Archive & Memory
Thematic Project Trimester 2
Lead by Annet Dekker

An archive is a collection of documents and records, such as letters, official papers, photographs, recorded material, or computer files that is preserved for historical purposes. As such, an archive is considered a site of the past, a place that contains traces of a collective memory of a nation, a people or a social group. Artists have always shown an interest in archives, either as inspiration for their own work, or to use and re-appropriate material. An archive has therefore become a site of reproduction. Although often not recognised as archives, commercial sites like YouTube and Facebook are examples of this: documents are posted and reposted all the time in these environments. Previously regarded as tedious repositories of the past, with the additional stereotype of archivists as spinsters who were picky, hardworking, standoffish, and, by most accounts, pitiable enforcers of orders and structures, today the image of archives is changing. They are becoming exciting places where one can adapt and appropriate through processes of cut-and-paste.

An archive was once a place to preserve the past, to build legacies as well as to remember and recognise the roots from which to grow. However, as Michel Foucault reminds us, memories and archives do not survive by chance but are constructed to serve structures of power. Thus, the shape of an archive constrains and enables the content it encloses, and the technical methods for building and supporting an archive produces the document for collection. After all, the word ‘archive’ is derived from the Greek arkhē, which means government or order, origin and first place. However, digital technologies have changed and altered the status and meaning of an archive. The creation of documents and their aggregation into all sorts of different – especially online – archives has become part of everyday life. Archives are now being collectively built. As Arjun Appadurai asserts in his text Archive and Aspiration, ‘we should begin to see all documentation as intervention, and all archiving as part of some sort of collective project. Rather than being the tomb of the trace, the archive, is more frequently the product of the anticipation of collective memory.’

It could be argued that whether the archive is composed of print, photographs, film and/or digital media, the technologies used to organise, search and share documents have taken over the purview of a state, with the crowd acting as the control mechanism. Digital archives have changed from a stable entity into flexible systems, referred to with the popular term ‘Living Archives’. But in which ways do these changes affect our relationship to the past, present and future? What are the implications for this mode of forgetting, for memories, as well as for what is suppressed? Will the erased, forgotten and neglected be redeemed, and new social memories be allowed? Will the fictional versus factual mode of archiving offer the democracy that the public domain implies, or is it another way for public instruments of power to operate?

These and other questions will be addressed and discussed from the perspective of both lens-based and networked media, by looking at different topics that relate to archive and memory, from database to narrative, time, and the glitch, and through the works of (among others) Johan Grimonprez, Chris Marker, Geoffrey Bowker, Lynn Hershmann, Paul Otlet, Suzanne Briet, Rosa Menkman, Graham Harwood, Thomson & Craighead, David Lowenthal, Etoy, Walter Benjamin. There will be additional visits to Beeld & Geluid (home of the National Broadcasting Archives and owner of unique audio-visual collections), Hilversum; Sonic Acts Festival, Amsterdam; and Netherlands Media Art Institute (an institute dedicated to video and media art), Amsterdam.

Annet Dekker is independent curator and researcher. Subjects of interest are the influence of technology, science and popular culture on art and vice versa. Currently she works as webcurator for SKOR, as researcher on the project ”Born Digital art in Dutch art collections” for SBMK, VP, NIMk and DEN, as lecturer at Piet Zwart Academy for the thematic project “Archive & Memory” and new media theory at Rietveld Academy. In 2009 she initiated aaaan.net with Annette Wolfsberger. At the moment they organise the Artist in Residence programme at the Netherlands Media Art Institute in Amsterdam and they produced Funware, an international touring exhibition in 2010 and 2011 about fun in software (curated by Olga Goriunova). Since 2008 she is writing a PhD on strategies for documenting net art at the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London, under supervision of Matthew Fuller. Read more here: http://aaaan.net

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During this time staff members and students of the Piet Zwart Institute will be present. Visitors have the chance to see our workshops, facilities, talk to our students, and ask the staff members questions about the master courses we offer.

While this is a smaller Open Day, the Piet Zwart Institute will have its larger annual Open House on March 24 2012. Please keep an eye on our website for more information.

Open Day Willem de Kooning Academy
Date: Saturday January 21 2011
Time: 10:00 – 15:00 hrs
Location: Blaak 10 / Wijnhaven 61 Rotterdam
Classroom number: W.1.145

For more information, please contact coordinator Vanessa Tuitel at pzwart-info@hr.nl

The artfestival Scheltema Beweegt in Leiden is a weekend filled with music, theatre, poetic dance and art. Two of our students, Laura Sicouri and Luis Soldevilla, will be participating in this festival.

Laura has created an animation ‘The curious fate of Humankind’. The animation has the set of a strange factory where man is dehumanised and replaced by machines. This work is about how humanity tries to make life manageable and simplicity, but often the opposite is reached; it gets more complicated all the time.

Luis made a video for multiple screens,  that shows movements of people alongside the movement of various machines and mechanisms.

Artfestival Scheltema Beweegt
Saturday 19 and Sunday 20 November 2011
Marktsteeg 1, Leiden

Date: November 01 2011
Time: 10:00  – 11:30 hrs including Q&A
Location: Piet Zwart Institute – Large project room
Address: Karel Doormanhof 45, Rotterdam

Continental Europe never developed an original idea of cultural diversity. Diversity was introduced as a purely negative token, as rupture in the concept of the national. Diversity within societies was recognised either in terms of absence (post-holocaust) or as re-appearance (post-colonial).

But how can diversity be thought of as “post-migrational”? Cities have always been shaped by mobility and migration. So-called globalisation, however, has renewed and accelerated this process. Cities are no longer defined by dwelling but by movement. The city has hence become a vague entity, a “Parapolis”. What is the state of culture in the Parapolis? What is its position in space and time, its ethics and aesthetics, its legitimation and policies? Culture has become part of an urban environment that is defined a forced-upon, sometimes spooky historicity, coincidences and juxtapositions, arbitrariness of references and longing for new coherence.

For an ethics of culture in Parapolis, one may go back to founding texts of Western civilisation. In Homer’s Ulysses is typically seen as the bearer of the Western idea of individual freedom. But he is on a quest for home, which makes him a free human being and a citizen at the same time. The Ulysses of the “Ilias”, “at home” with his fellow Greeks and ready to expand their territory, is a brutal slaughterer. When he returns home at the end of the epic, he commits a massacre in order to be “at home” again and homogenise this territory. The quest for home therefore is the true state of civility.

In Parapolis, dwellers live a “Phililhellenism” of the kind described by Greek writer Mimika Cranaki during his emigration in Paris. The nation no longer works as a homeland, but is still there as an imaginary place. The search for home should therefore be no longer considered transitional, but the essence of civility. Culture has the potential of being the location for negotiating this search. Traditionally, aesthetics has close ties to the concept of emancipation – and its underbelly, the desire of nations and educated middle classes to set themselves apart from others. The aesthetics of culture in Parapolis needs to be more “conversational” and participatory along the lines of, for example, Grant H. Kester. In the aftermath of boding, there seems to be a need for more “banding”. It could therefore make sense to consider any utterance – whether art or not – culture, and focus on “atmospheres” rather than meaning. The culture of Parapolis is not just about diversity, but abundance.

On the basis of these considerations, this lecture will propose a programme of interculture, focusing on the individual with his/her diverse backgrounds and qualifications, and with the potential to open up a new space for negotiating community.

Mark Terkessidis is currently a guest researcher in the lectoraat Cultural Diversity within the research centre Creating 010 of the Rotterdam University.

From 1992 to 1994, he was an editor of the German pop culture magazine “Spex”. From 2003 to 2011 he worked as a host for the intercultural radio programme “Funkhaus Europa” of the West German public broadcasting service. Mark wrote numerous essays on youth and pop culture, migration and racism for German newspapers, magazines and public radio. Together with Tom Holert, he is the co-founder of the Cologne-based Institute for Studies in Visual Culture (isvc.org).

During this time staff members and students of the Piet Zwart Institute will be present. Visitors have the chance to see our workshops, facilities, talk to our students, and ask the staff members questions about the master courses we offer.

While this is a smaller Open Day, the Piet Zwart Institute will have its larger annual Open House on April 14 2012. Please keep an eye on our website for more information.

Open Day Willem de Kooning Academy
Date: Saturday November 12 2011
Time: 10:00 – 15:00 hrs
Location: Blaak 10 / Wijnhaven 61 Rotterdam
Classroom number: W.1.145

• Chris Baronavski (USA)
• Femke de Bruijn (NL)
• Marleen Leuverink (NL)
• Vincenzo Onnembo (IT)
• Tanja Deman (CR)
• Tiddo Roozendaal (NL)
• Zafer Topaloglu (TR)
• Yuko Uesu (JP)
• Roeland Veraart (NL)

The film paints a picture of succesful German lawyer Daniel Paul Schreber, who claimed in 1893 that he received messages from God through a ‘type writer’ that spanned the kosmos. Schreber then spent nine years in an institution, where he suffered from delusions of cosmic control and the idea that he was slowly changing into a woman. During his confinement, Schreber wrote his now famous  ‘Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken‘, in which he claims that his faith is a matter of religious freedom and that he was mentally able enough to return to society.

The film, which took five years to make, is a combination of documentary interviews, fictional reconstructions and animation. The story explores the boundaries between religious visions, misleading fanaticism and the intimate connection between family secrets, psychiatric diagnoses and our society’s image of psychiatric diseases.

Pummell became known internationally when he received a British Academy Award (BAFTA ) for his transmedia project ‘Bodysong‘ in 2003. He’s not only a writer and director of documentary, animation and fiction, but also a researcher, tutor and course director the Lens-Based master programme.
Barend Onneweer, one of the tutors of the Lens-Based programme, was the visual effects supervisor on Shock Head Soul.

Shock Head Soul is produced by Submarine and Hot Property Films, in collaboration with Keith Griffiths Illuminations Films and in co-production with Serious Film. This production is supported by the Wellcome Trust, the Netherlands Film Fund and the Rotterdam Media Fund, with support from The Film Study Center at Harvard University. Besides a film, Shock Head Soul is also a research project affiliated to the Research Programme of the Piet Zwart Institute, Willem de Kooning Academy Rotterdam University.

TO-PO will be performing at the TodaysArt festival in The Hague. To-Po was founded in 2010 by Vincenzo Onnembo [IT] and Yuko Uesu [JP], as a synthetic audio-visual band.

Vincenzo is a graphic designer/ film maker, innovating on the existing VJ flair, with digital and analogue lens-based tools. Yuko is a harpist with a movie camera, and has performed as an improvisor / experimental musician in Tokyo, Beijing, and Rotterdam since 2005. Whether in Chamber music, improvisatory, experimental or post-electronica pop, her work explores the faculty of perception through various creative processes.

Besides perfroming at the Todays Art festival, you also have the opportunity to see TO-PO perform at the Camera Japan Festival in Rotterdam.

Below you will find an impression of these events. The graduation show will be open until August 21 2011.

Graduation Show 2011: WITH ONE EYE ON THE HORIZON

Dates: July 15 – August 21 2011
Opening: Thursday July 14 2011, 20:00 hrs
Location: TENT. Rotterdam
Address: Witte de Withstraat 50, Rotterdam
Open: Tuesday – Sunday, 11:00 – 18.00 hrs

(Photograph by Aad Hoogendoorn)

(Photograph by Mike Smith)

(Photograph by Aad Hoogendoorn)

(Photograph by Aad Hoogendoorn)

(Photograph by Aad Hoogendoorn)

(Photograph by Aad Hoogendoorn)

(Photograph by Aad Hoogendoorn)

(Photograph by Aad Hoogendoorn)

(Photograph by Aad Hoogendoorn)

(Photograph by Aad Hoogendoorn)

(Photograph by Aad Hoogendoorn)

(Photograph by Aad Hoogendoorn)

(Photograph by Mike Smith)