The Vantage Body
About
THE VANTAGE BODY
A meatspace broadcast by WdKA Social Practices
Thursday, October 29
10-1530h CET/Rotterdam
The vantage loaf is the thirteenth loaf in a baker's dozen, a term first recorded in the 17th century. This extra loaf was added to the wholesale purchase of twelve pieces of bread as a way to create value, redistribute profit, and increase circulation. Aside from the vantage loaf being a way of circulating baked goods leftover from previous days, its most important function was to allow resellers, or hucksters, to make a profit on the dozen. The price of bread was strictly controlled by governing bodies, so without the vantage loaf, value could not be created. Similarly, the thirteenth vantage body to this event, outside of the dozen people we are allowed to seat in the room—a collective public composed of WdKA Social Practices' student body and its extended network through Melly—gives this broadcast purpose, value, and a circuit for ideas to spread.
Links
Documentation
The vantage loaf is the thirteenth loaf in a baker's dozen, a term first recorded in the 17th century. This extra loaf was added to the wholesale purchase of twelve pieces of bread as a way to create value, redistribute profit, and increase circulation. Aside from the vantage loaf being a way of circulating baked goods leftover from previous days, its most important function was to allow resellers, or hucksters, to make a profit on the dozen. The price of bread was strictly controlled by governing bodies, so without the vantage loaf, value could not be created. Similarly, the thirteenth vantage body to this event, outside of the dozen people we are allowed to seat in the room—a collective public composed of WdKA Social Practices' student body and its extended network through Melly—gives this broadcast purpose, value, and a circuit for ideas to spread.
PROGRAM
10-11h ECE CANLI of Decolonising Design will converse with Teana Boston-Mammah about haunting as counterhegemonic design research and counterfactual artistic practice.
1130-1230h ROLANDO VÁZQUEZ will converse with Charissa Granger about decoloniality, time, and the end of the contemporary.
13-14h FOSSIL FREE CULTURE will converse with Selçuk Balamir about art and activism in the age of the Anthropocene.
1430-1530h GRACE SAMBOH will converse with Clara Balaguer about taking and giving and friendship in the curatorial, or why do we do what we do, how, and for whom?
ATTENDANCE
DOZEN BODIES
(Live Audience)
Due to COVID regulations, we cannot accept more than 12 guests at Kunstinstituut Melly. If you would like to be one of the 12 live audience members of this broadcast, please add your name here: https://etherpad.nl/p/WdKASocialPracticesTheoryProgramGUESTLIST
Bring your laptop and headphones to participate fully in the conversation.
VANTAGE BODY
(Online Audience)
The link for the live stream will be provided a few hours before broadcast. This stream is open to the general public.
SPEAKERS (Reading Lists)
ECE CANLI
A design researcher, artist and musician; born and raised in Turkey and based in Porto, Portugal since 2013. She holds a Ph.D. in Design from University of Porto (Portugal) and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Studies from Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design (Sweden). Her tools of investigation include text, voice, sound, and artefacts. Her academic work sits at the intersection of decolonial queer feminist epistemologies, material regimes and body politics; more specifically, socio-spatio-material constitutions of gender, sexuality, race and other identity categories. As a researcher and educator, she lectured and published internationally. She is a founding member of the research collective Decolonising Design Group and currently a researcher in CECS (The Communication and Society Research Centre) at University of Minho.
In her artistic and vocal practice, she explores the liminal states of agonised and demonised bodies, the ways of re-narrating untold stories, and corporal and mental metamorphosis of bodies, through extended vocal techniques. She currently works on her first solo music project VOX FLORA, VOX FAUNA, while continuing to create and perform as a soloist. She also composes, plays and sings in music projects NOOITO, Live Low and COBRA’CORAL.
READINGS
Eve Tuck and C. Ree, A Glossary of Haunting (2013)
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/557744ffe4b013bae3b7af63/t/557f2d6ce4b029eb4288a2f8/1434398060958/Tuck+%26+Ree%2C+A+Glossary+of+Haunting.pdf
To Play
Hey Look at My Games, Oh No
http://heylookatmygames.com/ohno/
To Watch
Laurie Anderson, Women and Money
https://youtu.be/H9nJ8xbeoTA
FOSSIL FREE CULTURE
A collective of artists, activists, researchers and critics working at the intersection of art and climate activism. Their goal is to confront oil and gas sponsorship of public cultural institutions in the Netherlands. They are committed to eroding the fossil fuel industry’s public image and their social license to operate. Through unsolicited art performances in institutions that accept such sponsorship, they expose the ecological and social devastation that the fossil fuel industry inflicts on the planet and lay bare the way these cultural institutions actively sanitise the reputation of companies like Royal Dutch Shell.
READINGS
John Jordan, "Art (and activism) in the age of the Anthropocene", Berliner Festspiele Blog (2015)
https://blog.berlinerfestspiele.de/art-and-activism-in-the-age-of-the-anthropocene/
Fossil Free Culture, End the Fossil Fuel Age Now
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7Sybb3dYV8
GRACE SAMBOH
She is in search of what comprises a curatorial work within her surrounding scene. She jigs within the existing elements of the arts scene around her for she considers the claim that Indonesia is lacking art infrastructure, especially the state-owned or state run, as something outdated. She believes that curating is about understanding and making at the same time.
With Hyphen —, her concern is to encourage Indonesian arts and artistic research projects and publications. Her research looks at contemporary practices outside the existing centers of Indonesian art scene and slowly reconnect them all with the past and central narratives. With Enin Supriyanto, Yustina Neni & Ratna Mufida, she used to run Equator Symposium (Yogyakarta Biennale Foundation, 2010-2018) where they explored the possibility of connecting equatorial countries through current life situation with an admiration to the past and optimism towards the future. Since 2019, she directs programs for RUBANAH Underground Hub, Jakarta.
Her current temporal attachments are: a doctorate in the Arts and Society Studies, at the Sanata Dharma University, Yogyakarta; curatorial team for the upcoming Jakarta Biennale “ESOK” 2021 and “Collecting Entanglements and Embodied Histories,” a joint venture between Galeri Nasional Indonesia, MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum, Singapore Art Museum, Nationalgalerie – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, and Goethe-Institut (2021-2022).
READINGS
Grace's Notes: The whole website in which Vera's text is uploaded extends the friendship quest; but anyhow, you don't need to read all the texts mentioned, just choose one. I will be speaking around these modes of working, connecting, while constantly trying to make sense of things.
Grace Samboh, TAKING AND GIVING: Friendship as a way of thinking and doing (2016)
https://www.academia.edu/31601839/_2016_TAKING_AND_GIVING_Friendship_as_a_way_of_thinking_and_doing
Sidd Perez, In defence of the curatorial (2018)
https://hrnl-my.sharepoint.com/:b:/g/personal/balac_hr_nl/EU6zIWgRpQ5BjdfjetMpdi8BUy0man6oMBJpsImt0O-C7A?e=q1weKE
Vera Mey, We're in this together (2016)
http://www.ayearofconsciouspractice.com/texts/were-in-this-together
ROLANDO VÁZQUEZ
He is Associate Professor of Sociology at University College Roosevelt and Cluster Chair at the University College Utrecht, both at the University of Utrecht. He is author of "Vistas of Modernity: Decolonial aesthesis and the End of the Contemporary" (Mondriaan Fund 2020). Together with Walter Mignolo he founded and co-directs since 2010 the annual Middelburg Decolonial Summer School now located at the Van Abbemuseum for the last eleven years. He co-authored the report of the Diversity Commission of the University of Amsterdam in 2016 under the direction of Gloria Wekker. Through his work he seeks to decolonize cultural and educational institutions beyond the dominant frameworks of contemporaneity, heteronormativity and coloniality. His research on the question of precedence and relational temporalities seeks to overcome the western critique of modernity and contribute to the ongoing efforts to decolonize knowledge, aesthetics and subjectivity.
READINGS
Lies Mensink, "Rolando Vázquez Melken: ‘Theatre is a space where we can face our vulnerability collectively’Interview with sociologist Rolando Vázquez Melken on decoloniality and the arts in times of corona", Theaterkrant (2020)
https://www.theaterkrant.nl/nieuws/rolando-vazquez-melken-in-het-theater-kunnen-we-onze-kwetsbaarheid-onder-ogen-zien/
http://liesmensink.nl/2020/06/12/rolando-vazquez-melken-theatre-is-a-space-where-we-can-face-our-vulnerability-collectively/
TEACHERS
CHARISSA GRANGER
A musician and musicologist
She is a Marie Skłodowska Curie Post-Doctoral LEaDing Fellow at the Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Concentrating on Afro-Caribbean and diasporic music-making practices, Charissa is interested in decoloniality, how music enables sensuous knowledge, and decolonial aesthetics and epistemologies. After completing a bachelor’s in visual and performing arts at Northern Illinois University (USA) with a focus on cultural studies and steelpan performance and a master’s in cultural musicology at the University of Amsterdam, Charissa focused on world music performance practice, attending to how otherness is framed at world music festivals as a doctoral research project at the University of Göttingen (Germany).
CLARA BALAGUER
A cultural worker, grey literature publisher, and undisciplined researcher
From 2010 to 2018, she articulated cultural programming with rural, peri-urban, and diasporic communities from the Philippines through the Office of Culture and Design, a residency space and social practice platform. In 2015, she co-founded Hardworking Goodlooking, a cottage industry publishing hauz interested in the material vernacular, collectivizing authorship, and the value of the error. Currently, she coordinates the Social Practices department at Willem de Kooning Academy and teaches in the Experimental Publishing masters of Piet Zwart Institute. Frequently, she operates under collective or individual aliases that intimate her service in a given project, the latest of which is To Be Determined. For the moment, TBD is an undocumented organization that has recently migrated to Rotterdam from Parañaque City. Aside from its main mandate—to redistribute access to cultural capital in neighborly ways—it is curious about models of non-extractive research, the possibility of radmin (radical administration), the agency of the secretariat, and dissecting the body public/published body.
TEANA BOSTON-MAMMAH
A sociologist
She earned a Bachelor’s degree in Sociology at Essex University (UK) and a Master of Urban Studies and Public Policy at the Erasmus University Rotterdam. She is particularly interested in notions of identity in an urban context. The first ten years of her career she worked as a teacher of sociology in London. In the Netherlands, she went on to develop her research and policy advising skills. She worked for over eleven years as a policy advisor/researcher for Scala, a non-profit expertise center for gender and diversity, in Rotterdam. Research areas include: the glass ceiling, emancipation in Rotterdam, radicalisation, fatherhood, sexual diversity and gendered social contacts patterns. From 2012, she has worked as a consultant and researcher for various organisations in Rotterdam, Formaat, Het Peutercollege and the research center Creating 010. In her free time Teana organises—as co-founder of the RotterdamINK foundation—various events in the context of women’s empowerment issues. Teana is a board member of various nonprofits. Her research on gender and social contact theory in a neighbourhood in South Rotterdam is via Emerald publishers accessible and called “Women and the Gender Gap”.
SELÇUK BALAMIR
A postcapitalist designer, commoning researcher, and climate justice organiser
I work at the intersections of creative production, radical politics and ecological transition. I specialise in strategic communications, community building and making social transformation irresistible. I helped develop the framework for “Climate Games”, a transmedia action-adventure event enabling peer-to-peer disobedience and Shell Must Fall, a grassroots campaign targeting shareholder meetings of the carbon major. I am among the initiators of the shared social housing projects NieuwLand, a postcapitalist urban commune, and de Nieuwe Meent, a cooperative entirely organised around the principles of commoning. I am graduating from my PhD in Cultural Analysis at UvA, on commoning practices in postcapitalist design. I am currently a BAK 2020 Fellow researching intersectional tools for political activation. People say I'm usually good at starting but quite bad at finishi——