September

A pro­posal con­ceived by the Parisian com­mittee of The Public School for The Public School Paris
RDV 7, 11 and 12 // 18 and 19 // 25 and 26 September at Bétonsalon – centre for art and research

September is a series of talks, work­shops, lec­tures, classes, per­for­mances, read­ings and diverse inter­ven­tions, whose aim is to think in acts, by com­bining theory and prac­tice, about the con­di­tions and forms of pro­duc­tion of the research in art, about their deploy­ment and about their sharing.

During three suc­ces­sive week-ends, we will launch a Pickpocket Almanack in Paris, we will orga­nize sev­eral sem­i­nars of The Public School and we will study research pro­jects bor­rowing tools and method­olo­gies from ped­a­gogy (dis­cur­sivity, col­lec­tive exper­i­men­ta­tion, auto-orga­ni­za­tion, open-source prac­tices, trans­mis­sion methods…).

In par­allel, artist Carson Salter will invest the phys­ical space of Bétonsalon, installing a work­sta­tion for his pro­ject The Teachable File in the per­ma­nent public Library of béton­salon, con­ceived in 2009 by artist Katinka Bock in col­lab­o­ra­tion
with book­shop castillo/cor­rales. This will be the first acti­va­tion of the Bétonsalon’s Library, which will now be offi­cially open.

With:

• Pickpocket Almanack, a project by Joseph del Pesco with Franck Leibovici (artist), Sébastien Pluot (art critic), Vivian Rehberg (art critic), Eric Périer (curious) and Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc (artist)
• The Public School and seminars 12 gestures with Renzo Martens, Communism’s afterlives by Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez and Elena Sorokina, Performing Memory by Virginie Bobin and Julia Kläring with Franck Leibovici
• The teachable file by Carson Salter
• Activations of discourse in the European dance scene, a proposal by Alice Chauchat
• The Workers Punk Art School Berlin
• A LOUER # 3 by Emilie Parendeau

The Public School is a pro­ject to pro­pose sem­i­nars for Bétonsalon. The Public School web­site enables to post a pro­posal and reg­istrer for others. The Public School Paris com­mittee mem­bers choose to orga­nize some sem­i­nars.

The Public School was ini­ti­ated by Telic’s Director, Sean Dockray, in 2007. It oper­ated in Los Angeles for a year before new schools, enacting the same model, were started in Chicago and Philadelphia in 2009. In fall of 2009, Telic and common room received a fel­low­ship from the Van Alen Institute to launch The Public School (for Architecture) New York. At the begin­ning of 2010, the school moved into 177 Livingston in Brooklyn with Triple Canopy and Light Industry and the "(for Architecture)" was dropped from the name.
Also in the fall of 2009, Telic trav­eled to Bétonsalon in Paris and Komplot in Brussels to help start new schools there. Since then, The Public School has also popped up in Helsinki (sup­ported by the mul­ti­pur­pose space, Ptarmigan) and San Juan (with Betalocal). The Public School Paris com­mittee mem­bers are Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc (artist), Virginie Bobin (free-lance curator), Mélanie Bouteloup (director of Bétonsalon – centre for art and research), Grégory Castéra (codi­rector of Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers), Sean Dockray (founder of The Public School), Nicolas Fourgeaud (art critic), Sandra Terdjman (director of Kadist Art Foundation), Mathilde Villeneuve (co-director at ENSA Paris Cergy).

PROGRAMME

TUESDAY 7 : 12 GESTURES THE PUBLIC SCHOOL
7pm: sem­inar ‘12 Gestures’ with guest artist Renzo Martens, screening of ‘Episode 3’ (2008) (90 min)
and talk with Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc
In his films, Renzo Martens, raises issues regarding image pro­duc­tion and the polit­ical and social claims of con­tem­po­rary art. The films prompt the viewer to think about the con­struc­tion of a doc­u­men­tary, the role of the fil­maker in it, and their respon­si­bility as viewers them­selves. For Episode III: Enjoy Poverty, Martens trav­elled for two years with his video camera in the Democratic Republic of Congo, an area marked by human­i­tarian dis­aster. Martens shows how NGOs and Western media delin­eate an image of this sit­u­a­tion. His film con­fronts the public with the fact that the Africans them­selves do not profit from the images that for­eign pho­tog­ra­phers take of them. So what if, the artist was directly teaching the Africans how to use a camera to ben­efit also from the image of their own poverty ?
Episode III: Enjoy Poverty has been recently pre­sented at the Berlin Biennale, at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, at the New Museum in New York, at Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Tate Modern in London...

Renzo Martens was born in 1973 in The Netherlands. He lives and works in Brussels, Amsterdam and Kinshasa.

The 12 Gestures sem­inar is the result of a dis­cus­sion between The Public School, which opened at Bétonsalon in September 2009 and a pro­ject ini­ti­ated by the Kadist Art Foundation’s phi­lan­thropic and artistic branches bringing together an artist and an NGO. Conceived as a series of inter­ven­tions pro­grammed over one year, this sem­inar focuses on artistic prac­tices devel­oped in a close rela­tion­ship with a con­text, a com­mu­nity and ques­tion what we call “so­cial prac­tice” in the field of art. The sem­inar will pre­sent expe­ri­ences, which keep ques­tioning the role of the artist, curator or art centre out­side of mere exhi­bi­tion making, when artists work in a col­lab­o­ra­tive, pro­cess-ori­ented and dis­cur­sive approach, some­times bor­rowing its method­olo­gies from other dis­ci­plines. We would rather use the term ’ges­ture’ than ’action’ since these pro­jects are often modest and very local; they address the com­plexity of a society taking into account sub­jec­tiv­i­ties and raising polit­ical ques­tions, meaning “re­vealing the pres­ence, behind a given sit­u­a­tion, of forces that were hidden until then” (Bruno Latour, "Changer de société, refaire de la soci­ologie").

SATURDAY 11: LAUNCH OF PICKPOCKET ALMANACK AND THE PUBLIC SCHOOL
A Paris Wide Compendium, Autumn of the Year 2010
The Pickpocket Almanack is an exper­i­mental cat­a­lyst for social encoun­ters with knowl­edge. A tem­po­rary fac­ulty of artists, cura­tors, writers and musi­cians create courses by selecting from public events already sched­uled to take place at venues around Paris. Each course takes these pre-existing events (lec­tures, screen­ings, work­shops) out of their ini­tial con­text and pro­vides a new nar­ra­tive. The result is a set of jour­neys around Parisian cul­tural life, some unex­pected con­nec­tions, new dis­cov­eries, and a variety of per­spec­tives pro­posed by a diverse group of cul­tural fig­ures.

6pm – 7pm : talk between Joseph del Pesco (founder of Pickpocket Almanack, San Francisco) and Sean Dockray (founder of The Public School, Los Angeles)

7pm – 8pm : pre­sen­ta­tion/reg­is­tra­tions for Pickpocket Alamanack fac­ul­ties selected by Franck Leibovici, Sébastien Pluot, Vivian Rehberg, Eric Perier, Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc and sem­i­nars The Public School pro­posed by Bétonsalon and Kadist Art Foundation, Virginie Bobin and Julia Kläring, Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez and Elena Sorokina

From 8pm: party !

SUNDAY 12: THE TEACHABLE FILE AND PERFORMING MEMORY THE PUBLIC SCHOOL
1pm – 2pm: brunch and pre­sen­ta­tion of pro­ject The teach­able file by Carson Salter
The teach­able file is a working cat­alog of alter­na­tive art schools and a pre-ped­a­gog­ical ref­er­ence on exper­i­mental edu­ca­tion. The file is actively forming itself through com­mu­nica­tive action and engaged research. It is what it is; it will be what it will be. During ’September’, the teach­able file will take up res­i­dency in the library of Bétonsalon, recording the month’s activ­i­ties and exploring the hold­ings of the library. Carson Salter will act as ‘Filer’, gen­er­ating a net­work of infor­ma­tion that con­nects the gath­ered data with his own ongoing research on the topic through var­ious tools and sources, including inter­ested mem­bers of the audi­ence.
Carson Salter (b.1984) works in per­for­mance and pub­lishing. His art­work and coor­di­nated pro­jects blur the bor­ders between art, research and fic­tion. Salter’s work has appeared in many shows across the United States, including You have to have not been there... (curated by Salter him­self) at the NY Art Book Fair, PS1, New York ; the PROMPT (curated by Michael Portnoy & Sarina Basta), Kunstverien NY with Performa, New York ; [Frieze] Frame (curated by Gintaras Didziapetris), Tulips & Roses at Frieze Fair, London ; Punctuation: four stops, two marks of move­ment... (curated by Chris Fitzpatrick and Matthiew Post), Right Window, San Francisco ; and at 16 Beaver, Bard College and Light Industry. His book col­lab­o­ra­tion with Garth Weiser was recently pub­lished by Onestar Press. Bétonsalon will host his first res­i­dency and show in France – he was invited to be part of We Don’t Record Flowers, said the Geographer, curated by bo-ring, opening October 9, 2010. http://car­son­salter.com/

2pm – 3pm: pre­sen­ta­tion of The Public School Brussels, Komplot by Sonia Dermience
Created in Brussels in 2002, Komplot is a cura­to­rial col­lec­tive con­cerned with nomadic cre­ative prac­tices, trends of spe­cial­iza­tion, sur­vival archi­tec­tures and the infil­tra­tion of pri­vate, public and insti­tu­tional space. The nomadism of Komplot as a plat­form of vari­able com­po­si­tion allows it to explore new ter­rain in rela­tion to objects, spaces, artists and the public. Komplot inves­ti­gates the con­cept of col­lec­tive author­ship. Research on this topic com­menced with a sem­inar (2005) and led to two full length doc­u­men­tary films Sad in Country 1 & 2 (2007/2008), which focuses on Belgian art col­lec­tives; both con­tem­po­rary and his­tor­ical. This issue was also explored in a series of lec­tures at Brussels art school La Cambre (2008/2009) and more recently with the film MARCEL that will be released in 2010.

3pm – 5pm: sem­inar Performing Memory with Franck Leibovici
« per­forming a doc­u­ment – intro­duc­tion to sequence 7 of the mini-opera for non musi­cians."
when wik­ileaks released 75 000 clas­si­fied pdf this summer, a public issue instantly rose up : how to har­ness such a huge amount of doc­u­ments ? how to manip­u­late such hetero­ge­neous mate­rials ? what intel­lec­tual tech­nolo­gies can we invent in order to seize ele­ments that are pre­sented to us as leading to the truth ? »

franck lei­bovici (paris). the mini-opera for non musi­cians, pro­ject in 10 sequences, is a tool for the re-descrip­tion of “low inten­sity con­flicts”. the per­for­mances, based on pro­to­cols from exper­i­mental music, dance, science studies or con­ver­sa­tional anal­ysis, do not belong to “living the­ater”. quelques sto­ry­boards (2003), 9+11 (2005), des doc­u­ments poé­tiques (2007), por­traits chi­nois (2007)"

Performing Memory is a pro­ject by Virginie Bobin and Julia Kläring (bo-ring), which con­sists in a series of sem­i­nars around works and researches that address the issue of the doc­u­ment and its trans­mis­sion within the prac­tice of per­for­mance. Beyond reflec­tions about doc­u­men­ta­tion of per­for­mance that have grown par­allel to its devel­op­ment since the 70’s, Performing Memory con­siders per­for­mance as a medium for a poten­tial crit­ical his­tory through the use, acti­va­tion, inter­pre­ta­tion and dis­play of (real or fic­ti­tious) doc­u­ments.
The pro­ject takes sev­eral forms in space and time:
 the web­site www.bo-ring.net gathers a selec­tion of inter­views with artists, chore­og­ra­phers, cura­tors, art his­to­rians or critics who address per­for­mance prac­tices as an act of crit­ical medi­a­tion and or ques­tion the active use of doc­u­ment within these prac­tices;
 the sem­i­nars allow for var­ious ways of unfolding this research and space and time, through talks, lec­tures,
per­for­mances, screen­ings and dis­plays of doc­u­ments, depending on the con­text. One ver­sion of the pro­ject will occur on September 17, 2010 at Kunstraum Niederrostereich in Vienna, Austria.
For the specific con­text of Public School, a monthly pro­gram of talks and events fea­turing artists, dancers, critics, con­ser­va­tors and even graphic designers will approach the issues at core in Performing Memory through the prism of renewed forms of knowl­edge trans­mis­sion and research-sharing. Upcoming ses­sions will fea­ture g.u.i. (graphic and web designers – in November) and the Eco-Musée de la Performance (with Benjamin Seror, artist, and Nicolas Fourgeaud,
critic – in December).

SATURDAY 18: A LOUER # 3 Exhibition open from 9am to 10am, 11am to 12am, 1pm to 2pm, 3pm to 4pm, 5pm to
6pm, 7pm to 8pm.
A LOUER is a mech­a­nism which pur­pose is to acti­vate pro­gram­matic art works. The work, that takes a tex­tual form when it has been cre­ated by its author, is con­sid­ered as a score. Its exe­cu­tion in a mate­rial form con­sti­tutes the ‘acti­va­tion’.
The pro­cess ends by the pro­duc­tion of a doc­u­men­ta­tion.
A LOUER # 3 is a one-day exhi­bi­tion. The choice of the works and their inter­pre­ta­tion depends of this sit­u­a­tion. The exhi­bi­tion con­sists of inter­twined acti­va­tions that take var­ious dura­tions.
A LOUER is a pro­ject imag­ined by Émilie Parendeau
www.alouer-pro­ject.net

SUNDAY 19: ACTIVATIONS OF DISCOURSE IN THE EUROPEAN DANCE SCENE
Program pro­posed by Alice Chauchat, chore­og­ra­pher and co-director of Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers 4 struc­tures for the pro­duc­tion and dis­tri­bu­tion of knowl­edge in dance, using phys­ical prac­tice as well as pub­li­ca­tion as tools for the devel­op­ment of a dis­cur­sive scene

11am – 12am: prac­tical ses­sion with Chauchat’s move­ment prac­tice "col­lec­tive sen­sa­tions"
A group prac­tice based on indi­vidual sen­sa­tions and imag­i­na­tion, in which pos­si­bil­i­ties for the moving body are shared through lan­guage rather than sight. No specific expe­ri­ence is nec­es­sary; bring com­fort­able clothes.

12am – 1pm: dis­cus­sion with Frédéric de Carlo on the col­lec­tive Praticable
Praticable pro­poses a specific model of working together between artists in the field of dance and chore­og­raphy: it is a hor­i­zontal work struc­ture, based on the sharing of body prac­tices, which brings together research, learning pro­cesses, cre­ation, pro­duc­tion and dis­tri­bu­tion, mul­ti­plying cir­cu­la­tions between them. This struc­ture is the basis for the cre­ation of per­for­mances that are signed by one or more par­tic­i­pants of the pro­ject. These per­for­mances are grounded, in one way or another, in the explo­ration of body prac­tices to approach rep­re­sen­ta­tion. Praticable was cre­ated in 2005 by Alice
Chauchat, Frédéric de Carlo, Frédéric Gies, Isabelle Schad and Odile Seitz.

2pm – 4pm: intro­duc­tion to the online plat­form every­bodys (every­bodys­toolbox.net) by Mette
Ingvartsen, including dis­cur­sive games and books pre­sen­ta­tion
The domain every­bodys­toolbox.net is ded­i­cated to dis­tri­bu­tion and cir­cu­la­tion within the per­forming arts.
Everybodys is a toolbox and a game cre­ator, a score con­tainer, a data-base and a library, a pub­li­ca­tion house: a site for dis­tri­bu­tion and for long term inves­ti­ga­tory dis­cus­sions. It is a plat­form for the devel­op­ment of tools and con­tent, for research and per­for­mance, for exchange and desire.
Everybodys is a col­lec­tive effort to develop the dis­courses that exist in the per­forming arts and to create a plat­form where this infor­ma­tion can be accessed by a wider audi­ence than the prac­ti­tioners it involves.

4pm – 5pm: pre­sen­ta­tion by Emma Kim Hagdahl on the Swedish per­for­mance net­work Inpex, including the release of Inpex’s latest Swedish Dance History International Performance Exchange (INPEX) is a Sweden based oper­a­tion working for expanded inter­na­tional exchange in per­forming arts. INPEX empha­sizes the impor­tance of dif­fer­en­ti­ated inter­na­tional net­works, in par­tic­ular knowl­edge inten­sive pro­cesses, edu­ca­tion and peer-to-peer exchange. INPEX works for cre­ators and makers, inde­pen­dent of fes­ti­vals and venues, in order to strengthen the pro­duc­tive enti­ties in per­forming. Inpex is a pro­ducing agency whose aim is to expand prac­tice and theory of the field.

SATURDAY 25 : THE WORKERS PUNK ART SCHOOL BERLIN
2pm – 4:30pm: screening pro­gram and per­for­ma­tive reading by the Workers Punk Art School Berlin
Workers Punk Art School is a tem­po­rary pro­ject. It appro­pri­ates its name in appre­ci­a­tion of the Workers Punk University Ljubljana.
The ini­tia­tive is grounded in cur­rent protest move­ments at the Berlin University of the Arts.
In November 2009, the school started the self-orga­nized sem­inar „Aesthetics of Resistance“, taking as its point of depar­ture Peter Weiss’ sem­inal novel by the same name about the rela­tion of pol­i­tics and art in the 20th cen­tury, posing the ques­tion of con­tem­po­rary art edu­ca­tion in the con­text of the "col­lec­tive ped­a­gogies" pro­posed by Weiss. The dis­cus­sion of ques­tions related to edu­ca­tional policy and notions of artistic labor was fur­ther pur­sued in a series of video works that will be screened along with a reading of pas­sages from Peter Weiss’ novel.

SUNDAY 26 : COMMUNISM’S AFTERLIVES THE PUBLIC SCHOOL
2pm – 4:30pm: sem­inar Communism’s after­lives organ­ised by Elena Sorokina et Nataša Petrešin-
Bachelez. Participants to be con­firmed. This sem­inar will focus on the cinema, notably on sev­eral films from the Soviet 60s and their recep­tion in con­tem­po­rary art pro­jects.
Through a series of polemic dia­logues, we would like to trace dif­ferent gen­er­a­tions of intel­lec­tuals (artists, cura­tors, philoso­phers, art his­to­rians) from the former East and West of Europe that deal with "shades of red", the after­lives of Communism and its (un) expected turning points in its most recent philo­soph­ical and artistic recep­tion fol­lowing the finan­cial and, more gen­er­ally, post-Fordist crisis.
After the col­lapse of the Soviet block, com­mu­nism as idea, image or problem has been regarded as "out­moded, absurd, deplorable or crim­inal, depending on the case". Today, it is often pre­sented by the main­stream media as a paren­thesis of his­tory, an aber­ra­tion of the 20th cen­tury, as "a com­pletely for­gotten word, only to be iden­ti­fied with a lost expe­ri­ence".
Although the com­mu­nist hypotheses of pre­vious eras may no longer be valid, their his­to­ries, nar­ra­tives and key notions have never ceased to spark atten­tion and inform recent dis­cus­sions such as the com­munal versus the common, and mate­rial versus imma­te­rial prop­erty, to name just a few. Perceived from a greater dis­tance today, com­mu­nism has reemerged as a topic for inves­ti­ga­tion in artistic and exhi­bi­tion pro­duc­tion, that reflects it in diverse ways, addressing the rel­e­vance of the term today or inviting provoca­tive com­par­isons with the pre­sent.

Elena Sorokina and Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez will mod­erate and dis­cuss sev­eral recent pro­jects, focusing on some sur­pris­ingly com­mu­nist episodes in the his­tory of Western modern art.

Elena Sorokina is Paris/Brussels based curator and critic. Her upcoming show is Etats de l’Artifice at the Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 2010. Her recent pro­jects include "Petroliana" at the Moscow Biennial 2007; "Laws of Relativity" at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy; "On Traders’ Dilemmas" at YBCA, San Francisco, 2008; “Scènes Centrales" at Tri Postal, Lille, 2009.

Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez is a curator and critic based in Paris and Ljubljana. She is a Ph.D. can­di­date at the EHESS in Paris where she also runs a sem­inar on con­tem­po­rary artistic prac­tices with Patricia Falguieres, Elisabeth Lebovici, and Hans Ulrich Obrist. She is also codi­rector of Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers.

Guillaume Désanges will pre­sent his pro­ject “Les Vigiles, les menteurs, les rêveurs” (now shown at the Centre d’Art le Plateau-FRAC, Ile-de-France, Paris), in which he con­fronts con­tem­po­rary ways of wit­nessing events with a range of his­tor­i­cally engaged art prac­tices, such as the works orig­i­nated within the French socialist realism or the Medvedkine groups’ work.

Guillaume Désanges is a free-lance curator and art critic, co-founder of Work Method, a Paris based agency for artistic pro­jects. Member of the edi­to­rial board of Trouble, he col­lab­o­rates with the magazines Exit Express and Exit Book (Madrid). He coor­di­nated the artistic pro­jects of Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers (2001-2007). In 2007-2008, he is invited curator at Centre d’Art Contemporain La Tôlerie. In 2009-2011, he is invited curator at centre d’art le Plateau Frac Ile-de-France, Paris, for a 2 years pro­gram­ma­tion.

Martha Kirsenbaum’s pro­poses a glimpse upon young polish cre­ators, ques­tioning the pres­ence or absence of a com­mu­nist her­itage in polish emerging artists’ works and their response abroad, par­tic­u­larly in the United States.

Martha Kirszenbaum is the cur­rent curator-in-res­i­dence at the Center for Contemporary Art in Warsaw (Poland). She has pre­vi­ously assisted the chief curator of the Photography Department at Centre Pompidou in Paris, and worked as research assis­tant at the New Museum in New York. As an inde­pen­dent curator, Martha Kirszenbaum has orga­nized numerous exhi­bi­tions, including NineteenEightyFour, recently pre­sented at the Austrian Cultural Forum in New York.

The Soviet fil­mog­raphy, lit­er­a­ture and cer­tain philo­soph­ical schools of the 60-s, rein­ter­preting the rev­o­lu­tionary genealogy and rereading Marxist theory after Stalinism, will be at the center of Keti Chukhrov’s anal­ysis of the de-alien­ation and Metanoya dimen­sions of “the com­mu­nist” in art.

Keti Chukhrov is an art the­o­rist and philoso­pher, PhD in com­par­a­tive lit­er­a­ture, post-doc­toral fellow of Moscow Philosophy Institute of Academy of Sciences, editor of Logos-Altera Publishers; writer for Moscow Art Magazine; and author of numerous pub­li­ca­tions in var­ious Russian and for­eign edi­tions most recently in the cat­a­logs of the Istanbul Biennial 2009, Gender Check. Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe, 2009 and the ongoing Former West pro­ject.

This sem­inar aims at pre­senting var­ious works that recast ideas related to com­mu­nism and revisit it as a com­plex and diverse arena of polit­ical and aes­thetic atti­tudes, which varied between nations, com­mu­ni­ties and his­tor­ical periods. By no means does the sem­inar intends to take a nos­talgic tour through the past decades, but rather seeks to address the topic through con­crete art and exhi­bi­tion pro­jects real­ized recently. All of them are trying to decon­struct the idea of mono­lith, still very pre­sent in today’s recep­tion, and to recu­perate var­ious episodes, sto­ries and notably, the "com­mu­nist apoc­rypha" - texts, music, visual pro­duc­tion - which have never been part of the estab­lished ide­o­log­ical canon, and whose intel­lec­tual pat­terns shed new light on what the con­tem­po­rary uses of the notion of com­mu­nism might be.
Instead of treating com­mu­nism as pure polit­ical abstrac­tion, the pro­jects pre­sented by the sem­inar deal with con­cepts, events and/or par­tic­ular per­son­al­i­ties related to com­mu­nism and its his­tory which have sur­vived the Bildersturm of there­cent past and can be artis­ti­cally reac­ti­vated.