Material 2009 - 2013
Nicolas Galeazzi
‘Material’ became a key concept in my work throughout the recent years. After a long engagement in the performance art scene in Berlin, where performing a final product was high in demand, I took distance from production for a while and saw my artistic practice rather in processing research. Representation, presence, visibility went out of my interest and were replaced by terms like liquidity, process, gesture. This underpinned the already present ephemerality of my performance art and urged me to think in different way about the communication of my work, the outcome of my research, its effects and side-effects, and the transmission of the generated knowledge into other fields. A specific idea of ‘materialisation’ helped me to rethink my practice. In my understanding, material are products for further use; material can be haptic, virtual, pure cognitive, or emotional; but material for me is not intra-personal, even if it is a product of my. Material only becomes relevant, when it is inter-personal - a product of social interaction. Material is a pre-state to the object and has often no defined function. Material is active for itself; it constantly generates potential. This understanding enabled me to think about other forms of practicing art and artistic research. In collaboration with Joël Verwimp and strongly influenced by my experiences within a.pass, we developed a common practice which we claimed to be non-negotiated collaboration. This required that all participants understand and create everything they produce as material in the service for a further use by others. Material is in this sense rather the waste of artistic activities. It is released from the emotional bonds of its creator and left behind in no specific structure. Only in this open, undefined and non-authorised, but filled and fueled sphere it is possible for a next user to appropriate the material and to continue using it - again temporarily - for further transformation. In this sense of non-causal but affective productivity “for further use” Materialisation became a key term for me in relation to artistic research. Research is productivity without waste. There is a lot of remnant, a lot of unused traces, but there is nothing such as ‘to be thrown away, after the fulfilment of the planned protocol of usage’. Research is performed in the thought of unplanned and unexpected continuation. The following portfolio is focusing on practices, which play in one or another way with this ‘material’. The portfolio is contradicting this ‘material’ practice. As a documentation of my practices this material tries to be representative and explanatory. The documentation is not active in itself, even though it preferably should inspires a reader. Representative, as documentation is, it not only constructs a meshwork of references to a history - my history -, I tried to build an internal reference system within the dossier itself. The workshops, festivals, events documented in this paper are separate and inseparable projects at the same time. They are part of one big search for my own notion of collaboration. They are singular work with their own trajectory, characteristics and contexts, but they are so strongly interwoven, so it does not make sense to present them individually. Nicolas Y Galeazzi, 01/2013
Tischgesellschaft. Conversations about collaborative workstrategies. Flutgraben 2011 Presenting and discussing collaborative work models.
Artistic research - the art of misunderstanding. Workshop for a.pass 11/2009 One big research paper, covering the floor or the workshop space, is recording our thoughts. This workshop was somehow my self-organized feedback to my own MA dissertation at Dartington College of Art.
e
work
foam
This poster is a collaborative outcome of the HP Officejet 9130 ± Errors Workshop at a.pt 05/2010. It emerged through various copying transformations based on ‘The Leakers’, a book resulting from a residency at Bains Connective in Brussels, which was the consequence of two letters Joel Verwimp and I wrote each other in order to launch a snowball process.
m
Incidential Person for Basel Sinfonietta: Rethinking the structure of this classical orchestra specialised in contemporary music, run base democratically by the musicians them selves since 30 years. They approached me as an artistic organizational developer. This ongoing collaboration had already many positive consequences for this orchestra. SPECULATIVE WORKSHOP: a.pass 05/2012 Research always is performative; not many performances, though, are researchive. More so, seeing performance as means of research is inverting the common notion of a performance: as a tool for research it is not interested in sending, but in receiving and processing information.
Economies of collaboration. Workshop for a.pass 01/2011 “Maybe it would be better if we worked in groups of three� Liam Gillick. Constellations of cutout-figures triggering discussions of potential politics of collaboration, while we were looking for the historical reasons for our contemporary understanding. This workshop laid the base for a long research for new economies.
Don’t know! artistic conference on knowledge production. 09/2011 “For me personally the question became tangible at the end of a conference, which I was organising for a.pass in September 2011 on the politics of knowledge production through art. In the end debate of this ‘Don’t Know!’ Conference the participants were filled with intellectual content, but left behind with a feeling of incapability of making this knowledge somehow relevant for a change in the contemporary society. The art discourse appeared once again in its ivory tower and the social context as a very differently placed field of problems. The question after bridging the artistic knowledge with potential realities beyond the art sector remained unsolved.”
what’s the case? Workshop invitation for a.pass 01/2012. We discussed amongst mentors and participants over a long period the issue how to see and name the different parts of the final presentation of the participants. Port folio, Communication, Research result, Log book? We agreed, that it is more interesting to collect and work during the whole year on the visibility of the research and to use this tanks as a tool for the research itself. Finally we decided to call this continuous work and the final communication simply the research case - in both, the material and the situational, sense of the word?
WHAT’s THE CASE, methodological Warm-up 17-20/1 by Nicolas Galeazzi and Lilia Mestre de Singel 10:30-16:30 “What’s The Case!” is questioning the basic gestures of your artistic research. In the search for descriptions of their methodologies, artistic researchers are developing an infinite spectrum of phrases, idioms and other grammatical constructs, to filter out the basic gesture of their own practice. In these four research days we try to get an overview of this spectrum and discuss this range of approaches to artistic research in relation to your own ‘case’! On the basis of the ‘knowledge’ generated at the “Don’t Know! Artistic Conference on Knowledge Production” we try to see the cases as an enfolding fan of possibilities, and the artistic choices taken within the case as the specific politics of your research. In other words, let’s get pragmatic about Wittgenstein’s “The world is everything which is the case”!! “What if... “the product of art is considered as an ongoing research and the artist realizes that in order to process the research a finished work is needed? “Yes, but...” , the “but” introduce the speculation with questions and potentials, and therefore it is a political instrument for artistic thinking. “Never trust... “ a statement you kept to yourself! “What has to be done... “if the question of “what has to be done - through art?” is leading to the conclusion that we shouldn’t do it through Art? “Unlikely, yet possible...” is the attitude, which connects visions with scepticism. “Don’t Know! ... “ is the attitude, which connects realism with curiosity. “Who else...?” is a question for: Who else, if not you? - Who else, apart from you? - Who else, next to you? or: What if, “what for?” is not the only relevant question to be asked if you ask “what hast to be done?”?
A research paper: end week a.pass block 2-2011 Re-working an essay written by Elke Van Campenhout about artistic research in the early days of a.pass together with different groups of a.pass participants as group-mentoring sessions and in preparation for the DON’T KNOW! Conference some month later.
Ae
h et
Pr
y og ol od
ot oc ol
sth eti
re tu
cs
s Ge
M
St
An a.pass participant asked me to react online to her research proposal. This mind map was accompanied with a explanatory text. 11/2010
ra te
s
tc i l Po
Performance
gy
LISTENING: The mentor as a processual listener. Circle of notions of mentoring collected for a mentor’s gathering. The inner circle are possible behaviors of a mentor. The outer circle are questions for a participants: What is the ... in your research?
Tischgesellschaft. This rather small project - which was set after an invitation by the Performer Stammtisch Berlin - becomes an important weight in this portfolio. It was a moment of meta-reflection, gathering of material from the past and open it up for direct intervention by the audience. Historic material, new formed present artworks, working tools, people and behavior became material in the use of creating new work. Tischgesellschaft. II After the audience intervention on the provided half finished posters on collaborative working strategies at the Tischgesellschaft event, two condensed pictures resulted and
* l’hôtesse
Dîner-Labo I
Accueil Saint Josse
* l’hôte
Hostilité et Hospitalité L’étymologie des mots ‘hostilité’ et ‘hospitalité’ partagent une racine commune qui a un rapport avec la nourriture. La racine du mot ‘hostis’ vient du Sanscrit et signifie ‘manger’, ‘consommer’, ou même ‘détruire’. Et même s’il n’est pas très clair de savoir qui mange et quoi, un ‘hostis’ est un inconnu et un étranger. Ce n’est que plus tard qu’il a commencé à signifier l’objet d’une hostilité, un ‘ennemi’. D’un autre côté à présent, le mot ‘hosps’ semble avoir été à l’origine un composé, une relation entre le mot ‘hostis’ et l’idée de ‘faire manger’, ‘nourrir’, ‘brouter’. D’où ‘hospsas’ celui qui reçoit un étranger, un hôte. Panu Minkkinen
-14-
-15-
One spread form a booklet supporting a laboratory dinner with migrant citizens of SaintJosse-ten-Noode for a project with Einat Tuchman, ex-apass participant. She invited me as permanent guest-artist in her project about cultures of hospitality.
Domino kingdom: Residency at Nadine curated by Adva Zakai and Miriam Rhode. 11/2010. This object is a transformation of material form an object of the previous resident, based on an interview with the two curators about the notion of Domino.
Commodity / Resources / Thing: „subjectivity itself is becoming a kind of objecthood: “today there is not even a single instant in which the life of individuals is not modeled, contaminated, or controlled by some apparatus”“ (15). Agamben, G., quoted in Lepeki, A. (in “the extreme phase of capitalist development in which we live,” characterized by “a massive accumulation and proliferation of apparatuses” (15). In other words: as we produce objects, we produce apparatuses that subjugate and diminish our own capacity to produce non-subjugated subjectivities. As we produce objects, we find ourselves being produced by objects.)
Higher Perfprmance! Workshop in economy for a.pass 06/2012 “This is at least why we - as artist - have urgently to rethink our relationship to economics, and have to leave our triple position as critiques, prototypes and profiteers of the system. [...] We rather have to occupy and appropriate the “economics” and fill it with new practices and new meaning. [...] We have to occupy the vocabularies, the practices and the appearance of the economy and to open it to a bigger spectrum of life than just a financial success.”
End of Copying: Frans Masareel Centrum, residency 08/2012 This is a compilation, an anthology, a journal, a condensation, a print out, an out put, a cluster, a random cluster, an abuse of others creative output.... Silk screen on news paper.
COPY CLUB: Residency at Zsenne 06/2012. A dissected copy machine, in all its parts, laid out at the ground. No specific order, just the ‘order’ that collaborators should take reference to one of more pieces of the machine in order to reflect about their own notion of collaboration.
COpy club Test workflow: Collaborators take an object and describe it in all its real or imagined details, from where they start to identify with the object and write about a manual for this identification.
Autobiographiction: Substitut project space berlin: Joel Verwimp and I exchanged our archives in order to write each other’s Autobiography. This was impossible, so we asked Ghost Writers to take this task. The tool of the Ghost Writer is key for our understanding of the non-negotiated collaboration, where authorship has to be abandoned and the one has to release the personal identification to your own history. This work is a manifesto for no ownership of memory!
Geldbäckerei: Workshop for kids at Theater an der Parkaue Berlin. 01/2012 For the Winterakademie#7 ‘Sagen wir, wir haben Geld!’ we invited kids to generate procedures of bread-making and procedures of money-making at the same time.
‘WHAT’S THE CURRENCY OF ART?’ Workshop for BUDA kunsten zentrum kortrijk. Economy is not a science. Economy is a half-knowledge and therefore similar to art. Appropriation of the economy is not necessary, we have to take it over. For that we have to ask ourselves, what are we really ‘dealing’and ‘trading’ with? What is/was our real contribution to the crisis and how do we fictionalise the changes to come? What kind of traps are we constantly falling into as artists? We will discuss the core of what economy is and should provide for us personally and for a society as a total.
Open House: public panel debate on ‘continuity in the fragmented’. In preparation for the panel the moderator asked us following questions. What specific needs did you try to answer? What answers did you develop? What made you change strategies along the way? I answered with following statement.
If you ask me for my answers to my needs, I would have to say, my basic need is to search for the answer. I developed a certain mechanism of hope to never get it. In my best moments I produce just that amount of knowledge, which makes me curious enough to invasively stumbling into the big unknown. This is a trap. This is a tread mill. This is even a dead end; but to constantly live with this dead end makes me spinning the never-ending internal Q&A session. Probably this is my lived interpretation of postmodernity. Celebrating a latent crisis and I'm the self-indulgence anti-heron in it. This goes parallel with the latent economic crisis, crises, we attended the last 20 years. We all know that the system is crap, that the system is exploitative on all levels. But we believe in a blurry trade-off, where we speculate on freedom as a pay-off for this precariousness. When the general economy was running in its liberated speed towards the wall, everything was fine and precariousness was cool. This has changed. My newest search is to change the basic answer, the paradigms of process and production in the economy of my art. I came from making theatre in a company, went to performance art, made in collectives to go to call my art 'research' performed in networks. This entropic strategy mirrored the economic evolution and their demands - just without having any access to their financial bony. I don't want to mirror anymore. I don't want to act anymore as a prototype for an economy system I'm not supporting. I don't want to depend anymore on the schizophrenic mode of being critic and beneficiary at the same time. I want to colonise the economy, to occupy their paradigms and terminologies in order to fill them with my needs and my visions of growth.