a series of seminars with Jan Verwoert
February-July 2006

Jan Verwoert lead a series seminars around the idea of imagined communities or modes of collective address. From which point do artists speak today? Does art in a way always address an imaginary collective? And if so, what ways can there be to address collectives that differ significantly from the conventional ways mass media and populist politics address their imagined communities?

Social bonds are forged through techniques of keeping and sharing secrets, coded ways of shaking hands, exchanging words and looks, learning to be, dress and speak in certain ways and not others, to perform rituals and cast spells that summon certain spirits, not others.

These techniques are a matter of practice as much as they involve the imagination. If a bond is to be forged, the community it is designed to create needs to be imagined. So images do play their role in the constitutive moment when a society is inaugurated. They formulate the promise of what that society will give to its members in the future.

This seminar looked at techniques and images through which communities are inaugurated, communities of the past, present and future. The seminar looked at historical and contemporary culture, and at art works that explore the practical and visual logic of the inauguration of communities and propose alternatives.

Artists discussed in this context were Kenneth Angle, Johannah Billing, Ceryth Wyn Evans, Lucie Mckenzie, Deimantas Narkevicius, Paulina Olowska, as well as Leonardo da Vinci and Velaszquez. Texts read together included Giorgio Agamben’s “The Coming Community” and Jacques Derrida’s “Politics of Friendship”, which raise crucial questions concerning the politics and ethics of the inauguration moment.

Jan Verwoert (Germany) is a cultural theorist and writer based in Hamburg. He is a contributing editor to Frieze magazine and writes among others for Afterall, Metropolis M, Camera Austria, Springerin and artists’ catalogues. He is also a guest professor for contemporary art and theory at the Academy of Fine Arts Umeå, and is a tutor at the Piet Zwart Institute.