Salon Time is on your side
@ Bains Connective!!! (GC Ten Weyngaert, Bondgenotenstraat 54 rue des Alliés, 1190 Brussels) 10 March 2011, 7pm (soup) / 8pm (start salon). Free entrance.
In the thematics “-18/+65 Politics of the An-Aged” at Bains Connective, artists and researchers develop in the course of two months artistic practices with a participatory dimension in a local social context. The focus on ‘non-productive’ ages yields several questions regarding time. Who has time and who spends it? In what ways? How can one ‘author’ one’s time within the ‘authorized’ time alotted by our society? Can one actually ‘produce’ meaningful time? What about free time, quality time, collective time, public time, alternative time, marginal time, losing time, wasting time? Transgression, loitering, procrastination? Volunteer’s work and the right to useful unemployment? How do artistic practices put these issues in perspective?
Guest speakers: Agency, Sarah Vanhee and Thematics artists: Marthe Van Dessel, Wendy Van Wynsberghe, Adrian Fisher and Luna Montenegro Concept: Lilia Mestre, Jeroen Peeters, Kristien Van den Brande Production: Sarma Co-production: Bains Connective With the support of WorkSpaceBrussels and Vlaamse Gemeenschapscommissie
Bios and links
Agency is the generic name of a Brussels-based agency that was established in 1992 by Kobe Matthys. Agency constitutes a growing “list of things” that resist the binary division between culture and nature, and consequently between expressions and ideas, creations and facts, subjects and objects, humans and non-humans, originality and banality, individuals and collectives, etc... These things are mainly derived from juridical processes, lawsuits, cases, controversies, affairs and so forth around intellectual property (copyrights, patents, trade marks, etc...). The concept of property relies upon the assumption of the division between culture and nature. Each thing on the list invokes the moment of hesitation in terms of this division. Agency calls things forth from it’s list via varying “assemblies” inside exhibitions, performances, publications, etc... Each assembly explores in a topological way a different aspect of the performative consequences of the apparatus of intellectual property for an ecology of art practices. For Assembly (Time is on my side), Agency will call a thing forth, speculating on the question: How to include “user generated content” in art practices? How are user uploaded content of media like Flickr, Facebook, MySpace, etc... taken into consideration by copyright law?
Sarah Vanhee was born in Belgium (1980) and currently lives in Amsterdam and Brussels. In her work she mixes product with process, theatre and visual arts with literature, fiction with reality. She has written various theatre texts, which she also staged herself and published Untranslatables - a guide to translingual dialogue (Onomatopee, 2009, in co-operation with E. Marchesini, C. Schwarz, Y. De los Bueis). She recently realized the C-project which resulted in the book The miraculous life of Claire C. Some years ago, Sarah Vanhee found an unfinished manuscript by Guillaume Maguire in which the main character is the insecure, unheroic, somewhat lost Claire C. Fascinated by this character, she decided that her story should not be lost. In The C-Project, Sarah Vanhee finished Maguire's novel by becomming Claire and going in search of the other characters from the book in Amsterdam. This enabled her to find the missing part of Claire's identity, along with the rest of the story. Through various channels, she came into contact with people who considered themselves potential characters in a novel. The book was then written on the basis of their meetings with Claire.
Adrian Fisher & Luna Montenegro: http://mmmmm.org.uk/
Marthe Van Dessel: http://www.ooooo.be/
Wendy van Wynsberghe: http://constantvzw.org/site/