characters in a forest telling stories musically
current research
characters in a forest telling stories musically is a research project and public program which takes the musical form of
fugue as a metaphor and example for polyphonic curating, and as a potential paradigm for sensing our entangled nature
cultures.
This project proposes that the rural is a crucial contemporary site for global change. Rem Koolhaas argues that the
“countryside is now the frontline of transformation… more volatile than the most accelerated city”, contradicting the oftheld notion of the countryside as a space that is both inactive and immune from the forces of global capitalism and
technocracy. Drawing on Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s understanding of multinatural perspectivism and Anna L. Tsing’s
notion of salvage accumulation, characters in a forest telling stories musically engages with the intertwined cultures of
plants and humans, and investigates means by which polyphony can be used as a paradigm for understanding and
articulating these nature cultures, and the creative practices produced in response to this dynamic. More broadly, it aims to
research and propose novel methods for re-articulating the relations of living things.
This examination looks at the means through which humans engage with plants via the technologies and logics of supply
chains, resource extraction, regulation, and monoculture, the historical development of the fields of taxonomy, botany and
botanical illustration, and the nascent study of plant intelligence, in juxtaposition to the uniqueness of plants’ “sessile life
style”, of living literally rooted in place.
The project arose out of a fascination with the resource of wild-grown food available to the public in Scandinavia due to
the regulation of allemannsrett, often translated as “everyman’s right” or alternatively, “freedom to roam”. This law outlines
the public right to private (uncultivated) land, but also allows for the public right to much of the wild-grown food on
private land (laws vary slightly across jurisdictions and certain foods are excluded). In Sweden and Finland, wild
blueberries are the most common, most present wild plant; they are estimated to cover close to 20% of each nation’s
territory. Strangely, this law which outlines a notion of commoning resources, now facilitates private companies’ profit
through their harvesting of berries on both public and privately-held land.
Planned programming 2017:
Hordaland Kunstsenter, Bergen
Small Projects, Tromsø
Konsthall C, Stockholm
Related past activities:
“Blueberries, migration, forest networks & commodity chains”, performance lecture, Galleria Sinne, Helsinki, August 2015
“A talk in search of some ideas for the 22nd century”, lecture, Hordaland Kunstsenter, Bergen, Norway, November 2014
Performance lecture, Galleria Sinne, Helsinki, FI, August 21, 2015
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How to float while touching the floor
essay commissioned by artist belit sag, February 2016
My sense is that our conversation… perhaps in its entirety, has been insistently gesturing toward the
question – and the affective labor – of critical agency, in its entwinement with multiple forms of doing,
undoing, being undone, and becoming, as well as multiple forms of giving and giving up. [1]
A sentence seems to reach something she has troubled to describe. It appeared, meeting her gaze, backlit from the glow of
the laptop screen. It’s an odd habit, really; when she finds herself struggling, a lack of clarity about what to do, or how to
persist, she reaches for reading material, preferably something theoretical and intolerably challenging to read. Perhaps it
was precisely this intolerability that met her melancholia squarely, proving itself an adroit adversary.
***
She is sitting with her back against the wall, trying to get comfortable. It started pouring as she was walking here
and she got caught in it; her jacket soaked through. It seems it’s almost always raining here. The room is small, but bright.
Around its periphery sits rows of benches and chairs. Murmurs, quiet conversations and a jostling of chairs, bags, and
notebooks; then a clear voice surfaces over the rustling, an introduction for the day’s activities. Many hours later she will
still be sitting here, albeit with some intermissions for coffee. Her mind wanders, and then returns, to a sentence hanging
in the air, it’s moment of enunciation already passed – there is a political weight still held by materiality, and by the
normative processes of production and circulation. The speaker picks up where she left off: we must go through a process
of devaluation; dismantle concepts of artistic value and autonomy.[2] Round and round. The ideas circle, never quite
touching the floor, they prefer to float and hover. But these well-articulated theoretical arguments seem to so often get
sidetracked en route to the practicalities, disappearing down an abstract path.
What she would like to know is how do we sustain ourselves if we do not produce? It reminds her of an
unexpected quip in an essay by the curator Mai Abu ElDahab: “I want to be able to pay my rent. I want to eat a meal in a
restaurant, buy books and a new pair of boots from time to time, and rent a small place near the sea in some Mediterranean
village during summer holidays every once in a while… a lower-middle-class life (the European version).”[3] And how
could one go about having such a life without transfiguring your cognitive capacities into capital? She wonders about lived
behavior and actions: how can one can go about refusing, what kind of habits could she install in her life that would allow
her to subsist and at the same time, rebuff? Work and (seeming) non-work seem to encompass all time and activity. We
work, and then when we are finished working, we escape our boredom by doing some work for social media companies on
our phones. It is a sort of ceaseless habitual creep, a perpetually hybridizing existence, wherein a dinner with the very same
people could be an opportunity to build more professional networks or an evening spent with friends. But of course, it is
both at the same time – the life of the precarious self-censoring, self-actualizing, creative class, freelance worker par
excellence. But where in any of this is a refusal? There are most likely multiple forms of giving and giving up indeed.
And yet, with a certain distance, the gaze adjusts. It’s as though once we can see the height of the building, a
concomitant clarity arrives: if it is far enough from our corporeal frame, we can point, we can identify. There is the
problem we say, knowing all the while that we are complicit, we have aided and abetted all along. And so, contemporary art
stays busy with keeping the social critique in the art on the walls, while the back of the house runs like any good capitalist
hierarchy should, extracting surplus value and monetizing it for the benefit of those closest to the apex of the pyramid.
***
Her head nods sharply down, jolting her awake. The room is dark, illuminated only by the street lamp glinting
through the rain-spattered window. She hears the patter of rain on the roof. She grasps in the dark for her tote bag on the
floor, and instead she finds water, a good few inches before her hand touches the rough-hewn wood under the wet. Her bag
has drifted a few feet over, soaked through, her phone at the bottom, now a soggy, useless, electronic hulk. It takes a
moment for her to focus in the dark; the room is empty except her. Other than the arm that had ventured out groping for
her bag, she is curiously dry. She grips the bag close to her before sliding her feet round in front of her; the water swamps
them, seeping into her shoes. Her legs stumble a bit before swishing through the swell toward the door. She catches her
balance in the doorway, steadying herself, before hurriedly sliding down the slippery stairwell. She reaches the front door,
twists the handle and the door sways opens easily, a gush of water coming with her. Bewildered, she abandons the open
door and drifts out onto the street, into the beating rain.
***
“The pictures will not go away,” Susan Sontag says. “That is the nature of the digital world in which we live”. [4]
She is speaking of a group of images obtained by Amnesty International and the Associated Press in 2003, documenting
the torture of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers. A quick Google search confirms that the pictures do not go away, but
an object’s presence does not equate to its visibility. Sontag argues that images relay affect; this is their capacity. But they
still require interpretation, a linguistic apparatus to render them intelligible. Yet here, in this essay, Regarding The Torture
of Others—published a few months after these images were made public—Sontag finds her faith in narrative waning.
Words, she says, are easy to disguise and forget, “in our age of infinite digital self-reproduction and self-dissemination” –
photographs were required to make it “real”. [5] But are images not also easy to hide? Could they not just as easily accrue as
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digital detritus in this infinite archive of self-reproduction? Despite the incredible ease of editing and manipulating them,
do images still somehow remain more real, less refutable than narrative?
Images hold an anticipatory capacity, a bound-up potential as non-empirical, empathetic records of human life,
despite their seemingly empirical quality. Of course snapshots and selfies most often attempt to show us not so much as
who we are, but as how we would like to be seen. But this preening and awkward perfomativity seems to only make us
more human once captured in the frame. And in their past-ness, images divulge their inherent melancholia, revealing a
moment of what has been. [6] Perhaps it is this quality that leaves a visual trace, a ghosting. Judith Butler argues that the
capacity for haunting arises from the photograph’s linkage with this peculiar grammatical tense, both anticipating and
performing the grievability of a life. [7] And it is this pathos of the image that allows us to be haunted by the suffering of
others:
“Someone will have lived” is spoken within a present, but it refers to a time and a loss to come. Thus the
anticipation of the past underwrites the photograph’s distinctive capacity to establish grievability as a
precondition of a knowable human life – to be haunted is precisely to apprehend that life before precisely
knowing it. [8]
Butler argues further that it is precisely the image’s contemporary condition of circulation that allows it to break its frame,
to always be entering and visiting new contexts, new frames. It is through this framing that normative conditions
determine not just what is visible, but how we even conceive of visibility; the act of framing is always an operation of
power, delimiting “the sphere of appearance itself”. [9] The very notions of personhood are null without relation to a frame.
But at the same time, the heterogeneity of these norms and their performativity forecloses their capacity. They cannot
determine, but their omnipresence delimits the view, setting a context. Certainly this concern cannot be overstated. If the
production of visual and narrative culture is to matter, in the midst of the growing deluge of the digital flotsam engulfing
us, it will be precisely because of the critical agency of its makers, dragging the frame—in all its heterogeneity—over and
over again, into view.
1. Judith Butler and Athena Anthanasiou, Dispossession: The Performative in the Political, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013, 193.
2. These ideas are paraphrased from a lecture by Andrea Phillips, as part of the Commoning Forum Series, “Forum II: Commoning Art
Organization”, at Casco – Office for Art, Design and Theory, Utrecht.
3. Mai Abu ElDahab, “You Play Every Time You Rehearse”, in A Needle Walks into a Haystack, London: Liverpool Biennial and Koenig
Books, 2014. 60.
4. Susan Sontag, “Regarding The Torture of Others,” New York Times, May 23, 2004,
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/23/magazine/regarding-the-torture-of-others.html
5. ibid.
6. Roland Barthes, Camera Ludica: Reflections on Photography, London: Vintage, 2000, 85.
7. Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?, London: Verso, 2009, 98.
8. ibid.
9. ibid, 1.
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Neither here nor there, neither fish nor fowl
co-curated with Antonia Lotz
Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen, DE April 22 – June 14, 2015
and Schloss Ringenberg, Hamminkeln, DE, May 31 – July 12, 2015
It’s too early for her taste and she is in the shower. She glances down at a bottle of upmarket shower gel—organic rice
milk & cherry blossom—and reads:
Celebrate each day as a new beginning.
The object is speaking perhaps. But its attempt at pithy wisdom cum marketing ploy seems to her only sad. Instead of
celebrating, she daydreams of sleep. She pauses on something she had just read: a call for a new paradigm of exhaustion
within social life.1 She finds herself staring at the bottle again. It seems to her that objects aren’t speaking with a
language of information or manufactured wisdom. Or at least not the objects that interested her. Instead they seemed to
express a sensibility that couldn’t be captured via explanation or information.
The press of cognitive labor remained. The shower off, she opens her laptop and starts typing. This is what will
happen: (1) there will be two exhibitions; (2) they will overlap in time and space. The exhibitions will begin on 23
April 2015 at the Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Siegen, and end on 12 July 2015 at Schloss Ringengberg in
Hamminkeln. The two exhibitions express a desire to embrace our inability to grasp something in its entirety and to
find joy in the redundant and banal. It is an attempt to escape from a rational transfer of information, and inhabit a
non-language of withdrawal and refusal.
1
Franco Bifo Berardi, The Uprising, (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2012), 68.
***
Exhibition 1: Bernd & Hilla Becher, Simone Forti, Hans Haacke, Hans Hartung, Candida Höfer, Nancy Holt, Joan Jonas,
Jochen Lempert, Bruce Nauman, Simone Nieweg, Sigmar Polke, Charlotte Posenenske, Yvonne Rainer, Fritz Winter
Exhibition 2: Olivia Dunbar, Chris Evans, Karin Hasselberg, Will Holder, Ingrid Hora, Kitty Kraus, Christoph Westermeier
Companion Book: Olivia Dunbar, Will Holder, Anthony Huberman, Bernadette Mayer, Christoph Westermeier, Samuel Bonnet
& Mäel Fournier-Comte
Neither here nor there, neither fish nor fowl took the narrative mode as form, as a means to consider the interplay of
affect and interpretation, of objects and images, and how these relationships shape our ability to recognize one another
and the world around us. As part of the project, we commissioned participating artist Christoph Westermeier to
produce the sole visual documentation for the project on his own terms. Included here are some of the resulting images.
1 April 2015, Schloss Ringenberg © 2015 Christoph Westermeier / VG Bild-Kunst
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14 April 2015, Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen © 2015 Christoph Westermeier / VG Bild-Kunst
1 June 2015, Chris Evans, Untitled (Drippy Etiquette), Schloss Ringenberg © 2015 Christoph Westermeier / VG Bild-Kunst
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1 April 2015, Schloss Ringenberg © 2015 Christoph Westermeier / VG Bild-Kunst
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17 April 2015, Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen © 2015 Christoph Westermeier / VG Bild-Kunst
18 May 2015, Hans Haacke, Fotonotizen, documenta 2, Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen © 2015 Christoph Westermeier / VG Bild-Kunst
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Athens Conference for Utopian Technologies, Etc.
as part of New Babylon Revisited, in collaboration with YKON (FI/DE) and Circuits & Currents,
Athens, GR, November 5 – 9, 2014
The Athens Conference for Utopian Technologies Etc., was a 3-day conference which aimed to both use and parody
academic conference infrastructure. The conference experimented with models of self-organization and collaborative
tools for generating ideas. Occurring primarily in the city’s public places and operating via somatic, imaginative, and
nonsensical approaches, the conference aimed to parasitically use and appropriate what was already there, with the hope
that altering habits and gestures would generate alternative and novel ideas for artistic and curatorial practices.
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Game Theory
in the 2nd CAFAM Biennale, CAFA Art Museum, Beijing, CN, February 28 – April 20, 2014
Game Theory began with an examination of mass media, in its broadest sense: the means that we communicate
information and ideas, in a person-to-person sense and to “the masses” – from the daily news to your ex-boyfriend’s
twitter feed. The line between media as leisure and recreation (i.e. a movie) and media as information and
communication (i.e. “the news”) seems increasingly blurred – if ever there really was a divide.
In her text Frames of War, Judith Butler aims to draw attention to the frames through which we apprehend or, perhaps
more often, fail to apprehend the lives of others. She argues that the frame through which we see one another is
inherently an operation of power; it is an editorial embellishment that implicitly guides our interpretation and delimits
the very “sphere of appearance itself.”
Today, mass media, the image, the sound bite, and the meme, traverse the globe with incredible speed and ease. They
are tweeted, shared, linked, and printed in a newspaper within less than 24 hours. Media, in all its various guises, can
be seen as a set of existing tools, a genus of technologies, which can be used, appropriated and subverted.
In lieu of an encyclopedic study, Game Theory aimed to examine a handful of both historical and contemporary
activities that use mass media to produce alternative structures of power through the vehicle of play; this playfulness
has both fantastical and practical aims. While examining precedent for this methodology, Game Theory itself attempted
to generate future possibilities for ludic and utopian thinking, and invited the viewer to play within its structure.
Contributors: Constant Niewenhuys/New Babylon (NL), Experimental Jetset (NL), Provo (NL), Temporary Services
(US), The Yes Men in collaboration with Steve Lambert (US), and YKON (FI/DE).
Overview of installation
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Left: Exhibition title; right: display of sketches and maquettes for the exhibition design, Game Theory, Experimental Jetset, 2013 – 2014
Overview of installation, showing three stations of Utopian Devices & Reality Technologies, YKON, 2014
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Installation view, Selected Publications by Temporary Services and Half Letter Press, Temporary Services, 1998 – 2014, and Public Phenomena, Temporary
Services, 2014, a new bi-lingual publication created for and distributed during the exhibition
Utopian Devices & Reality Technologies, detail, YKON, 2014
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Foreground: Utopian Devices & Reality Technologies (detail), YKON, 2014; background: Two or Three Things I Know About Provo, Experimental Jetset,
2011 - 2014
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As far as anyone could recall
Fridericianum, Kassel, DE, August 26 – September 4, 2016
It happened a few months ago at an opening. Or else it was another evening event of some sort. The man had arrived as
any of the other guests had, though no one could remember if the man had engaged in the social milling and gaiety
generally required of such an occasion. At some point in the evening, however, someone noticed that he had a worn,
wooden measuring stick with him. He had walked off to one of the corners alone, along one of the exterior walls,
placing the stick at increments and making notes in a small pad from his pocket. A short time later, overcome by a
mixture of curiosity and dutiful concern, the facilities manager walked over to the lone man to question him. Then, a
story began to circulate: the man was in possession of a ground plan for the building from many years ago. Yet, no one
recognized him and it was a mystery as to how he had such a document. I heard that he wanted to confirm the
building’s current dimensions; he was under the suspicion that the measurements had changed in time.
But perhaps it’s better to tell a different story in a similar matter. What would it be if we were to take up a place as
nothing more than our interpretation of it? In other words, to reconsider our understanding of architectural syntax?
The Fridericianium is a place of many lives and incarnations—library, museum, kunsthalle and post-war ruin, to name
but a few—holding a near infinitude of stories. But how does one take a measure of such a place? If a building is to
reveal or conceal itself to us, perhaps we must reconsider our notions of material, as something inherently unstable and
animate, its surfaces sensors of time, affective forces, and social history. As Eyal Weizman quips, no crack can ever be
reproduced, “its path is a unique entanglement of material inconsistencies on the mircro scale in combination with the
effects of macro forces”. Thus a crack is information. [1]
The practice attributed to Simonides of method of loci, to place objects in a palace as a pneumonic device, reminds us
that memory is rooted in place. But is it not also inherently dialogical? We only ever remember together, in
conjunction with another. A place, a scent, a person – memory is a social enterprise. Even on our own, in this
conjuring, we recollect the scenes and sounds and shapes around us, we recreate a social milieu in our minds if it can’t
be present next to us. Within the social these stories take shape, but somehow remain slippery. A story can call witness
as easily as it can embellish; it can haunt and hurt. Through their sedimentation, stories shift hearsay to histories, but
only through our contingent entanglement and indeterminacy.
As far as anyone could recall came into being as an opportunity for the installation team of the Fridericianium to develop
an exhibition of their own work at the institution. The exhibition includes work from Sebastian Amelung & Miriam
Aust, martinafischer13, Peter Freund, Tilman Hatje, Katrin Leitner-Peter, Ingmar Mruk, Walter Peter, Eric Pries &
Maja Wirkus, Torben Röse, Bernd Schlake, Björn Wolf and Jürgen Zähringer, and is guest curated by Angela Jerardi.
[1] Eyal Weizman, “The Matter of Memory”, Adrián Villar Rojas: Today We Reboot the Planet, Köln: Walter Konig, 2014, 20 - 21.
Display of Fridericianum floor plans from 1950’s to present
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Overview of installation
Overview of installation
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Bourgeois Leftovers
co-curated with the participants of de Appel Curatorial Programme
de Appel arts centre, Amsterdam, NL, April 19 – June 16, 2013
April, 1936
Business rests for the day. The Tobacco Baron sits in his parlour.
[A knock at the door]
The Art Collector has come to call. They swiftly move to the dining room. Not much is said.
Both know, economic matters of grave importance will have to be discussed. But this can wait
until after food has been served.
[Another knock]
The Visitor arrives late. Very late. By the time she is led in to the dining room, the Collector
and the Baron have long moved on to the smoking room. She finds their plates on the table.
Each has left a piece of steak behind. Why, she thinks. These are hard times. Were they not
hungry? I am.
Bourgeois Leftovers, the exhibition of the 2012 – 2013 de Appel Curatorial Programme, hosted a group of unlikely
conversation partners at de Appel arts centre. The exhibition presented 32 Dutch genre paintings leftover from the
current Van Abbemuseum collection display, together with commissions and contributions from contemporary artists:
Ayreen Anastas & Rene Gabri, Ruth Buchanan, Jota Castro, Dina Danish, Lydia Davis, Judith Deschamps, Marlene
Dumas, Chris Evans, Will Holder, Jugedamos, Alison Knowles, Matthieu Laurette, Gabriel Lester, Daragh Reeves,
Barbara Visser, and Timmy van Zoelen
Paintings by Johanna Bauer-Stumpff, Hubert Bekman, Arnout Colnot, Lucie van Dam van Isselt, Jacob Dooyewaard,
Willem Dooyewaard, Edgar Fernhout, Johannes Franken, Jan Goedhart, Herman Heijenbrock, Georg Hering, Jan van
Herwijnen, Eduard Karsen, Conrad Kickert, Willem Knip, Ernst Leyden, Sal Meijer, Dirk Nijland, Bart Peizel, Wim
van de Plas, Coba Ritsema, Dio Rovers, Wout Schram, Albert Servaes, William Henry Singer, Jan Sluijters, Walter
Vaes, Jan Voerman, Cornelis Vreedenburgh, Betsy Westendorp-Osieck, and Matthieu Wiegman.
Left (on table): A Sill Life of a Cigarette and Smoke, Daragh Reeves, 2013; above right: Antinous, Johanna Bauer-Stumpff, 1935, collection of the Van
Abbemuseum; below right: Miasmic Revisionism (Clinical PDF), Timmy van Zoelen, 2013
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Foreground: The Witch and a Shipwreck Full of Paintings, Dina Danish, 2013; background: A Condition, Ruth Buchanan, 2013, installed on Buchanan’s
work: Still Life with Books, Bart Peizel, 1933, Still Life with Nautical Instruments (Homage to Conrad), Dirk Nijland, 1935 and Still Life with Skull, Dirk
Nijland, 1932, all collection of the Van Abbemuseum
Reclining Nude, Jan Sluijters, 1931, collection of the Van Abbemuseum; behind: 17 Left Out Leftovers (Bourgeois); 17 Farrow & Ball Archive Colours,
Barbara Visser 2013
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Cookie 1 & 2 (Koekeloern 1 & 2), Gabriel Lester, 2013; behind right: Portrait of Eliza, Johannes Franken, 1939, collection of the Van Abbemuseum; left:
Portrait of Joep Nicolaas, Ernst Leyden, 1935, collection of the Van Abbemuseum
Table: Time Samples, Alison Knowles, 2010 – 2013; pedestal: SHOES OF YOUR CHOICE for Wies 1962, 2013; wall left: THINGS (Purchased with Funds
Provided By), Matthieu Laurette, 2010 – 2020; wall right: collection of the Van Abbemuseum
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