A thematic project by Jan Verwoert (October 2009-June 2010)

This is not a game. This is not just about figuring out a winning formula before someone else does. There’s nothing more stupid than playing smart. But playing plain stupid won’t do either. So you got a secret? Guess what, that doesn’t make you special. For I have a secret, too. We all do. Secrets are not such a new thing. Secrets started long ago. The question is how to share them, how and with whom, with whom how? What if you don’t know me but still feel that I might be someone to share secrets with (as I may strike you as someone who could keep them)? How do you talk to me? How do you address, summon, evoke, invoke, convoke, provoke people like me, like you, like us? How do you want to talk to my, your, our soul? You make art. That’s what you do. Because it’s still one of the best ways to keep and share secrets and address the soul. So artistically, philosophically, emotionally, socially, existentially, politically, ethically, sexually, spiritually the crucial question is: how to develop the mode, manner and style in which you desire to share secrets and address the soul? It’s a question of artistic form, rhetoric and attitude and a question of how we want to be with and towards each other.

The seminar will be held in tandem with a series of public talks that will raise some of the issues to be addressed in the seminar discussion. The aim of the seminar is then to transform this discussion into a production process: a process, in which we, as a seminar group, will generate our own language and formulate our own aesthetic theory in a form that is to be determined by us. It could be something to be published, a collectively written essay, piece of fiction or text collage. It could equally also be an image or a sound piece composed over time. It could be a performance or choreography enacted by the seminar group. Or it could just remain a secret. It could be anything, really, provided it formulates a manner of speaking that speaks about how we want to speak to each other.