The Saturday Sessions

On Saturday at 3pm

A pro­gram of weekly Saturday after­noon talks, public events and work­shops, with scholars and artists exploring the issues at stake in “The Secession Sessions” beyond the ques­tion of Abkhazia per se.

Technical means: Khiasma (www.khi­asma.net)
Find all the Saturday Sessions on the radio web R22-Grand Paris (www.r22.fr)

Session 1

January 18 2014

Improbable Abkhazia*
A con­ver­sa­tion between Maxim Gvinjia & Leon Colm

Max and Leon met in 2000. Max was working at the Foreign Ministry of self-declared Abkhazia, while Leon was a uni­ver­sity lec­turer, inter­ested in war and sep­a­ratism. They spent the summer together, traipsing throughout Abkhazia, dis­cussing state­hood, doing a lot of swim­ming and becoming friends. A few years later, they met again, this time sit­ting across from each other at nego­ti­ating tables in Geneva. Maxim had risen through the ranks of the Foreign Ministry, while Leon was working in var­ious inter­na­tional organ­i­sa­tions for the res­o­lu­tion of the con­flict between Abkhazia and Georgia. Max even­tu­ally became the Foreign Minister of Abkhazia, and Leon became a senior advisor to an inter­na­tional organ­i­sa­tion dealing with con­flicts in the former Soviet Union. For the Saturday Sessions, a con­ver­sa­tion between Max and Leon will revisit History—the col­lapse of the USSR, the rise of sep­a­ratist States—and a his­tory, the tale of two men, of two friends. A small story in the bigger story. Today, nei­ther Max nor Leon offi­cially work for or on Abkhazia. What remains after so many years of rep­re­sen­ta­tion and offi­cialdom?

Maxim Gvinjia is the former Minister of Foreign Affairs of Abkhazia. Before he was appointed on February 26th 2010 by the gov­ern­ment of Sergueï Bagapsh, Maxim Gvinjia had served as Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs since March the 1st 2004. Maxim Gvinjia was born on March 13th 1976 in Sukhumi, USSR. In 1998, he grad­u­ated from the Gorlovsky State Institute for Foreign Languages in Ukraine.

Leon Colm
With a doc­torate from Oxford University, he has trav­elled through, and written about the de facto states that resulted from the break-up of the former Soviet Union, both as a scholar and as a nego­tiator for sev­eral inter­na­tional organ­i­sa­tions. He has taught at Oxford University and Kings College, London, and was a Research Fellow at St Antony’s College and the Royal Institute of International Affairs. Author of a number of books in English on European secu­rity and on con­flicts, he is also the author of an essay in French, Improbable Abkhazia (Éditions Autrement, 2009).

*this event will be in english

Session 2

January 25 2014

Identity Ploy and Dangerous Fictions
A work­shop hosted by the journal Vacarme

No one knows for sure what "iden­tity" means, but all minori­ties most def­i­nitely need to fic­tion­alize iden­ti­ties for them­selves. To fic­tion­alize is both to let the cat out of the bag and to hide, to resist the dom­i­nant order and accept its game, but to play it dif­fer­ently. Nevertheless when the iden­tity trick becomes a national pro­ject and a desire of the State, it is con­tin­u­ally at risk of falling into vio­lent or sad re-ter­ri­to­ri­al­iza­tions. In response to the invi­ta­tion by the “Se­ces­sion Sessions”, Vacarme offers to hold a fic­ti­tious edi­to­rial board meeting with the audi­ence in order to reflect upon the pos­sible artic­u­la­tions between its specific issues of inter­ests: fic­tions, pol­i­tics of eman­ci­pa­tion, the rela­tion to the State and the rise of European fas­cisms.

Vacarme is a quar­terly journal pub­lished on paper and extended online, which car­ries out a reflec­tion at the cross­roads of polit­ical com­mit­ment, artistic cre­ation and research, since 1997.

A will to decom­part­men­talise knowl­edge

Vacarme is the result of an encounter between indi­vid­uals engaged in var­ious social move­ments—in­cluding the fight against AIDS and the pro­tec­tion of undoc­u­mented res­i­dents—and their desire to con­front what they were learning about the world from their polit­ical expe­ri­ence to the knowl­edge they were forging in their respec­tive work as researchers, teachers, writers, ther­a­pists or artists. They wanted Vacarme to be a place of exchange between activist, intel­lec­tual and artistic net­works, a space that escapes the tra­di­tional sep­a­ra­tion between prac­tice and knowl­edge, pol­i­tics and art; between the urgency to act and the need to think.

Session 3

February 1st 2014

State Desire*
A sem­inar by Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez & Elena Sorokina

An inter­na­tional law, the rea­sons for non-inde­pen­dent enti­ties to aspire to state­hood are enu­mer­ated as fol­lows: the notion of sovereignty and the desire for inde­pen­dence and self-deter­mi­na­tion are the aspi­ra­tions which come first; the pos­si­bility of joining inter­na­tional orga­ni­za­tions only open to inde­pen­dent states; and the prospect of being involved in for­eign affairs and the right to use force in self-defence are equally impor­tant. But what fuels these desires, what kind of affects are involved, how are they gen­er­ated and expressed? Collectively pro­duced, the strife for recog­ni­tion and sovereignty is a spe­cial kind of affect, usu­ally clashing against the strict inter­na­tional reg­u­la­tions and laws. The speakers invited will pre­sent their reflec­tions and insights into a range of topics, from visual expres­sion to fic­tional (re-)con­struc­tion, including case studies from dif­ferent areas of the world. At the end of the sem­inar, Björk’s music video Declare Independence, will be pro­jected and ana­lyzed.

Elena Sorokina is a Russian-born, Paris based curator and art his­to­rian, alumna of the Whitney Museum of American Art ISP in New York. She recently co-orga­nized "Spaces of Exception" a spe­cial pro­ject for the Moscow Biennal, the sym­po­sium "What is a post­colo­nial exhi­bi­tion?", a col­lab­o­ra­tive pro­ject of SMBA/Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and the Stedelijk Museum. She pub­lished in numerous cat­a­logs, and has been writing for Artforum, Flash Art, Cabinett Magazine, Manifesta Journal, Moscow Art Magazine, and other pub­li­ca­tions.

Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez is a curator and critic based in Paris and Ljubljana. She co-runs a sem­inar on con­tem­po­rary artistic prac­tices with Patricia Falguières, Élisabeth Lebovici. She was also co-director of Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers from 2010 to 2012. In 2013 she was the curator of U3, the art Triennale of Contemporary Art in Slovenia, at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Ljubljana. Since 2011, she is the editor of Manifesta Journal. Around Curatorial Practices. In 2014, she is the invited curator for the Satellite pro­gram at Jeu de Paume, Paris.

Biography of the par­tic­i­pants:

Keti Chukhrov is an asso­ciate pro­fessor at the Department of Art Theory and Cultural Studies at the Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow. She has authored numerous texts on art theory, cul­ture, pol­i­tics, and phi­los­ophy, which have appeared in peri­od­i­cals including: Afterall, Artforum, Brumaria, doc­u­menta magazine, e-flux journal, New Literary Review, and Springerin. Her books include: “To Be – To Perform. Theatre” in Philosophical Criticism of Art (2011); Pound & £ (1999), and two vol­umes of dra­matic poetry: Just Humans (2010) and War of Quantities (2004). Chukhrov’s latest per­for­mances include Communion and Elpida, and The Greeks, both 2010. She has recently per­formed her dra­matic ora­torio Afgan Kuzminki in the Fourth Moscow Biennale (2011); 1st Kyiv Biennale (2012); Wiener Festwochen in Vienna (2013); and Bergen Biennial (2013). Chukhrov lives and works in Moscow.

Dean Inkster cur­rently teaches art his­tory and theory at the École Supérieure d’Art et Design Grenoble - Valence. Over the past three years has co-curated exhi­bi­tions on the English com­poser Cornelius Cardew, "Cornelius & the Freedom of Listening" and the North American artist Christopher D’Arcangelo, "Anarchism Without Adjectives: On the Work of Christopher D’Arcangelo (1955-1978)", that have been shown in Europe and North America. Both exhi­bi­tions were first shown in France at the CAC Brétigny.

Caecilia Tripp’s work of filmic instal­la­tion, per­for­mance and pho­tog­raphy is entan­gled with a poetic mind in par­tic­i­pa­tory forms of freedom and the social imag­i­nary as a space of trans­gres­sion of social as well as cul­tural bound­aries. Her work has been shown inter­na­tion­ally in museum venues such as PS1/MOMA (New York / USA), Museum of Modern Art (Paris / France) De Appel (Amsterdam / Netherlands), Roomade (Bruxelles / Belgium), Center of Contemporary Arts (New Orleans / USA), 7th Gwangju Biennale 2008 (Gwangju / South Korea), Clark House Initiative (Bombay, India). The Making Of Americans (2004) received an award for the best exper­i­mental film at Cinema Paradise (Hawai / USA) and was shown at Mostra 61 Venice. She is also part of the edi­to­rial team of Afrikadaa Magazine.

*this event will be in english

Session 4

February 8 2014

The Nitty Gritty of the State
A lec­ture by Fabien Jobard

The State, as we say, is the monopoly of vio­lence. The state, it seems, is pri­marily the army, the police, and prison. But taking a closer look, the State is above all an edi­fice made of papers. It draws its legit­i­macy from a written Constitution, and not any­more from cus­tomary or divine law. This doc­u­ment, and the seals that attest it, are kept pre­cisely by the same min­istry that man­ages sen­tences and prisons. The State and its agents dis­pose of an authority, of a power that is first and fore­most made of paper.
From a research we con­ducted in Paris on iden­tity checks, this very par­tic­ular act which entails the iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of indi­vid­uals thanks to their papers by depos­i­tory agents of the public authority, we offer to enlighten the estab­lish­ment of the State grasped in History and the con­sis­tency of papers that link indi­vid­uals to public authority. Having papers. Having one’s papers. Losing one’s papers. Presenting them. Is this really how we make the State?

Fabien Jobard is a research director at the CNRS. He works on the police soci­ology, crim­inal law and col­lec­tive vio­lence. In 2009, with René Levy and John Lamberth, he car­ried out an inves­ti­ga­tion on iden­tity checks that opened a new space for dis­cus­sion around the pre­ven­tive con­trol of iden­tity and the poten­tial con­se­quences of these con­trols. He recently pub­lished, in the journal Critique, a crit­ical review, on Pierre Bourdieu’s lessons, On the State and par­tic­i­pates in pro­ject P. Le Galès and Demond King, Restructuring European States (CNRS / U. Oxford).

Session 5

February 15 2014

The Bergen Sessions*
Live broad­cast from Bergen Kunsthall

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/plat­form-bergen-kun­sthall

http://www.kun­sthall.no/

*this event will be in english

Session 6

February 22 2014

The Secession Sessions is WithOut Wall
An inter­ven­tion of the WithOut Wall col­lec­tive (Georgia)

Is the con­sti­tu­tion of a new State the only path to the empow­er­ment and eman­ci­pa­tion of a people? Does the recog­ni­tion and nur­turing of a cul­ture and folk tra­di­tion need the model of a rep­re­sen­ta­tive State? What does it mean to adopt a specific cul­tural stand, espe­cially in one of the most eth­ni­cally diverse and com­plex regions in the world such as Caucasus?
“The Secession Sessions” bring another con­crete but imma­te­ri­al­ized insti­tu­tion from Caucasus: the TCCA WithOut Wall based in Tbilisi. This struc­ture­less and artist-run pro­ject, which squats a plot of land in the out­skirts of the Georgian cap­ital, has devel­oped alter­na­tive artistic activ­i­ties, far from ever fighting for the cel­e­bra­tion of a cul­tural iden­tity per se and for the artistic poli­cies sup­ported by the State of Georgia.

Founded in 2011 by artist Gela Patashuri, the WithOut Wall pro­ject is con­sti­tuted by artists Giorgi Kobiashvili, Eduard Oganov, Mari Tipukhian, Sergo Zhornitski, Tamar Mdivani. WithOut Wall is a struc­ture­less and home­less pro­ject that mainly takes place on a small plot of land near Tbilisi pur­chased in 2006 by curator Daniel Baumann to build the Tbilisi Center for Contemporary Art (TCCA). Facing the lack of oppor­tu­ni­ties avail­able for young artists in Tbilisi, WithOut Wall was estab­lished in order to offer an open space for research, for pro­duc­tion and for the, devel­op­ment of exper­i­mental cre­ative pro­cesses and dis­cus­sions. When you have no other alter­na­tives, you just do what you want to do.

This ses­sion was organ­ised in the form of a work­shop with stu­dents from EESA Bretagne, in col­lab­o­ra­tion with the research pro­gram "Géographies vari­ables" directed by Julie Morel. This pro­gram is sup­ported by the Scientific Council of the art research (MC).

Session 7

March 1 2014

An Epistolary Secession
Morad Montazami & Eric Baudelaire

Paris, November 30th 2013

Dear Eric,

Here is what your film makes me think of. In the world of RAM and down­loading, it’s not writing that went out of fashion. Actually, we may prob­ably have never written as much, as a net­work civil­i­sa­tion of course, but espe­cially as a hyper-bureau­cra­tised one. Maybe without knowing we even devel­oped cer­tain writing reflexes worthy of the most monop­o­listic and author­i­tarian state struc­tures (from the imper­a­tive of vis­i­bility to widespread surveil­lance). Therefore, it is in my opinion edi­fying that you bring back into play ges­tures that are tra­di­tion­ally asso­ci­ated with epis­to­lary exchanges, par­tic­u­larly in order to ques­tion our con­cep­tions of the State. The wait, the des­ti­na­tion and ulti­mately the “body/trace” of the writing (or the voice) con­tain an archaic power that thwarts the fan­tasy of ubiq­uity con­trol­ling our cur­rent modes of com­mu­ni­ca­tion. Neo-exis­ten­tial ques­tions embodied by the being of the writer—are we really where we write, where we are des­tined, or nei­ther one nor the other, in the very trace we leave for the future reader to deci­pher?—lead us to fore­bode the forms of com­mu­nion or union to come. The com­mu­ni­ca­tion pen­dulum seems to be reversing and the bureau­cra­ti­za­tion of our lives is no longer inevitable. Do you think we could dis­cuss this?

Yours,
Morad

Morad Montazami is an his­to­rian of modern and con­tem­po­rary art. He is the author of sev­eral arti­cles on the works of many artists, among them Eric Baudelaire. He is also editor of the magazine Zamân (Texts, images & doc­u­ments).

Session 8

March 8 2014

Reinventing the State?
A con­ver­sa­tion between Alain Badiou & Pierre Zaoui

WARNING Due to a last minute change, Alain Badiou will not be pre­sent tomorrow at Bétonsalon. Please accept our apolo­gies.

Around Alain Badiou ideas, Pierre Zaoui will open the dis­cus­sion with the audi­ence on the ques­tion on the rein­ven­tion of the State and of the new col­lec­tives.

The dis­cus­sion Reinventing the State? between Alain Badiou and Pierre Zaoui is post­poned. We will keep you informed of the date very soon.

Thank you for your under­standing and hope many tomorrow for the last day of the exhi­bi­tion and the last ses­sion on Saturday

Pierre Zaoui teaches phi­los­ophy at the University Paris Diderot –Paris 7. Amongst others, he is the author of Spinoza, la déci­sion de soi (Bayard, 2008) and of La traversée des catas­tro­phes (Seuil, 2010). Recently, he col­lab­o­rated on the Dictionnaire poli­tique à l’usage des gou­vernés (Under the direc­tion of Fabienne Brugère and Guillaume le Blanc, Bayard, 2012)

To go fur­ther

In rela­tion with "The Secession Sessions" Political phi­los­ophy lessons by Seloua Luste Boulbina, open to the public

Friday, January 31 / 4pm-6pm The State between imag­i­nary/ies and reality/ies -
State "à la carte"

Friday, February 7 / 2pm-4pm The State between imag­i­nary/ies and reality/ies -
The Ghost of the State

Seloua Luste Boulbina teaches at CPGE. She is the pro­gram director at the International College of Philosophy (Paris) and asso­ciate researcher (HDR) at LCSP, University Paris-Diderot - Paris 7. She is inter­ested mainly in colo­nial and post­colo­nial ques­tions. She most notably pub­lished Le singe de Kafka et autres propos sur les colonies (Sens Public, 2008), and les Arabes peu­vent-ils parler? (Blackjack,2011). She directed Réflexions sur la post­colonie (Rue Descartes, 2007), Un monde en noir et blanc (Sens Public, 2009), Monde arabe : Rêves, révoltes, révo­lu­tions (Lignes, 2011), Décoloniser les savoirs (Mouvement, 2012) and La Migration des Idées (Rue Descartes, 2013).