trajectories and becomings; it is no longer an unconscious of commemoration, but one of mobilization, an unconscious whose objects take flight rather than remaining buried in the ground. (Gilles Deleuze)
The event is inspired by and refers to the history of dérive, or drifting, of the Situationists, who appropriated the Surrealists’ strolls and Walter Benjamin’s idea of passage in order to realize their own “technique of locomotion without a goal,” or what Deleuze and Guattari call the “schizo stroll.” They are all influenced more or less directly by the French pacifist and educational reformer Célestin Freinet and the Modern School Movement he founded in 1926 based on three complementary teaching techniques. School children would go on learning walks, and take their experience of the walks as a pretext for writing free collective texts, which they composed on Freinet’s printing press. Through these collective texts the pupils were committed to the current situation in their community and tried to respond to their context, because meaning is always situated, formed by the situation and by spatial interventions. Dérive is a means of creating a space in which meaning is not a question of reflection between smooth surfaces, or of a dominant signifier, not an automated process of opening and closing, not mediation through media. It is a form of knowledge that cannot be individualized in a defined system because it is subjectified, specific and localized with its own temporality. This is how it can follow a concrete reality in its entire sinuosity without creating representation. This is indeed learning from experience, learning from theory.
Program
17:00 Jacqueline Poloni & Riikka Tauriainen, Proposal for a walking method IV. Meeting point: meeting point at Langstrasse underpass on the side of District 4. Direction/orientation: walk with the artists across the back alleys between the train tracks, Bäckeranlage and Kanzlei. Ends at: Langstrasse underpass on the side of District 5.
18:00 Mortimer Chen & Benjamin Egger, multi-play Äh! -ply. Meeting point: Röntgenplatz, 8005 Zürich. Direction/orientation: Walk with the artists to Kunsthof, Limmatstrasse 44, 8005 Zürich.
… Romy Rüegger, Free Space! Free Space? Location: Kunsthof, Limmatstrasse 44, 8005 Zürich. Throughout the afternoon and evening, whenever we are at Kunsthof, you will hear from word-of-mouth about all the ZHdK buildings that will be vacated a year from now, and are invited to sharpen and share your visions, fantasies, ideas and desires on how the space should be used in the future.
Please download the flyer as PDF.
19:00 Navid Tschopp, ZHdK or Kunsthof Häuserball Tournament. Meeting point: Kunsthof, Limmatstrasse 44, 8005 Zürich. Direction/orientation: Soccer tournament in the streets between Kunsthof and Sihlquai 131, 8005 Zürich. Ends at: Kunsthof.
20:15 Kika Nicolela, Water Tasting from Local Public Fountains. Location: Kunsthof, Limmatstrasse 44, 8005 Zürich.
20:30 Konstantinos Manolakis, Presentation (A dramatisation of structures). Meeting point: Kunsthof, Limmatstrasse 44, 8005 Zürich. Direction/orientation: Walk with the artist to Passage Kornhausbrücke (off Limmatplatz), 8005 Zürich (passage between Ausstellungsstrasse 104 and Sihquai 133). The installation will be available for the public to view from 17:00 on.
21:00 Petra Elena Köhle & Cat Tuong Nguyen & Nicolas Vermot-Petit-Outhenin, 21, 11, 25, from green and white to blue and yellow – micro-gentrification interventions in the Bäckeranlage (in the fog). Location: Kunsthof, Limmatstrasse 44, 8005 Zürich (referring to Bäckeranlage, 8004 Zürich).
21:30 Kika Nicolela, Water Dialogues. Location: Kunsthof, Limmatstrasse 44, 8005 Zürich.
21:45 Amélie Brisson-Darveau & Sandra Lang, Irruption dans le tissu urbain / Irruption into the Urban Tissue. Location: Kunsthof, Limmatstrasse 44, 8005 Zürich. Paper Cut Stop Motion Animation, duration 2 min; artists’ talk.
22:00 Zoë Darling, Labyrinth #1 – Invitation. Location: Kunsthof, Limmatstrasse 44, 8005 Zürich (referring to Zeughaushof, Kanonengasse, 8004 Zurich).
22:15 DJ set by Dott, with visuals by Aurelio Kopainig. Location: Kunsthof, Limmatstrasse 44, 8005 Zürich. End: unknown.
A-t the heart of the event on 6 July lies its own singularization as a process of multiplicity composed by interventions as molecular movements and their methods of performative dramatization, starting out from different locations in the afternoon in Districts 5 and 4 of Zurich, some of them crossing Kunsthof, others taking place directly there during the evening, creating different situations, stretching invisible vectors between themselves in a heterogeneous milieu, each with its own temporality, color, intensity and invention.
An intervention means to create a situation, to evoke a mode of dramatization for becoming a form of locomotion – a machinic metabolization which is both a form of organization and a form of singularization. They are encounters, active dynamic diagrammatizations mapping those areas in town characterized by the vital phenomenon of grassroots initiatives, a molecular adaptive and ethico-aesthetic living form of resistance against the commercialization and beautification of the public environment. The question is how the space of common sense can become a common place, a place governed by individuation, which might well look entirely absurd from the point of view of common sense. The idea of the event is not to attract or communicate with the public and town, but to create a situation that directly triggers public curiosity, to stimulate inventive and peculiar situations from which new relations, processes and ideas may arise, but also reveal invisible layers of knowledge and unknown aesthetic forms, themselves spatially structured.
Why psychogeography? Why would one use the unconscious as cartographer by means of transversal techniques, and their vectors of singularization that stretch us, the logic of intensities that creates difference? Psychogeography creates an intensive field of individuation in a state of creativity, which aims to experience, to encounter, to experiment and complicate the semantic codes coming from different signifiers and create rather a field of noise than of clear statements and concepts. From this cacophonic noise the pattern of an ecological mind can appear. This stage of mind is a singularization with its own temporality of a situation, and involves flows, streams, fluxes coming from different sources in new forms of machinic becoming, and opens up towards an affective space of micropolitics.
This praxis of intervening and mobilizing heterogeneous strata and their dancing layers is not about urban geography. Psychogeography is not an attempt to redefine the urban space, browsing, scanning, exploring, and cutting it in slices in order to put it in a frame, fixing it to a detail. Every detail is part of a bigger cartographic image. Geographies are part of the large territory, the surfaces that belong to the molar. In The Birth of Biopolitics, Michel Foucault says that there is an interdependence between the molar, and ‘’social entropy,” the entropy that arises from a dominant subjectivity, desires for stability and fixations, all of which induce the ecological and social costs of the crisis.
Each artist’s subjectivity re-tells and re-translates polyphonic stories in decentralized and small narrative patterns to excavate the memory hidden behind the anonymizing tendencies imposed by the gentrification of the urban living environment and the proliferation of control by data collecting machines and their capturing apparatuses, which tear apart the narrative tissue, whose scattering causes a break in the movement of the connecting pattern. With these situations we would like to contribute to a change in the ecology of ideas and the microclimate of mentalities that not only offer a new place to the public, but provoke a new process, a new form of exchange and metabolic circulations, and inspire the imagination on how the social environment might be composed of different living and nonliving forms that co-exist.
Because of this, the interventions of 6 July are oriented towards micropolitics. The aim of the event is not to create a new urban taxonomy through observation and judging based on formal principles. This praxis of intervention is not about investigation or reflections of knowledge by means of representation. It is both an aesthetic praxis and a knowledge praxis aimed at breaking up the axiomatic totalization of our perception, at de-naturalizing or de-atomizing them through the “disorientation of habitual reflexes.” The intervention is a form of mobilization through which situations are created in which all sorts of flows enter into conjunction in human and non-human temporalities. Creating a situation is to engage with an idea of the politics of location by means of perception, by means of cognition, mobilizing both.
[…]
(Text: Dimitrina Sevova)