a seminar with Jan Verwoert
November 2006-June 2007

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 takes visual material as its starting point and centre its discussion around images and techniques found in historic and contemporary everyday culture. In the same context it discussed art works and art projects that explore the practical and visual logic of the inauguration of communities and propose alternatives. In the process of looking at art and everyday life, text material was added to the discussion.

These explorations were guided by the questions: Does the inauguration of and initiation into a community always imply a moment of violence and the affirmation of a hierarchical power structure? Or can there be practices and images that renounce this violence and thus generate powerless structures of communal conviviality? How could a community be imagined that is not a sect defined through the exclusion of a constitutive other, or a fraternity based on the codex of male bonding, for instance? Maybe a ‘community without community’, as Derrida puts it, invoked in the moment of a ‘secretless conjuration’ to assemble for those who have nothing else to bring to that community but their own solitude.

This project is organized in monthly seminars. Project work included lectures, group discussions, analyzing art works, reading texts, and proposing texts and art works for joint discussion.

Jan Verwoert (Germany) is an art critic based in Berlin. He is a contributing editor to Frieze magazine and writes amongst others for Afterall, Metropolis M, Camera Austria, Springerin and artists’ catalogues. He is also a tutor at PZI.