The Subject of The Email Final by Sandberg Instituut

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FINAL WORKS 1

THE SUBJECT OF THE EMAIL SANDBERG INSTITUUT GRADUATION 2020

DRAFT WORKS

SANDBERG INSTITUUT GRADUATION 2020

FINAL WORKS 5

FINAL THIS PUBLICATION CONCLUDES THE 2020 GRADUATION EXHIBITONS & EVENTS OF THE SANDBERG INSTITUUT. 69 GRADUATES OF THE FIVE MAIN DEPARTMENTS AND TWO TEMPORARY PROGRAMMES PRESENTED THEIR GRADUATION FINAL WORKS TO THE PUBLIC FROM 29 OCTOBER TO 1 NOVEMBER 2020 AT HEMBRUGTERREIN (HET HEM / DE DOOD), ZAANDAM (NL). PART DRAFT AND PART FINAL CONTENT, THIS PUBLICATION CONSISTS OF CONTRIBUTIONS BY THE GRADUATES AND EXTERNAL PHOTOGRAPHERS AND EDITORS COMPILED BY PS (PUBLIC SANDBERG). FOR MORE INFORMATION AND IMAGES VISIT: WWW.SANDBERG.NL/GRADUATION2020/FINAL

SANDBERG INSTITUUT GRADUATION 2020

DRAFT WORKS 7

DRAFT THIS PUBLICATION IS A DRAFT AND WILL BE UPDATED WITH THE FINAL GRADUATION WORKS IN DECEMBER 2020. VISIT HTTPS://SANDBERG.NL/GRADUATION2020/DRAFT/PUBLICATION TO DOWNLOAD.

SANDBERG INSTITUUT GRADUATION 2020

INTRODUCTION

THE SUBJECT OF THE EMAIL From non-humans to real estate developers, The Subject of The Email compiles the draft (released in May) and final works (released in November) of the 2020 Sandberg Instituut graduates from Master programmes Critical Studies, Design, Dirty Art Department, Fine Arts, Studio For Immediate Spaces, Challenging Jewellery and The Commoners’ Society.

The Subject of The Email is part of an ongoing series of publications by PS (Public Sandberg) developed in collaboration with graphic designers Our Polite Society. Previous editions are The Place of Birth (2019), The Name of The Author (2018) and The Title of The Work (2017). EDITORIAL LETTERS SEVEN *CLICKING* INDEX FINGERS

Seven *CLICKING* Index Fingers is a series of letters interpreting the 2020 Sandberg Graduation Draft & Final Works developed by various guest writers and curators. Each letter is sent out as an email addressed to an organisation, industry or part of society, adding context to the works and addressing related topics and phenomena as perceived by a new generation of artists, designers and (interior) architects. Seven *CLICKING* Index Fingers includes contributions by researcher Delany Boutkan (NL), curator Zippora Elders (NL/ DE), writer Maurits de Bruijn (NL), curator Léon Kruijswijk (NL/DE), exibition- and film maker Jules van den Langenberg (NL), writer Adrian Madlener (BE/USA) and curator & critic Laurens Otto (NL). Contact ps@sandberg.nl if you are interested in contributing an editorial to next year’s publication.

SANDBERG INSTITUUT GRADUATION 2020

THE SUBJECT OF THE EMAIL

INDEX

SANDBERG INSTITUUT GRADUATION 2020

INDEX

The Place of Birth (A – Z)

38.9637° Near, 35.2433° East Aix-La-Chapelle Amsterdam Århus Athens Basel Beneden-Leeuwen Berlin Beverwijk Bogotá Bremen Bristol Cadier en Keer Chongqing Corpus Christi Crewe Daegu Damascus Dublin Essex Haarlem Hengelo Home Jeddah Karlsruhe Kecskemét Kent Kerch La Seyne sur Mer Lakeport Lekeitio Lisbon Lisieux Livadia

92 172 132/186 134 224 42 38 130 44 102 164 150 136 34 108 220 188 28 124 168 202 32 96 104 46 68 216 64 36 70 192 30/138 74 154

SANDBERG INSTITUUT GRADUATION 2020

Liverpool Lucerne Madrid Melbourne Mérida Nijmegen Norrköping Odense Pretoria Radebeul Rome Rostov-on-Don Rotterdam Santiago Seeheim Jugenheim Sofia Stockholm Słupsk Taipei The Negev The Place of Birth The Womb Ulm Vantaa Venice Warsaw Winterthur Womb Zurich

INDEX

204 66 62/140/218 60/72 194 110 166 222 128 200 198 126 156 158 214 78 196 106 190 76 170 98 152 58 122 94/162 100 160 40

The Name of the Author (A – Z)

Emirhan Akin Anouk Asselineau Veronika Babayan Anna Maria Balint

92 60 98 42

SANDBERG INSTITUUT GRADUATION 2020

INDEX

Carmen Dusmet Carrasco Beatriz Conefrey Constantin Dichtl Seline Durrer Anto López Espinosa Veronika Fabian Silvia Faggiani Janina Fritz Levi van Gelder Francisca Khamis Giacoman Gabriella Goldsmith Ting Gong Andrea González Franziska Goralski Spazio Cura Jesper Henningsson Natalia Jordanova David C. Kane Kamila Kantek Eva van Kempen Kyulim Kim Morgane de Klerk Miriam Kongstad Goytung (Wei Tung Kuo) Alexander Kuusik Tali Liberman Sara Santana López Pedro Matias María Mazzanti Laila El Mehelmy Heleen Mineur Kasper van Moll Marek Mrowinksi Margaret Munchheimer Cóilín O’Connell Amber Oskam

96 30 152 66 140 68 198 164 38 158 134 34 62 200 170 166 78 204 162 156 188 74 222 190 150 76 218 138 102 104 160 110 106 70 124 202

SANDBERG INSTITUUT GRADUATION 2020

INDEX

Nicolò Pellarin Nicholas Reilly-McVittie64 Octave Rimbert-Rivière Charlotte Rohde Patrycja Rozwora Yara Said Lucia Fernandez Santoro Willem Schenk Stephanie Schuitemaker Sasha Sergienko Sophia Simensky Luca Soudant Linda Stauffer Wouter Stroet Dimitris Theocharis Aimée Theriot Roman Tkachenko Fabian Tombers Simpson Tse Ben Tupper Hanna Valle Lieselot Versteeg Marilyn Volkman Joanne Vosloo Myrto Vratsanou Klara Waara Michael Weber Cindy Wegner Andoni Zamora

122 220 36 172 94 28 40 32 132 64 168 136 100 186 154 194 126 214 72 216 58 44 108 128 224 196 46 130 192

The Title of the Work (A – Z)

*pop* the sound of a bursting bubble 7 um / Seven Micrometers, II <In Transit> A Way Of Wearing

194 40 188 34

SANDBERG INSTITUUT GRADUATION 2020

INDEX

Acid Utopia Now! Alphabet Of Touch Amplifier As Far As I Can Remember Aum Mani Padme Hum Blood From A Stone blyblomma Bursting Bubbles: Another Truth Chained Culture à la Carte Do What You Love EVERYTHING IS VALUES Ecce Ötzi Es Imposible, No Puede Ser (It Is Impossible, It Cannot Be) Escribas Modernas Helices Hey Device, Show Me Privacy How Dare You? I Ate The Last Piece Of Cheese, Wrapped In A Piece Of Wax I Do Have The Intention Of This, Being, An Act Of Love I, CREATOR OF MOTIVATORI I, Object Inanimate Friends Kitchen Conversations Lands End – 0223 621570 LandscapeGardenPassage Lost, Misplaced Or Abandoned Memory Traces Misrepresentations Modern Bedouin Mushroom Dreams Neighbours Of Zero No Applause Until I Say So ;)

214 70 132 158 64 124 166 78 68 32 46 108 38 62 218 154 74 30 160 140 198 128 36 94 122 130 102 42 100 104 152 126 172

SANDBERG INSTITUUT GRADUATION 2020

INDEX

Now/Here OPENING AN ALREADY 64KNOWN CONTENT Offspring On Sonic Intimacy One Way Or Another Queer Commoning Is Desire. Or, Now It’s Time To Stay Awake. Ribbon Collection Sand Castle Scenario 02 Seven Four Seven Short Worlds For Halftime: A Reading So Settler, Are You A Pioneer? Something Happened Here Sonic Failure: Glass Sculpture Sour Counterfeits St Anthony’s Wilderness The Filigree Ambassador The Middle Station The Most Glorious Day On Earth The Onset Of Fever The Swimming Pool There Is A Future The Other Side Of The Present: This Future Is Abandoned They said: ‘I’ Was Never An Island Tools for Dispersion And Techniques For Accumulation Two Lapses (The Haunted Villa Of Spetses) Unrendered Road Unrequited Recognition Until The Flavor Lasts Who’s Going To Die If I Kill My Self? Why Are We Pretending To Be Clocks? Wrap Your Arms Around It

162 192 58 136 190 200 134 202 170 150 216 186 110 28 98 168 156 196 164 222 96 204 138 44 224 76 220 192 92 72 60

SANDBERG INSTITUUT GRADUATION 2020

INDEX

Seven *CLICKING* Index Fingers

Delany Boutkan DEAR EMPLOYMENT AGENCIES,

Zippora Elders HELLO NON-HUMANS,

Maurits de Bruijn DEAR GATEKEEPERS,

Léon Kruiswijk DEAR KRAFTWERK,

113

Jules van den Langenberg DEAR COUNTRYSIDE,

143

Adrian Madlener DEAR PUBLIC TRANSPORT COMPANY,

175

Laurens Otto DEAR READER,

207 Main Departments

Critical Studies Design Dirty Art Department Fine Arts Studio For Immediate Spaces

230 231 232 233 234

Temporary Programmes

The Commoners’ Society Challenging Jewellery

235 236

DEAR EMPLOYMENT AGENCIES, https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/letters/dear-employment-agencies-by-delany-boutkan

LETTER BY

DELANY BOUTKAN RESEARCHER

EDITORIAL SERIES

SEVEN *CLICKING* INDEX FINGERS 21

GRADUATES MENTIONED

• YARA SAID • BEATRIZ CONEFREY • WILLEM SCHENK • TING GONG • OCTAVE RIMBERTRIVIÈRE • LEVI VAN GELDER • LUCIA FERNANDEZ SANTORO • ANNA MARIA BALINT • LIESELOT VERSTEEG • MICHAEL WEBER

DEAR EMPLOYMENT AGENCIES,

DELANY BOUTKAN

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/letters/dear-employment-agencies-by-delany-boutkan

Dear employment agencies, Cc: Anna Maria Balint, Beatriz Conefrey, Levi van Gelder, Lieselot Versteeg, Lucia Fernandez Santoro, Michael Weber, Octave Rimbert-RiviĂ¨re, Ting Gong, Willem Schenk and Yara Said, What shape could a department in an employment agency for a new generation of creative workers in the Netherlands take? And what if those recently graduated from art and design academies were the ones to form this department and what it means to work in a healthy work environment in their field? Navigating work conditions within the creative industries in the Netherlands can be challenging, due to the uncertain, temporary and network-oriented nature of cultural work. Especially for those graduating in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic. Recent graduates from art and design academies in the Netherlands are often known to start their artistic practice while additionally working in hospitality, retail, cleaning, cultural or food services to maintain financial security in society. Unfortunately those industries are currently hit hardest by the pandemic. Under Covid-19, many graduates turned to the income supplement for the self-employed of the Dutch government to sustain themselves temporarily, but how about we start thinking through how they would navigate the labour market with the prospect of possibly losing this support? Working in a privileged country where investment in culture is still possible, the conditions in which this work takes place are in need of constant examination. As a freelance cultural worker and recent graduate (2018) from a design academy myself, I have experienced several instances where temporary work conditions gave me tummy aches. Ways of rethinking, rewriting and speculating about what alternative forms of creative work could entail, I found with some of the recent graduates

DEAR EMPLOYMENT AGENCIES,

DELANY BOUTKAN

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/letters/dear-employment-agencies-by-delany-boutkan

at Sandberg Instituut Amsterdam. Temporarily relieving my tummy ache and making me curious about how they could improve our workfield. In a hypothetical department focussed on creative work in an employment agency Sandberg graduates Yara Said and Willem Schenk could become advisors in navigating institutions, organisations and corporate companies aiming to work with the creative ‘new generation’ and ‘young talent’. With the ambition of potential employers to bring in, often diverse, ‘new perspectives’ come responsibilities to prevent the commodification and consumption of physical and emotional labor. Through her self-organised non-profit network (Salwa Foundation) Yara already hosts programmes that value abstractness, to support creatives new to The Netherlands in an art world that tends to market personal stories and categorizes collective trauma. Willem analyses how luxury conglomerates often consume creative ‘talent’ and in his self-organised events and collaborations speculates on how to make space for creatives to work with those businesses on mutually satisfying terms, by balancing out the ownership over work conditions between the artist and the commercial company. Leading to more relevant project outcomes for both parties, on a long term. Work opportunities and collaborations some of the graduates test out, find themselves outside of the institutionalized art world and therefore rely on an alternative approach to networking. An approach that ensures relationships stay reciprocal and non-exploitative from the artists side as well. Through materialising humour and inside jokes in his graduation project, Levi van Gelder started a network in the carnaval community near his hometown in the Netherlands far removed from the ‘Amsterdam art bubble’. A collaboration he aims to continue. Within our hypothetical department, Levi could become an advisor on how to establish long-term relationships in locations not formerly familiar with art graduates. Michael Weber explores similar alternatives for temporary work infrastructures. Creative young people in the Netherlands often

DEAR EMPLOYMENT AGENCIES,

DELANY BOUTKAN

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/letters/dear-employment-agencies-by-delany-boutkan

move to cities to make a living, as outside of those not many opportunities seem available. In Michaelsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; fictional scenarios, conversations with friends and through workshops however, he speculates on how to materialise short or longer term work opportunities for young people in rural areas like the countryside in ways also beneficial to farmers and other local businesses. Through his research on corporate flexible workspaces like WeWork he understood that these corporate companies should not be the only ones to decide the future of temporary work. Michael shares this fascination for communities outside of cities with Levi and Willem and could therefore collaborate on experimenting with ways to facilitate networks there. As networks materialise, Lucia Fernandez Santoro would advise on how to approach interactions, maintain open communication and to notice skewed hierarchies between clients and employees. Younger generations are often employed as flex workers through 0-hour contracts or under unchosen freelance conditions. Positions devoid of professional development support like other contractors receive through personal year plans. Luciaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s experience with the often harsh and hierarchical dance world informed her ambition to create nonhierarchical and peer-to-peer collaborations and forms of learning in an art world driven by sole-authorship. In hosting forms of communication between clients and employees in the department, Beatriz Conefrey would join Lucia. Beatriz in-depth understanding of the role a tone of voice plays in uniting, excluding or empowering within work environments can be of use in guiding constructive and open conversations. Creative work often depends on conversations and interactions with others to develop contacts for possible work opportunities. But Anna Maria Balint taught me, by not being able to respond to my email invitation for a conversation about her work as the email ended up in spam, that sometimes one does have to talk to a person to appreciate the work they do. For this perspective, hopefully Anna would also join the department.

DEAR EMPLOYMENT AGENCIES,

DELANY BOUTKAN

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/letters/dear-employment-agencies-by-delany-boutkan

Lastly, what does it mean to offer compensation for work in the creative industries? Some creative workers remark that not every trade can be financial, believing in alternative forms of exchange — others wish for payment on every occasion. Some aim to find a job for stable income next to their creative practice, others rely more heavily on the sales of their products or relationships with steady clients. Ting Gong’s graduation project speculates on the potential of an agreement or subscription instead of a short-term money transfer. She sees potential in creating long-term forms of exchange between a product producer and customer. Ting and Octave Rimbert-Rivière would advise on alternative economies and forms of exchange in the department. Octave thinks through the emancipation of the craftsman. In his work he suggests how artists could create their own economy outside of commercial galleries by making sculptures that combine artisanal craft with mass produced objects. Lieselot Versteeg, both a teacher for children and autonomous artist interested in stock market economies, could oversee experiments in how to navigate financial stability and making space for imaginative reflection at the same time. Looking forward to discussing how this department could become a way for employment agencies to branch out their network to support artistic work outside of the confines of the art world and for these graduates to test out their relevant perspectives on creative work. Hoping this department could be of interest to you, Delany

DEAR EMPLOYMENT AGENCIES,

DELANY BOUTKAN

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/letters/dear-employment-agencies-by-delany-boutkan

Graduates mentioned: sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/levi-van-gelder sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/octave-rimbert-riviere sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/anna-maria-balint sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/yara-said sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/lieselot-versteeg sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/michael-weber sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/ting-gong sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/lucia-fernandez-santoro sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/willem-schenk sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/beatriz-conefrey

Since 2019, Delany Boutkan has been developing research projects and public programs within the Research Department at Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam. At the moment, she approaches her writing and curatorial projects from a fascination with the mechanisms surrounding cultural production and the conditions of cultural work. Delany has coordinated conversations, lectures and workshops in several art and design academies in The Netherlands. She received her Master degree in Design Curating & Writing at the Design Academy Eindhoven in 2018.

VISUAL POEMS

• YARA SAID • DAMASCUS (SYRIA) • FINE ARTS

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/yara-said

28 64

Visual poems is a collection of short films that investigates love, loss, trauma and everyday objects in relation to sound and memory. It attempts to create an environment where all these elements can exist organically without the disturbance of the outside world. The sound of the image, the language and the active act of listening that is encouraged through the slow layout of the video will allow the spectator to construct their own narrative of the dreamy sequences they are looking at.

SONIC FAILURE: GLASS SCULPTURE

• YARA SAID • DAMASCUS (SYRIA) • FINE ARTS

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/yara-said

Yara Said’s (Damascus, Syria, 1991) Visual Poems is a collection of short films that investigates love, loss, trauma and everyday objects in relation to sound and memory. It attempts to create an environment where all these elements can exist organically without the disturbance of the outside world. The sound of the image, the language and the active act of listening that is encouraged through the slow layout of the video allows the spectator to construct their own narrative of the dreamy sequences they are looking at. For Sonic Failure: glass sculpture, Said investigated the qualities of light that shines through glass. By hanging them on and above eye level, the visitor is encouraged to walk around them and to change their perspective.

HOW DARE YOU?

• BEATRIZ CONEFREY • LISBON (PORTUGAL) • STUDIO FOR IMMEDIATE SPACES

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/beatriz-conefrey

30 64 Having a background in Graphic Design, words and text are predominant in Beatriz Conefrey’s (Lisbon, Portugal, 1996) practice, which she brings to the surface using voice and sound. She is interested in giving and creating narratives and imaginative scenarios to spaces. Turning the public realm into a scripted space, the audience becomes a potential character of the piece. Invisibility, discomfort, taboos and the usage of the voice are her topics of investigation. In the piece How dare you? Conefrey opens doors to five rooms in the former underground shooting range of Het Hem in Zaandam, creating five scenes, in which the audience bears witness to various conversations and monologues. While walking through the tunnel the audience enters one room after another, tuning in to narratives, passing through different imaginative spaces, ambiances and moods.

Hello, I am your Host. Like me or not, no turning back.

THE HOST

As you can hear, I am the Voice you listen first. I am the Voice that runs this space. Call it power or just obligations.

I am the Voice of the space that you are about to enter. My Voice is a muscle that I shaped to fit this specific location, I have others… But here, in this space, my Voice is assertive! generous, clear. my words are distinctive, And since you are here, I will actually not decide if you enter, but here you have your own will.

• BEATRIZ CONEFREY • LISBON (PORTUGAL) • STUDIO FOR IMMEDIATE SPACES

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/beatriz-conefrey

CULTURE À LA CARTE

• WILLEM SCHENK • HENGELO (NL) • THE COMMONERS' SOCIETY

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/willem-schenk

32 64

Culture à la carte is a series of interventions designed to mitigate today’s cut-throat capitalist society. The events arise from collaborations with autonomous artists and designers who are working around socially engaged topics such as trust, labor and minorities. For one of the collaborations I was inspired by a rural tradition from the Dutch hinterlands. The work of designer and activist Rowena Buur is laid into a mosaic of flowers – discussing the lack of queer spaces amongst conservative communities.

CULTURE À LA CARTE

• WILLEM SCHENK • HENGELO (NL) • THE COMMONERS' SOCIETY

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/willem-schenk

Willem Schenk’s (Hengelo, The Netherlands, 1991) Culture à la carte is a series of interventions designed to mitigate our capitalist surroundings. The events arise from collaborations with autonomous artists and designers who are working around socially engaged topics such as trust, labor and minorities. Through a series of interventions such as outdoor cooking, Schenk aims to discover a new role for art and design. Events arise from a need for resilient communities who need emphatic models to survive. Ideas are open source and applicable on fleeting places in our daily life such as independently owned bars, salons and shops. Schenk asks which new traditions can be scripted for these institutions and how we can learn and expand on the values they bring to the table.

A WAY OF WEARING

• TING GONG • CHONGQING (CHINA) • CHALLENGING JEWELLERY

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/ting-gong

34 64

Ting Gong (Chongqing, China, 1989) is interested in garments as they are made, used, exchanged, and take on a life of their own between people and places. At the center of her project, A Way of Wearing, is a particular Chinese padded coat that belonged to a woman in a rural village, which Ting eventually purchased from her for a symbolic price. This seasoned craft object – over 20 years old – has led Ting to think about designing for and in an ongoing cycle of social exchange, considering how one can include social histories of production into the product itself. Her project comprises 20 coat replicas that will be passed on to friends who commit to a 20-year retainer period, in which they will exchange their coats yearly. By doing so, Ting explores how clothing itself can constitute a kind of social fabric and a commitment to each other.

A WAY OF WEARING

• TING GONG • CHONGQING (CHINA) • CHALLENGING JEWELLERY

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/ting-gong

“A Way of Wearing” consists of 1 piece of garment (a design), 1 letter (a statement) and 20 envelopes (a reach for commitment). The work will unfold in time, starting from 2020, and ending in 2040.

DIABLE

• OCTAVE RIMBERTRIVIÈRE • LA SEYNE SUR MER (FRANCE) • DIRTY ART DEPARTMENT

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/octave-rimbert-riviere

36 64

In my practice, I cross over references and link them in an unhierarchical way. Those fragments glued together become monsters. Their skins and surfaces are seductive, colorful and shiny, but they hide something disturbing. They outline bodies that stand between humour and the uncanny. Like a trompe l’oeil, they flirt with the eyes of the viewer, even if finally an empty character stands behind the gaze. The emptiness of those grotesque figures is reminding us that everything around us could be an imitation, a ghost coming back from the past, or a combination of something haunting and humourous.

• INANIMATE FRIENDS

• OCTAVE RIMBERTRIVIÈRE • LA SEYNE SUR MER (FRANCE) • DIRTY ART DEPARTMENT

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/octave-rimbert-riviere

37 The sculptures of Octave Rimbert-Rivière (La Seyne sur Mer, France, 1988) cross-over, mash-up, code-switch, trans-mutate and counter-craft without hierarchy of process or material. The installation Inanimate Friends consists of heads blown from colored glass. The heads seem to have faces on both sides and are ghost-like hanging in the exhibition space. Behind the glass sculptures, Rimbert-Rivière installed two-dimensional works that are suggesting the same spatial qualities as the heads that flirt with the viewer like a trompe l’oeil. The emptiness of those grotesque figures is reminding us that everything around us could be an imitation, a ghost coming back from the past, or a combination of something haunting and humorous.

ECCE ÖTZI

• LEVI VAN GELDER • BENEDENLEEUWEN (NL) • DESIGN

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/levi-van-gelder

38 64 For his work Ecce Ötzi, Levi van Gelder (Beneden-Leeuwen, The Netherlands, 1995) filmed two members of a Carnival association making a paper-mâché head that depicts the cryodesiccated corpse of Ötzi the Ice Man, Europe’s oldest known natural mummy. When Carnival is cancelled, they have to decide upon the fate of the distorted effigy. The head, which is exhibited by Van Gelder, becomes charged with personal and political values. Questions around the futility and folklore of Carnival merge with questions about our human nature and position in this world. In an exploration of how values are transmitted from symbol to person, from person to person, Ötzi becomes a medium to unearth frictions between compounds of reality and fiction, representation and misrepresentation, in a game of encounter and failed adaptation.

NO TITLE

• LEVI VAN GELDER • BENEDENLEEUWEN (NL) • DESIGN

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/levi-van-gelder

I tried yanking my legs out of their sockets, dislocating them and putting them elsewhere useful. I tried growing extra tall, growing extra flesh. Eating bugs to muster extra power. Holding my breath and biting my teeth and moving my rotting vessel towards a way out. I remember I cried and felt guilty and angry about crying since this would defeat the objective to evolve into a normal stoic human that muffles its tears.

UNTITLED CERTAINTY

• LUCIA FERNANDEZ SANTORO • ZURICH (SWITZERLAND) • THE COMMONERS' SOCIETY

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/lucia-fernandez-santoro

64 40

Immersive installation exploring space expansion between mirror, body, lights and smoke. Study on the physicality of smoke and the narrative potential it contains. How, conditioned by a few factors (lights, mirrors) it induces the viewers in a state and space for individual storytelling to occur. Study on everyday life and its fictional potentials. How is a body a story, how can the narrative association of the body be removed from its primal interpretation? E-publication of thesis illustrated and with sonic interpretation.

7 UM / SEVEN MICROMETERS

• LUCIA FERNANDEZ SANTORO • ZURICH (SWITZERLAND) • THE COMMONERS' SOCIETY

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/lucia-fernandez-santoro

Through the immersive installation 7 um / seven micrometers, II Lucia Fernandez Santoro (Zurich, Switzerland, 1991) explores space expansion and its malleability. The work is a ‘duet’ between a flexible structure and a body in an environment framed by lights and smoke. Fernandez Santoro investigates the body as a story and how narrative association attached to the body can exceed its primal interpretation through kinetic empathy. The work is an on-going performative study on physicality and the narrative potential it contains. Inducing the viewers into a meditative state, the installation tries to transform the exhibition space into a space where individual storytelling can occur. The physical manifestation of this narrative exploration can be seen as a sequel to the master thesis Ad Extremum Terrae.

MEMORY TRACES

• ANNA MARIA BALINT • BASEL (SWITZERLAND) • FINE ARTS

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/anna-maria-balint

42 64

For her sculptural installation Memory traces, Anna Maria Balint (Basel, Switzerland, 1992) combined stainless steel and fiberglass fabric to create slightly translucent ‘frames’ for her resin cast objects. Light passes through the material, emphasizing the tension of the material’s surface. The sculptures’ transparency makes fore and background merge.

KEYS

• ANNA MARIA BALINT • BASEL (SWITZERLAND) • FINE ARTS

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/anna-maria-balint

Keys is a video work showing simultaneously different sceneries, directing the viewers vision to various objects. The shown objects are keys in the narrative to unknown meanings. “There is this thing which transforms in front of ones eyes, memorized in the mind, as both of the images, present and transcended into abstraction.”

THE SAME COIN

• LIESELOT VERSTEEG • BEVERWIJK (NL) • FINE ARTS

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/lieselot-versteeg

64 44

When owning a power symbol (many, large, big) on ones body, it causes that body to be shattered with holes through which everything that the symbol incarnates can be experienced. I think ‘power’ then beams out from every coin-hole.

TOOLS FOR • LIESELOT DISPERSION VERSTEEG AND TECH- • BEVERWIJK NIQUES FOR (NL) ACCUMULATION • FINE ARTS https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/lieselot-versteeg

Lieselot Versteeg (Beverwijk, The Netherlands, 1990) shows five works that are part of her Tools for Dispersion and Techniques for Accumulation. For Coin-holes she perforated small plates of brass. Versteeg sees the perforations as metaphors for the power of the symbol that a coin represents. By accumulating a symbol it gains power. This importance of repetition is also visible in Versteeg’s Nets, a seemingly semi-functional structure, reminiscent of a piece of jewellery because of the use of antique glass beads. By using recognizable materials in an unusual way, Versteeg questions their symbolic value.

DO WHAT YOU LOVE

• MICHAEL WEBER • KARLSRUHE (GERMANY) • STUDIO FOR IMMEDIATE SPACES

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/michael-weber

46 64

For his film Do What You Love, Michael Weber (Karlsruhe, Germany, 1987) focused on the current condition of the immaterial worker trying to find certainty in the era of New Work. By observing and researching co-working spaces, such as WeWork as well as small cafés with couches occupied by freelancers and entrepreneurs, Weber questions what it means to live in a world under Post-Fordism. Rather than understanding co-working spaces as places filled with energetic and opportunistic people, Do What You Love frames them as an assembly of invisible networks and accounts, digital communities, isolated beings, all operating from lists of references and made up job titles where everyone is a manager, director and executive officer. Weber makes visible the structure of how things work, revealing the game you have to play in order to have a chance of winning it.

DO WHAT YOU LOVE

• MICHAEL WEBER • KARLSRUHE (GERMANY) • STUDIO FOR IMMEDIATE SPACES

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/michael-weber

Do What You Love is a series of web-based sculptures fantasizing on today’s immaterial worker in the neoliberal city. Labour as a state of accomplishment and utility has been replaced by its lifestylization. The immaterial worker experiences labor marketed as a product, masked as a service to optimize the daily work routine.

HELLO NONHUMANS, https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/letters/hello-non-humans-by-zippora-elders

LETTER BY

ZIPPORA ELDERS CURATOR

EDITORIAL LETTERS

SEVEN *CLICKING* INDEX FINGERS 49

GRADUATES MENTIONED

• HANNA VALLE • ANOUK ASSELINEAU • ANDREA GONZÁLEZ • SASHA SERGIENKO • SELINE DURRER • VERONIKA FABIAN • MARGARET MUNCHHEIMER • SIMPSON TSE • MORGANE DE KLERK • TALI LIBERMAN • NATALIA JORDANOVA

DEAR NON-HUMANS,

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/letters/hello-non-humans-by-zippora-elders

ZIPPORA ELDERS

Dear Jurgen, Cc: Anouk Asselineau, Seline Durrer, Veronika Fabian, Andrea Gonzalez, Natalia Jordanova, Morgane de Klerk, Tali Liberman, Margaret Munchheimer, Sasha Sergienko, Simpson Tse, Hanna Valle A note from me to you, director to director, following the postponed graduation of the Sandberg students in September 2020. That month also marked your 10 year anniversary as director of the Sandberg Instituut, for which I send my congratulations. In June I was invited to write a letter to Non-Humans, simultaneously integrating the description of the works-in-progress of eleven selected graduates. And now, as a follow-up, we have been asked to continue the writing after their finals. Reading back, I am fascinated by the level of abstraction that I could allow myself to think in still, last June, considering the vast and daily-changing loads of emotional and institutional labour that followed soon thereafter. It made me wonder ... How are you looking back at this year, Jurgen? If anything, 2020 is a year in which injustice and inequality came to the surface on so many levels and in so many layers. As a director of an international, public institution for art education: how did you deal with that? And, something I have been asking myself often as well: how do you measure to what extend you are the appropriate person to do so? The presence of racism and sexism, as well as emotional, physical and sexual violence, sadly is one of the everyday. A question that kept on bugging me these past months: how can we create a safe environment for our students, our artists and designers, to be able to just work. Just work. It sounds so simple. But apparently it is not.

DEAR NON-HUMANS,

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/letters/hello-non-humans-by-zippora-elders

ZIPPORA ELDERS

Have we been failing, as a public sector? Is our government shifting responsibilities to us? What is our agency, where lies our strength, and which work will we do? Below, in caps, extra notes on the graduation projects. Poetry, still. Looking forward, stay healthy, Z.

DEAR NON-HUMANS,

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/letters/hello-non-humans-by-zippora-elders

ZIPPORA ELDERS

You can be tools, you can be dead, you can be unknown to me still. You can exist in my imagination and you can exist outside this world.

Dear Non-Humans, Bcc: Koert van Mensvoort Are you familiar with love? In human language it means deep affection. To be honest I think some humans are more capable of loving non-humans than each other. Except, maybe, for those who they consider non-humans while they’re actually humans as well. Are you still following me here? It seems that to some, humans become lesser humans when they are threatening our own safety. And safety, another non-human, is a strange thing you know: it doesn’t necessarily mean being protected from danger. It means a lot more than that. Things unnecessary even. I’ve witnessed humans neglecting love in favor of extended safety, luxury, the familiair. It’s twisted. With humans, safety apparently easily turns into greed, and in turn anxiety – all about possessing non-humans. And it gets even more twisted, because one of the non-humans that we’re probably most dependent on, we are actually protecting the less: a climate that we humans can survive in. And to make it even worse, that often comes with simultaneously running over other humans that look less similar to ourselves. My apologies, I’m not sure if any of this is actually of your concern. Many of you non-humans will be better off without us anyway. So let’s turn to the non-humans that we do value – and even make ourselves. And sometimes such special ones! Humans are currently graduating from art school by making you, and in making

DEAR NON-HUMANS,

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/letters/hello-non-humans-by-zippora-elders

ZIPPORA ELDERS

you they’re reflecting on your meaning. No taking for granted at all. Isn’t that hopeful? Let me give you some examples. Our current state of saying goodbye to old narratives and realities, while not recognizing new horizons yet, is a recurring topic for several of these artists. For example, the speculative and bodily landscapes of Hanna Valle created strange narratives where labour and fantasy come together. DID THIS IMAGINATION BECOME REAL NOW? Also Anouk Asselineau blurred realities by her immersive recorded story, the Female Hypnotist. HOW IS THE HYPNOTIST DOING? In addition Andrea González investigated our material culture in order to produce alternate dream worlds. HAVE WE TURNED INTO VAMPIRES YET? And Sasha Sergienko searched for new romanticism and experiencing true belief: through his colourful, bright works he is encouraging sensory receptivity for events from the past and future. WHAT TO DO WITH PAST AND FUTURE IN A SITUATION WHERE PRESENT IS EVERYTHING? In turn Seline Durrer in her work searches for “slowing up”, as a chance to rethink the present. WHAT ARE MESSAGE AND MASSAGE SERVICES TODAY? That present was especially challenged during the semilockdown that the virus brought upon us. Veronika Fabian is using jewellery as an intermediary between the self and society and as a mediator of value and identity, exploring the lasting bond that we have with our objects. With this in mind, it is interesting how she noted how working from home really messed up her work-life balance: “Work can be an addiction quite easily.” You probably wonder how this affected her bond with and between home objects and work objects? WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN LABOUR AND DOMESTIC? Also Margaret Munchheimer – who researches hand work and gestural communication – during lockdown began working in strange, typically unused corners like the laundry room. “I sat there on a stack of blankets, working with wire and pliers creating sculptures.” WHERE DO HUMAN CRAFT AND HUMAN HERITAGE TOUCH? And Simpson Tse – who explores notions of affective work – even had the realization that he had never lived with a toilet of

DEAR NON-HUMANS,

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/letters/hello-non-humans-by-zippora-elders

ZIPPORA ELDERS

his own: “In the most practical sense, maybe we do not need one! Then again, the last two months has heightened another realization of being privileged enough to be able to gain access to stable accommodation and a certain degree of personal space.” ARE WE UNKNOWINGLY LIVING IN OUR FECES? Musing about living with your designs, Morgane de Klerk’s developed a bunch of sensitive protectors. “Who is assisting who, nowadays? Is it the object or the user?” Her hybrids between devises and jewellery, are protecting their users from being unwillingly traced or reminding them that devices are essentially tools to benefit from. Indeed wishes to care and be cared for are a tough question for us humans in these days: “I wish to find enough financial stability to be able to have a small family,” she said. “While this is a rather normal wish for a 33 years old woman, the status of creatives is often so precarious that it feels like a luxury to project ourselves in a future in which we could provide and support anyone.” WILL THE PLAGUE PUSH US INTO A POST NATAL-FAMILY ERA? In general navigating ourselves while being observed and simultaneously observing seems even more of a challenge than before. In his project Tali Liberman unveiled the bias from interfaces that seem neutral by design. Unrendered Road traces the road between Jerusalem and Jericho, which would be dismissed by Google Maps. HOW CAN WE FIND SAFETY IN NATURE THAT IS LARGELY RECONFIGURED BY MEN? In turn Natalia Jordanova’s alienating yet attractive sculptural installation is itself developed as an ecosystem of images and signs. She quite hopefully stated about the current tides: “I believe that form is just a possibility, and so if conditions change that form can also transform. Essentially, ideas can not be taken away...” WHAT IS DIRTY ART IN A DIRTY WORLD? Dear non-humans, you can be divided between the nonhumans that were already there (or will enter from elsewhere), and the non-humans that have been created by or due to humans. The latter are often designed. Therefore

DEAR NON-HUMANS,

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/letters/hello-non-humans-by-zippora-elders

ZIPPORA ELDERS

I hope you can forgive us for acting so human-centric in basically everything that we do, for foresaking you so often. But believe me: those rare moments when we actually are trying to balance life a bit with beauty, we mean well, and when we do that by simultaneously reflecting upon ourselves, we do too. Indeed such non-human artifacts are made in collaboration with on of my favourite non-humans: imagination. Likely, as a human, one needs imagination to foresee a future in our imagined linear perception of time. And especially now one needs imagination to genuinely believe that we’re living in a fertile and good world. Perhaps imagination will keep us safe – at least in our minds and souls – and make us survive after all. I don’t know. But maybe you do. In honour of you I am inviting any body viewing these graduation works to blur their biased difference between humans and non-humans. And to give both their equally devoted attention. Z.

Graduates mentioned: sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/hanna-valle sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/anouk-asselineau sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/andrea-gonzalez sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/sasha-sergienko sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/seline-durrer sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/veronika-fabian sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/margaret-munchheimer sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/simpson-tse sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/morgane-de-klerk sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/tali-liberman sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/natalia-jordanova

DEAR NON-HUMANS,

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/letters/hello-non-humans-by-zippora-elders

ZIPPORA ELDERS

Zippora Elders (34) is director of Kunstfort bij Vijfhuizen and cocurator of sonsbeek20-24. Previously she worked a.o. as curator for Foam and as master coordinator at Sandberg Instituut. She holds several advisory positions and regularly writes for Dutch art magazines as well as international platforms and publications.

OFFSPRING

• HANNA VALLE • VANTAA (FINLAND) • DESIGN

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/hanna-valle

58 64

‘Offspring’ is an ongoing visual research about speculative and bodily landscapes.

OFFSPRING

• HANNA VALLE • VANTAA (FINLAND) • DESIGN

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/hanna-valle

59 Hanna Valle’s (Vantaa, Finland, 1988) installation Offspring is a test ground for tactile experiments. It is a science fiction story about pulsing objects and alien parenthood, – the relationship of the sculptor’s physical labour and the beings on the table. Through Offspring, Valle imagines different multi-species’ continuous journeys on Earth, moving across various landscapes and different times while carrying the burden of an environmentally violent past. As the illegitimate descendant of the human designer, Offspring deals with the questions of (historical) transformation, co-dependency and care. Following the traces of yet-unknown organisms – bodies entwined with the environment reminiscences of trauma and terror – Valle maps uncanny scenes, where socioecological tensions take form, materialize and speak.

WRAP • ANOUK YOUR ARMS ASSELINEAU AROUND • MELBOURNE IT (AUSTRALIA) • FINE ARTS https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/anouk-asselineau

60 64

Anouk Asselineau (Melbourne, Australia, 1993) developed Wrap Your Arms Around It in relation to the pillars that are part of Het Hem’s exhibition space. The grid in which the pillars stand is emphasized by the silhouettes of rats that Asselineau applied to them. One of the columns invites visitors to sit down on a wooden bench that is made around it. The wooden structure has organic recesses that reflect the shape of the pillars as well as those of the visitors. It is balanced by green sandbags of which one is open and reveals a cat-like creature made out of soil. Like the rats, it seems to be a creature from a different world, and perhaps a dream.

FEMALE HYPNOTIST

• ANOUK ASSELINEAU • MELBOURNE (AUSTRALIA) • FINE ARTS

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/anouk-asselineau

Female Hypnotist is a short story written by Anouk during the quarantine. The story has been sitting for about a decade and is now being released through writing. Currently Anouk is holding voice auditions for the story to be read, recorded, the recording will then be pressed as a record.

ES IMPOSIBLE, NO PUEDE SER

• ANDREA GONZÁLEZ • MADRID (SPAIN) • DESIGN

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/andrea-gonzalez

62 64

It is impossible it cannot be: something too good to be true. It is impossible it cannot be: something that cannot be because it is impossible and is doomed to disappear. Radical hedonism, Nowhere girls, being out of time, super power, absence of fear: I start to flirt with the idea that the memories – supernatural – of that scene, subversion, infinite music, heartbeats beatmatching beats, being part of something completely new, speeding cars, tireless dancing bodies, memories of transcending to another world that still live – are connected to the notion of the vampiric.

ES IMPOSIBLE, NO PUEDE SER

• ANDREA GONZÁLEZ • MADRID (SPAIN) • DESIGN

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/andrea-gonzalez

La Ruta del Bacalao was a club scene that appeared magically and disappeared tragically between 1977 and 1993 along the highway CV-500 near Valencia, Spain. For her film Es Imposible, No Puede Ser (It Is Impossible, It Cannot Be) Andrea González (Madrid, Spain, 1990) went to look for vampires where the images were missing. Set in a car trapped at full speed on the CV-500, the script is a fictional reconstruction of the ruins of a future in a past that cannot be. Something too good to be true, something that cannot be because it is impossible and is condemned to disappear; the film crosses archeological and speculative means to sculpt an impossible dreamscape outside of time.The film strives for alternative models of narration that respond to the complexity of capturing something that is not here anymore.

AUM MANI PADME HUM

• SASHA SERGIENKO • KERCH (UKRAINE) • FINE ARTS

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/sasha-sergienko

For his Aum Mani Padme Hum, Sasha Sergienko (Kerch, Ukraine. 1989) explores meditation and daydreaming. The work consists of two A3 papers on the wall, mentioning the title of the work, which is the most frequently quoted mantra in Tibetan Buddhism. Half of our life is spent in some sort of daydreaming. Sergienko proposes to use that time to meditate instead in order to eliminate daydreams entirely, acknowledging that this wouldn’t leave much time for anything else than cooking, eating and washing.

ASCENSION

• SASHA SERGIENKO • KERCH (UKRAINE) • FINE ARTS

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/sasha-sergienko

The soul was wandering through experimental exploration on dramatic issues, studying phenomena of catastrophe of the world in its wide sense. That’s why after odious thesis, it needed spiritual growth and salvation, hence, it needed peaceful conclusion. Ascension is a selection of works which are eventually clear, solved, bright and optimistic. It’s just an exit from the past with long awaited maturity.

OVERTURE

• SELINE DURRER • LUCERNE (SWITZERLAND) • CHALLENGING JEWELLERY

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/seline-durrer

66 64

Overture acts as a vocal ‘Auftakt’ for graduation, reflecting the urge for a slowing up and a wishful reality as a chance to rethink the present – where the value of virtually everything is measured in quantitative economic terms of time and money. A personal manifestation, Overture aims to return to the essence; instead of adding more things devoid of humanity, diversity or complexity and to create awareness of the most precious commodity we have: time.

OVERTURE

OPENING • SELINE AN ALREADY DURRER KNOWN • LUCERNE CONTENT (SWITZERLAND) • CHALLENGING JEWELLERY https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/seline-durrer

Seline Durrer (Lucerne, Switzerland, 1992) explores the modalities of process, team-work and productivity. In her practice, she cultivates moments of concentration, intimacy, and ambiguity within critical objectives, which lead to shifts in perception in everyday life. As an initiator and member of OVERGRADUATION, she co-created the collective’s founding contract, which formalizes how artistic professionals can provide for their own existence and work together within a non-consensual cultural space. The contract was subsequently transformed into a flag and a bedsheet for members to use at home. At Het Hem, Durrer collaborated on a wall scape installation with fellow graduates of Challenging Jewellery and BLESS to create a memorial space for the graduation work and its metamorphosis.

CHAINED

• VERONIKA FABIAN • KECSKEMÉT (HUNGARY) • CHALLENGING JEWELLERY

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/veronika-fabian

68 64 Veronika Fabian (Kecskemét, Hungary, 1979) investigates the impact of contemporary capitalism on daily life and personal identity, both of which play a vital role in her project Chained. She conducted a survey asking individuals to name their most essential possessions as a way to investigate the role of artifacts as signifiers of identity and as a potential way through which value can be created and expressed. Fabian condensed the outcome of the survey into a series of chain necklaces, analyzing and reflecting on our material culture, to stimulate a dialogue on the necessity and value of our things. In addition to the pieces, Chained expands across mediums, comprising short stories and several musical singles produced in a collaborative project. Along with the jewellery pieces and music videos, Fabian presents Chained in an AR fitting room where audiences are invited to try on the collection.

YOU, ME AND YOUR STUFF

• VERONIKA FABIAN • KECSKEMÉT (HUNGARY) • CHALLENGING JEWELLERY

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/veronika-fabian

In her project You, me and your stuff Veronika Fabian presents a series of chains made of reconstructed everyday objects. Using jewellery as an intermediary between the self and society and as a mediator of value and identity, the work explores the lasting bond we have with our objects. Building on the tension between image and materiality, commodity and uniqueness, craft and design in contemporary society, her experiment aims to create an ongoing dialogue allowing individuals to engage at various stages of the creative process.

ALPHABET OF TOUCH, 2020

• MARGARET MUNCHHEIMER • LAKEPORT, CALIFORNIA (USA) • CHALLENGING JEWELLERY

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/margaret-munchheimer

64 70

Stemming from my thesis research regarding craft as human heritage, I began this object investigation referencing the ideas of both hand work, and gestural communication. Current prototypes are made of soft black iron wire, depicting life-size abstracted images of hands, with the effect of 3D line-drawings. The visual impact of the hand has shifted since the effects of quarantine and social distancing. Regardless of my initial interpretation for the work, the current reading is unmistakably about human touch and the lack of contact; a temporary layer of interpretation, but nonetheless relevant.

ALPHABET OF TOUCH

• MARGARET MUNCHHEIMER • LAKEPORT, CALIFORNIA (USA) • CHALLENGING JEWELLERY

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/margaret-munchheimer

Margaret Munchheimer (Lakeport, California USA, 1976) considers craft a tacit “body knowledge” that resides within the brain and muscles. This discourse takes on a new perspective in a digital era, where hand-based technologies are often rendered obsolete, and where jewellery can seem like a very old-school practice where touch, pressure, and unmediated tactility play a huge role. Munchheimer’s Alphabet of Touch is an inquiry into how physicality is translated (or not) in a digital age of design. Her material research journey has led her to working with iron that she manipulates into outlines of hands, which, when put against a white backdrop, resemble line-drawing made in 3D digital image rendering software. Ironically, their shadow on the wall is then a 2D version of a 3D object. Considering Plato’s allegory of the cave, Munchheimer imagines how we can explore the messy space between vision, perception, materiality, and virtuality.

WHY ARE WE • SIMPSON TSE PRETENDING • MELBOURNE TO BE (AUSTRALIA) CLOCKS? • THE COMMONERS' SOCIETY https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/simpson-tse

72 64

Living In A Blur is a video installation by Simpson Tse (Melbourne, Australia, 1984) that contains 12 video loops filmed using Jitsi, a video conferencing application with a default function called ‘background blur option’. During this time of stay-at-home working, we have grown accustomed to this blurry virtual environment, and have begun spending a considerable amount of time living in it. The installation Why Are We Pretending to be Clocks? is comprised of laundry racks, engraved acrylics of screenshots taken from Living in A Blur, and silk-screened pillowcases. The work points at both domestic work (such as laundry) and online work (such as virtual meetings) as forms of affective labour, which have often been called ‘feminine labour’. Especially during this period of confinement, housework can be rewarding, and a strategy to stay sane and to stay in a sense of control.

LIVING IN A BLUR

• SIMPSON TSE • MELBOURNE (AUSTRALIA) • THE COMMONERS' SOCIETY

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/simpson-tse

During this period of soft quarantine, my room is a workplace, a gym, a library, and also a cinema and its foyer, now occupied not by a crowd but by audio visual transmissions from other rooms in the city and further afield. The divisions between work, entertainment, leisure, and relationships bleed into one another. Originated from a fascination of the background blur options in video conferencing applications, Living in a Blur is a research project looking into these contemporary notions of blurriness, and how blurriness could be seen as the aesthetics of both our social facade and emotional interiors.

HEY DEVICE, SHOW ME PRIVACY

• MORGANE DE KLERK • LISIEUX (FRANCE) • CHALLENGING JEWELLERY

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/morgane-de-klerk

64 74

Who is assisting who, nowadays? Is it the object or the user? The mixed-media installation aims to raise awareness on the value of the numerous personal data collected, and on the loss of privacy and control generated from the quantification of our behaviours. It consists in a series of tangible objects; hybrids between devices and jewellery, protecting their users from being unwillingly traced and/or reminding them that devices are essentially tools to benefit from. This reciprocity between the object and the user is an interaction based on trust – a type of trust currently put at stake.

HEY DEVICE, SHOW ME PRIVACY

• MORGANE DE KLERK • LISIEUX (FRANCE) • CHALLENGING JEWELLERY

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/morgane-de-klerk

Morgane de Klerk’s (Lisieux, France, 1987) Hey device, show me privacy investigates privacy and surveillance technologies in the age of the smartphone: the increasing invisibility and dematerialization of surveillance, and how to position oneself against that as a maker of objects. De Klerk created a series of 9 aluminum pieces that serve as tokens of surveillance rather than having any actual function. They serve as decorative pieces that look like iPhones crawling up the pocket, surrounding the body; like shadows of the real thing. During the exhibition at Het Hem, De Klerk presents an interactive service where audiences can have free clay replicas made of their smartphones.

UNRENDERED ROAD

• TALI LIBERMAN • THE NEGEV (ISRAEL) • DESIGN

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/tali-liberman

76 64 The work of Tali Liberman (The Negev, Israel, 1985) questions socio-political narratives and structures. By dismantling the subjectivity portrayed in objectivising disciplines and tools, she unpacks forms of knowledge that shape one's perception of so-called reality. The video Unrendered Road traces the road between two ancient cities – Jerusalem and Jericho. A journey that Google Maps will not show you – an unrendered road. By assembling conflicting perceptual readings, the reliance of existing knowledge systems are questioned, including regulations and legislations, on geo-political power structures and sedimented historical inequities. The resultant ‘editing’ of reality is made manifest through the interface by which we navigate a conflicted border zone.

UNRENDERED ROAD

• TALI LIBERMAN • THE NEGEV (ISRAEL) • DESIGN

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/tali-liberman

Our reliance on seemingly neutrally designed interfaces makes our interactions with devices feel natural but when applied unequally, systems and technology also concentrate power and knowledge, enable and disable our access to places, and to certain actions. The video installation Unrendered Road traces the road between Jerusalem and Jericho. A road that Google Maps will not direct you to, the unrendered road. By documenting and bringing together different experiences of the road Liberman unpacks existing knowledge systems, regulations, and legislation, as an attempt to expose the political and historical circumstances manifested through the interface.

BURSTING BUBBLES: ANOTHER TRUTH

• NATALIA JORDANOVA • SOFIA (BULGARIA) • DIRTY ART DEPARTMENT

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/natalia-jordanova

78 64

The sculptural installation is developed as an ecosystem of images and signs. Its narrative explores myths, science fiction imagination and the desire to know. The world, as defined, consists of objects resembling fortune-teller orbs and two-dimensional sculptural pieces. It mimics the way technology is using models, systems, and elements of nature to solve complex human problems. The proposition is for a non-human centred subject, no single narrative and no single truth.

BURSTING BUBBLES: ANOTHER TRUTH

• NATALIA JORDANOVA • SOFIA (BULGARIA) • DIRTY ART DEPARTMENT

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/natalia-jordanova

Natalia Jordanova (Sofia, Bulgaria, 1991) sees her practice as an evolutionary process. From human bodies to animals, machines and environments, she moves between scales of magnification and time frames to explore what it means to be human today. Bursting Bubbles: Another Truth is the third stage of an installation first titled Simultaneous Truths followed by Flat Bubbles. For the duration of one year, the work has developed and transformed from one exhibition to another, mimicking the way technology uses models, systems, and elements of nature to solve complex human problems. As an ecosystem of images and signs, it evolves within context and between places – a feedback loop between the natural and the artificial technologically-fabulated reality.

DEAR GATE KEEPERS, https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/letters/dear-gatekeepers-maurits-de-bruijn

LETTER BY

MAURITS DE BRUIJN WRITER

EDITORIAL LETTERS

SEVEN *CLICKING* INDEX FINGERS 81

GRADUATES MENTIONED

• EMIRHAN AKIN • PATRYCJA ROZWORA • CARMEN DUSMET CARRASCO • VERONIKA BABAYAN • LINDA STAUFFER • MARIA MAZZANTI • LAILA EL MEHELMY • MAREK MROWINSKI • MARILYN VOLKMAN • KASPER VAN MOLL • LUCIA FERNANDEZ SANTORO

DEAR GATEKEEPERS,

MAURITS DE BRUIJN

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/letters/dear-gatekeepers-maurits-de-bruijn

Dear gatekeepers of the art world, Cc: Emirhan Akin, Patrycja Rozwora, Carmen Dusmet Carrasco, Veronika Babayan, Linda Stauffer, Maria Mazzanti, Laile El Mehelmy, Marek Mrowinski, Marilyn Volkman, Kasper van Moll, Lucia Fernandez Santoro This is a proposition. It is to be taken seriously, but not personally. If this proposition is an attack on anyone, or anything, it would be the art world as we know it. I’ve been trying to make this proposal sound like a movie trailer, so I would appreciate it if you, the reader, would be willing to experience it as such. In a world ... (you know the type of movie trailer I’m referring to) ... In an art world ... without ... any imposed hierarchy ... ten people graduate. (Graduating isn’t the right term here, because it would imply a hierarchy between the students who haven’t met the criteria to fly off – or couldn’t or did not want to meet those criteria – and the students who did.) So ... In an art world ... without any imposed hierarchy, ten people exhibit their work amongst their peers in a set of buildings previously used for military purposes. (Within our society, the military is the absolute epitome of hierarchy. Not one institution relies on the pecking order as heavily. An army consists of collective action that is ranked. Those military ranks define the level of authority, prestige, compensation, honour, dominance and responsibility each individual of the collective carries and deserves.) The first thing to be discovered in this exhibition is a black screen mounted on a deteriorated wall. On that screen, we see a face that is surrounded by black matter. A human face, the face of the maker, possibly. But in this proposition for an art world without

DEAR GATEKEEPERS,

MAURITS DE BRUIJN

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/letters/dear-gatekeepers-maurits-de-bruijn

hierarchy, one shouldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t pay attention to authorship. We can forget about the concept of origination altogether. Authorship and origination belong to the system of individuality and individuality belongs to religion of the ego. That damned ego, celebrated so profusely and shamelessly in the art world of the past. A celebration that cemented the relation between the social status of the artist and their work, a celebration of the bad boy. An art industry that produced stars. No, here, in this instance, the face is nothing more than a face. Whether it belongs to a man or woman, is of no relevance. Neither is the presumed age of that face, or the presumed ethnic heritage of said face. We will ignore whoever made this work. It is just a face, looking into the camera and repeating the word human until it is nothing more than a sound, a collection of movements of the mouth, rendered meaningless. In our neoliberal, bureaucratic society, we (are) often (forced to) lose one anotherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s humanity out of sight. We place the importance of money and rules and paper and documents and ranks above our innate sense of values, care and love. The face drifting through the black seems to try to remind us of what we all are in the first place: human. I would like you, the gatekeepers of the art world, to carry more weight to the humanity of others, and your own, for that matter, from here on. It could make your gates more fluid, more honest and could make the institutions more durable. Next to the black screen and itsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; moving mouth, stands a kitchen-like set up. There are some fruits lying around, some jars, some cooking has happened, some fruit leather was extracted from a pomegranate. (Here, I could use the pomegranate as a metaphor, for surprise, for violence, and mostly for bombings. But if I were to do that, I would consciously ignore the mangoes that were there). The fruit leather on display was turned into passports, another pillar of the hierarchy that exists in our world. One could easily imagine those passports to melt, to turn into fruit juice again. Or what if they

DEAR GATEKEEPERS,

MAURITS DE BRUIJN

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/letters/dear-gatekeepers-maurits-de-bruijn

would disappear into mould, that transition fruit is so capable of? I would like to quote a fragment of a poem that accompanied this work if thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s OK: I I I I I

am am am am am

both the oppressor and the oppressed both the victim and the perpetrator both war and peace a wandering call for those who are longing; a quest for new geographies of belonging.

In the very same room, hangs a series of puppets. Helpless marionettes awaiting their puppeteer, whom I hope never shows up. I prefer them while they wait, are inactive, not yet put to work. Flamboyant, fun, full of potential, and seemingly genderless these characters hang, stuck in a moment of uncertainty. Gatekeepers, a fresh load of graduates can often seem like a group of puppets, to be celebrated, marketed and exploited, one by one. Letâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s try not to do that to this particular group. Please. Be collaborators of these artists instead, be on equal footing with them, let go of your status. In the kitchen I mentioned before, stands a table. On that table a podcast is presented. Podcasts are great, for a number of reasons. Mostly, because anyone can experience them, no matter where they are. That makes this a non-hierarchical work by its very nature. Kitchen Conversations is a series of talks with artists that create work that in some way relates to their post-Soviet heritage. (I like to think of conversations as opportunities for equality, but they can be many things, especially in kitchens, conversations tend to take on a fluid character.) In one of these talks I heard a thought that, however simple and some might say obvious, I want to underline: we all have two things in common, they are the great equalizers, we are all born at some point and we all die at another point. In between those two points, we all try to find a sense of purpose (no, that is not true, to be in search of purpose is to revel in privilege).

DEAR GATEKEEPERS,

MAURITS DE BRUIJN

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/letters/dear-gatekeepers-maurits-de-bruijn

(When I was invited to write this text, I was assigned ten artist names that are listed below and was asked to write an email letter form based on the final works of these Sandberg graduates. I was also told I was not obliged to describe all of their works, but to not do that would feel unfair, a random omission on my part that I would not want to be responsible for.) (But when I went looking for one of the works of the artists on my list, a classmate told me that they had in fact, not graduated that year.) (It ruled out the possibility to see any work of this person, so I wonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t be able to describe it.) (The Sandberg Institute had deemed this artist unfit to graduate.) (And that is that.) Gatekeepers, what does it even mean to not be able to graduate as an artist? Underneath the staircase I watch EVERYTHING IS VALUES, an artwork shining a light on the conditions in which these students graduate. The video piece is a meta reflection on the masterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s degree at Sandberg, a display of what can or what did occur on an art school. And what struck me was, YES, if all participants of an institution feel that they have the agency to comment and to reflect on the processes and dynamics that play out during their education, that would be a lot healthier. That kind of agency can only be experienced in a system in which each participant has a voice, possesses an equal amount of power, and that is rarely the case, in the art world as we know it. And the outcome would not only be healthier, but could also be a lot slower, or more diffused, (possibly even more bureaucratic) but it has the potential to diminish the upholding of toxic power dynamics. When I leave the room under the staircase and attempt to walk upstairs, a person wearing an ill-fitted black suit stops me. They show me a collection of keys. Keys that would allow me entrance to different rooms in this structure and the structures surrounding this structure. As the key chain dangled in front of my eyes, all I could think of was access and of whom holds it and how much of those power dynamics are usually invisible. We all belong to systems of hierarchy, that is how

DEAR GATEKEEPERS,

MAURITS DE BRUIJN

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/letters/dear-gatekeepers-maurits-de-bruijn

much of the world is presented to us since we are born. It is what gives our families structure, it is how our schools are organized, it is so much a part of everyday experiences, so intertwined with the fabric of life that we often don’t even recognize it. (Some armies have attempted to get rid of their ranks, like the Soviet Red Army, the People’s Liberation Army of China and the Albanian Army. All of them found themselves forced to reinstate the hierarchy after stumbling upon operational problems of command and control.) I wonder what were to happen if we’d let go of it. Perhaps non-hierarchy will always be a goal, a dream, an ideality, something to strive for, never a reality. But I do think I know where it could begin. It could begin with confusion, with anonymity, by placing the power of community, the strength of these ten artists put together, above their individual potential. So, no prices or awards, no name tags, no headshots, no resumes, no biographies, no private anecdotes. Gatekeepers, I want to propose to look at this group as a collective, one wave of art works, stripped from signatures. The importance lies not in the individual projects (or art works) but in the commitment to the whole. A decentralized entity of which the individuals control and influence one another in equal measure. We all have mothers, mother like figures, an aunt or uncle, an elder. We all drift closer to them and drift further away from them as our lives evolve. We love our elders, it’s almost impossible not to, because on some (if not genetic) level we ARE them, BUT it’s not always easy to love the elders of others. It’s not very common for us to succeed in that kind of loving. The video The Swimming Pool, that I watch on the TV set in the master bedroom, does manage to translate the love for and of a mother towards the viewers’ heart (my heart, of course). What a mother, what a struggle, what restlessness lie in both the way the film was shot, the way the mother behaves, the way the material was cut into a kaleidoscopic, crystal clear portrait, full of charm. The mother wears the most colourful star-shaped

DEAR GATEKEEPERS,

MAURITS DE BRUIJN

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/letters/dear-gatekeepers-maurits-de-bruijn

earrings I have ever seen. She keeps altering their length, adding one star, taking on off. In between her jittery alterations, she smokes. (Sorry, this is untrue. Those earrings are another art work.) The mother in the film becomes OUR mom. We LOVE her. We LOVE her, but we LEAVE her. I leave her for a series of paintings in the hallway, showing different foods and monsters. In all of them, I recognize a sense of togetherness. I also see technicolor dreams, or maybe they’re failures, and not dreams. In Freudian psychoanalysis (not that I usually quote him) the basement represent unconscious drives, repressed fears, traumas and fantasies. The basement also represents that in this proposition. I descend the staircase, and another staircase, and reach the dark. I walk into a plastic cube; a light shines on the other side of it and shows me the silhouette of a genderless person who seems to be very far away. A part of me wants to help that black shadow of a person. I want to help them come out, reach me, (us), the people on the other side of the plastic structure. I want those things, until I realise that person is better off than I am. (I was, by the way, not asked to write about this particular work.) There is a specific beauty in not knowing who it is you’re looking at. It creates an opening, an uncertainty that we reject once we fix our eyes on the sign with the artists’ name, their home country, their year of birth. Not only does it close doors instead of opening them, the emphasis on the makers’ identity also feeds into our shared fantasy of the genius. I turn my back towards the plastic bubble. My shoes hit shards of ceramic that are spread across the floor, the sound announces my presence, even though the pop music pumping through this side of the tunnel is most likely much louder. The music protects me from being an individual, in that sense, from making myself know. In front of a huge screen, stands a soldier. Or better said: a person making salutations the way a soldier would. I later learn that the ceramic shards belonged to six hundred replicas of the artists’ face. So, in

DEAR GATEKEEPERS,

MAURITS DE BRUIJN

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/letters/dear-gatekeepers-maurits-de-bruijn

a sense, by crushing them under my shoes, I was also freeing the artist from being an individual, from making themselves known. The imagery on the screen: soldiers shooting rifles. After that, a monotone voice delivers statements on daily routines, violence, desire, activity, shame, all the stuff basements are know to hold. The saluting person answers these statements with true or false and then salutes, an endless, all-encompassing repetition of tough, imposed movements and fragile, personal confessions. The body standing in front of me possesses the signature body language of the collective, and releases the fluid outpourings of the individual. I leave this house, and its artworks. While I stand in the front yard, I see the street, the neighboring lanes, I can almost see the whole town. We all belong to both spheres (the collective, the individual), we all find ways to navigate between the two. It is my hope these ten artists find power in the collective, in their anonymity, in their power to confuse, but that is just me (my proposition). Even more so, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s my hope that the gatekeepers (whether they are in charge of galleries, museums, art academies, masters programs, art fairs or any other art-related institution) will help to dismantle dysfunctional systems of power, will strive for shared leadership, transparency, accountability, and will include the voices of all participants. If all gatekeepers could get back to us, that would be great. Maurits de Bruijn

DEAR GATEKEEPERS,

MAURITS DE BRUIJN

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/letters/dear-gatekeepers-maurits-de-bruijn

Graduates mentioned: sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/emirhan-akin sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/patrycja-rozwora sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/carmen-dusmet-carrasco sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/veronika-babayan sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/linda-stauffer sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/maria-mazzanti sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/laila-el-mehelmy sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/marek-mrowinski sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/marilyn-volkman sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/kasper-van-moll sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/lucia-fernandez-santoro

DEAR GATEKEEPERS,

MAURITS DE BRUIJN

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/letters/dear-gatekeepers-maurits-de-bruijn

Maurits de Bruijn is the author of two novels (Brother and Behind the Sun) and one work of nonfiction Not Only Your Holocaust, that was published in 2020. He writes think pieces for Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant and is the editor of online art magazine Mister Motley. His recurring themes include collective memory, trauma, queerness and identity.

• EMIRHAN AKIN • 38.9637° NEAR 35.2433° EAST • DESIGN

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/emirhan-akin

92 64

BULLY / INTONATION / ARCHETYPAL TRUTHS / REINVENTION / PUBLIC HUMILIATION / APOCALYPSES / RITUALS / GENTRIFICATION / CONSTANT HYBRIDIZATION / INQUIRY OF THE SELF / MASKS / PROPHECY / RIPPING OF THE PLASTER / DISARMING THE NEW BORN SOLDIER / THE WISDOM OF INSECURITY / MONUMENTAL CHALLENGE OF SELF-AWARENESS / MEETINGS WITH THE REMARKABLE MEN / DYSFUNCTION OF THE CHILDHOOD / DEATH IS OPPOSITE OF EVERYTHING / A LIST IS NEVER DONE / ENTRANCE IS ALSO THE EXIT / CAN I KILL MY SELF?

WHO’S GOING • EMIRHAN TO DIE IF I AKIN KILL MY SELF? • 38.9637° NEAR 35.2433° EAST • DESIGN https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/emirhan-akin

In his performance Human, Emirhan Akin (38.9637° Near, 35.2433° East, 1992) questions the word ‘human’ in order to flee from its inadequate definition and to arrive at a more embodied understanding. For his work Who’s Going To Die If I Kill My Self?, Akin turned the former shooting tunnel of the exhibition space’s basement into an immersive installation. As viewers walked closer to the screen, they stepped on ceramic masks, ultimately crushing them. Akin wrote about his performance: “On the last day of my compulsory military service in Turkey I realized I was nobody. After a month of embodying a toxicmasculine persona, fabricating an additional layer of skin as another sort of camouflage, alongside the military uniform, to survive amongst thousands of men, I lay on the bottom bunk bed asking: who am I?”

KITCHEN CONVERSATIONS

• PATRYCJA ROZWORA • WARSAW (POLAND) • CRITICAL STUDIES

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/patrycja-rozwora

94 64

Patrycja Rozwora’s (Warsaw, Poland, 1994) podcast series Kitchen Conversations aims to open up the ‘mysterious’ and ‘vague’ Eastern Bloc to a broader, international audience. Each episode is devoted to one artist or researcher exploring their relation, interest and urgency to create within the framework of the post-Soviet sphere. The podcast series’ title derives from Svetlana Alexievich’ Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets: “For us, the kitchen is not just where we cook, it’s a dining room, a guest room, an office, a soapbox. A space for group therapy sessions […] It’s where ideas were whipped up from scratch, fantastical projects concocted.”

KITCHEN CONVERSATIONS

• PATRYCJA ROZWORA • WARSAW (POLAND) • CRITICAL STUDIES

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/patrycja-rozwora

My podcast series Kitchen Conversations aims to open up the mysterious and vague ‘Eastern Block’ to a broader, international audience. Each episode is devoted to one artist exploring their interest and urgency to create within the framework of the post-Soviet sphere. I take after Madina Tlostanova that we should delink from the losing battle and from the logic of ‘catching up’ in the sphere of knowledge production. This podcast looks at how we can be aware of other models (especially non-Western ones) – but instead of replicating them, create new models accurately fitting the specificity of our current conditions.

THE SWIMMING POOL

• CARMEN DUSMET CARRASCO • HOME (SPAIN) • DESIGN

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/carmen-dusmet-carrasco

96 64

The work emerges after a 2-year, domestic-ethnographic research. In an attempt to find proof of what it means to practice care, Carmen develops an obsession to observe and capture her mother’s journey towards a precarious retirement. What began as a socio-economic study of female poverty in Spain, led to an intimate negotiation of a mother-daughter relationship. The work unapologetically submerges the viewer on a raw, personal journey about the cyclic aspect of life and the desperate qualities of love.

THE SWIMMING POOL

• CARMEN DUSMET CARRASCO • HOME (SPAIN) • DESIGN

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/carmen-dusmet-carrasco

Carmen Dusmet Carrasco’s (Home, Spain, 1991) film The Swimming Pool was developed over the course of a two-year domestic ethnographic research involving many travels to Southern Spain. In an attempt to find what it means to practice care, Dusmet Carrasco developed an obsession with capturing her mother’s precarious journey towards retirement. What began as a socio-economic study of female poverty in Spain led to an intimate negotiation of a mother-daughter relationship. Projecting the imagination of a younger generation onto a future that is unfolding, the film is an intergenerational prism. In its rawness, it unapologetically poses a confessional question: How can younger generations take care of the elderly while safeguarding their own future?

SOUR • VERONIKA COUNTERFEITS BABAYAN • THE WOMB (C-SECTION) • DIRTY ART DEPARTMENT https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/veronika-babayan

98 64

Veronika Babayan (The Womb, C-Section, 1994) is interested in pedagogies and practices that affect the perpetual production of a national identity. Using and animating traditional women’s practices, she emphasizes the role of feminism in undermining hegemonic authority in patriotic memory. Babayan looks for ways in which antagonistic histories such as the Armenian-Turkish can interact with each other transnationally by borrowing existing cultural elements, signs and symbols to create new spaces for interterritorial belonging. Sour Counterfeits is a mobile forgery lab, where fruit leather documents are produced. Using the maternal Armenian tradition of fruit leather making as a mnemonic device for cultural preservation, Sour Counterfeits pulls from a larger collective memory, serving as a vessel through which deracinated testimonials of trans-generational trauma circulate beyond territory, language and citizenship.

SOUR • VERONIKA COUNTERFEITS BABAYAN • THE WOMB (C-SECTION) • DIRTY ART DEPARTMENT https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/veronika-babayan

Sour Counterfeits is a setup of a forgery lab which consists of several elements and shows the production of fruit leather. This slow method of sun-drying fruit has been practiced predominantly by women in the Caucasus and Middle East. The work imitates the tradition of fruit leather as an inherited routine of a maternal practice that is part of a collective memory. The recipe takes the form of a mnemonic device, which has the ability to transmit both transgenerationally and transnationally. Here, it is regarded as a vessel through which collective stories can be preserved and transmitted.

MISREPRESEN• LINDA TATIONS: STAUFFER CLITORIS • WINTERTHUR AND (SWITZERLAND) BASKETBALL • DIRTY ART DEPARTMENT https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/linda-stauffer

100 64

In this subversive play, a utopian story called “Misrepresentations” advocates for a more agender thinking. Touching upon critical notions in feminism such as gender politics in sports and the mystification of the female anatomy, the characters of this alter-world appear in form of marionette puppets. The dimension-spectrum of props and sculptural objects are blurring fictions and realities.

MISREPRESENTATIONS

• LINDA STAUFFER • WINTERTHUR (SWITZERLAND) • DIRTY ART DEPARTMENT

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/linda-stauffer

101

Linda Stauffer’s (Winterthur, Switzerland, 1990) Misrepresentations explores the alternate genderless world of marionette puppets; Marcell, Clitoris, Basketball, Lunda Stunda, Gallerist, and the band Doris Klit. We encounter the characters in a series of nonlinear videos who are displayed propped on chairs. The puppets, props and sculptural objects create a scenography which blurs the boundaries between fiction and reality.

LOST, MISPLACED OR ABANDONED

• MARÍA MAZZANTI • BOGOTÁ (COLOMBIA) • STUDIO FOR IMMEDIATE SPACES

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/maria-mazzanti

102 64

In her work, María Mazzanti (Bogotá, Colombia, 1988) explores the interaction between communication and space. Her practice is committed to comprehending boundaries, classifications, and spatial interfaces that visualise hierarchies and framing mechanisms, translating her findings into circulating material, text, and installations. During the four days of the graduation exhibition, keys are misplaced around Het Hem’s building. Each set has an email address inscribed in the keychain to contact the keys’ owner. Lost, Misplaced Or Abandoned functions as a set of fluid objects that trespass the exhibition’s time and place. The lost items might end up trapped in the lost & found box, pockets of strangers, and unknown drawers. By doing so, they address questions of ownership, private property, power, language, and binary oppositions embedded in the object itself.

GHOSTLY VOICES, NOISE AND STATIC

• MARÍA MAZZANTI • BOGOTÁ (COLOMBIA) • STUDIO FOR IMMEDIATE SPACES

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/maria-mazzanti

103

Ghostly voices, noise, and static is a 24-hour hotline for audios about the invisible within the dominant narratives produced by the city. The phone menu becomes a front line for the unheard and unreadable through landscapes of opposition that violently silence the underrepresented. The line works as a fragile archive of the invisible ghosts and female characters that inhabit the city. The line’s beta version consisted of a series of text messages that were read and performed in a communal reading by the attendants.

MODERN BEDOUIN

• LAILA EL MEHELMY • JEDDAH (SAUDI ARABIA) • CHALLENGING JEWELLERY

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/laila-el-mehelmy

104 64

Inspired by the duality of lives of Saudi women: the contrast between behavior and dress, between inside and outside. Using Bedouin motifs, which form the bases of my modules and are used in the jewelry pieces I present here. Using resin and injecting playful and vibrant colours which are in distinct contrast to the traditional colour pallets. The modular system of adding and subtracting pieces allows the pieces to grow or shrink depending on the wearers desire. An innovative take on deep heritage, an extension of how women in Saudi live modern lives in traditional society.

MODERN BEDOUIN

• LAILA EL MEHELMY • JEDDAH (SAUDI ARABIA) • CHALLENGING JEWELLERY

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/laila-el-mehelmy

105 In her work, Laila El Mehelmy (Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, 1992) tackles her Saudi origins and reflects on heritage – with a focus on the country’s tradition and its shifting social patterns in the face of our current society. For Modern Bedouin, she explores what the modern Saudi woman looks like. No longer the victim of society but a prominent contributor, El Mehelmy presents the Saudi woman as a contributor to evolving social norms. To generate buzz around her upcoming jewellery collection, El Mehelmy started a guerrilla marketing campaign at Het Hem where performers wore three Niqabs made of reflective fabrics, prompting discussion and encouraging socializing. El Mehelmy’s jewellery is based on motifs taken from traditional bedouin fabrics and tile patterns, extending her preoccupation with nomadic exchange.

REPAIR -› NO CHANGE

• MAREK MROWIŃSKI • SŁUPSK (POLAND) • CHALLENGING JEWELLERY

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/marek-mrowinski

106 64

REPAIR -› NO CHANGE

• MAREK MROWIŃSKI • SŁUPSK (POLAND) • CHALLENGING JEWELLERY

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/marek-mrowinski

107

The thesis consists of text strikethrough right after the writing is accomplished. The No Change project includes making identical copies of already existing own works, using the same materials and timeconsuming techniques.

EVERTHING IS VALUES

• MARILYN VOLKMAN • CORPUS CHRISTI, TEXAS (USA) • CHALLENGING JEWELLERY

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/marilyn-volkman

108 64

Marilyn Volkman is Aurora Fleischer, The DUO, Zsófia Puskas, Hans Dekker, Mila Shadid, Paul Desjardins, CELESTE, James Carmiel, Brit Harding, Edgar van Dijk, THE COMMITTEE, Jane Booysen, Rebecca Ruskin, Lotte Moritz, Rod Nutt, Helen Brouwer, Lucia Bianchi, Marloes de Vries, Émilie Gainsbourg, Vasil Wiśniewski. Marilyn Volkman is Marilyn Volkman. FEARLESSNESS is COMMUNITY. CHALLENGE. EVERYTHING IS VALUES.

EVERTHING IS VALUES

• MARILYN VOLKMAN • CORPUS CHRISTI, TEXAS (USA) • CHALLENGING JEWELLERY

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/marilyn-volkman

109

Marilyn Volkman's (Corpus Christi, Texas USA, 1984) monolithic research work, EVERYTHING IS VALUES, restages the complex interactions between people and their values during the Challenging Jewellery MA programme. Drawing on methodologies from anthropology, auto-fiction and archiving, the work is at once a novel, a film, and a physical object, interrogating how communal ideals, failure, taste, money, scale, and jewellery interact in the collective search for inspiration and purpose.

SOMETHING HAPPENED HERE

• KASPER VAN MOLL • NIJMEGEN (NL) • THE COMMONERS' SOCIETY

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/kasper-van-moll

64 110

Friendships, music, amateurism and weirdness are fundamental to Kasper van Moll’s (Nijmegen, The Netherlands, 1992) work. Something Happened Here features painterly, performative and auditive reinterpretations of memories and experiences between three good friends. Van Moll’s paintings show fictionalised versions of personal experiences in which he felt most connected with others. It’s not about depicting certain memories as precisely as possible, but rather about finding something hidden behind the physical reality of those moments, using the flat surface as both a fixative and as a means to share. Something Happened Here can be seen both as an ode to collectivity as well as collectivity as a praxis: a methodology of re-remembering, reminiscing, recycling, remixing and recreation.

SOMETHING HAPPENED HERE

• KASPER VAN MOLL • NIJMEGEN (NL) • THE COMMONERS' SOCIETY

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/kasper-van-moll

111

Welcome to my world. This is your world now, too. Crawl inside the cave-like space I’ve built. Meet my friends. Watch the curtain being pulled back. Enjoy the scenes, a collection of movie-stills. A non-sequential storyboard of friends meeting friends. Look at the eyes, look at the hands. Some invite you in, like an open window. Others might seem to float in vast nothingness. Trust me, when I tell you it all happened for real.

DEAR KRAFTWERK, https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/letters/dear-kraftwerk-by-leon-kruijswijk

LETTER BY

LÉON KRUIJSWIJK CURATOR

EDITORIAL LETTERS

SEVEN *CLICKING* INDEX FINGERS 113

GRADUATES MENTIONED

• NICOLÒ PELLARIN • CÓILÍN O’CONNELL • ROMAN TKACHENKO • JOANNE VOSLOO • CINDY WEGNER • STEPHANIE SCHUITEMAKER • GABRIELLA GOLDSMITH • LUCA SOUDANT • PEDRO MATIAS • ANTO LÓPEZ ESPINOSA

DEAR KRAFTWERK,

LÉON KRUIJSWIJK

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/letters/dear-kraftwerk-by-leon-kruijswijk

Dear Kraftwerk, Cc: all other signifiers of a paradigm shift A couple of months ago I wrote you an e-mail to introduce the inspiring draft proposals of 10 graduates of the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam. Although I shared it with some people, it somehow slipped my mind to send it to you, or maybe it did not slip my mind, but I might have been reluctant to actually click ‘send’. Sometimes, when we express thoughts, they become more part of reality than before, don’t you think? I believe I was not ready yet to actually share my formulations of the world we were, and still are, living in, as I wrote to you about the plethora of turns that have been taking shape, which we un/expectedly still are in the midst of grasping. Since that letter, many things have shifted in the world and I continued to think about the best way to grasp our current living condition, which I could compare to a dystopian novel that, by leaking through cracks and bursts, has left the realm of fiction invading our tangible everyday life. I cannot even count the alienating moments of the past months in which my reaction was a mixture of finding myself gawking, feeling unsettled and trying to pinch myself awake, though knowing that my dreams came to an end the moment my alarm went off that morning. Now they have finalized their graduation projects, I feel a need to update you on the works of these artists, with which they offer us fresh perspectives on, insights in and tools for navigating the present into the near future. As pioneers of a generation, they have been making sense of as much as deconstructing current tendencies — like you have been doing, when you embraced the electronic turn, while fundamental other turns of structures and modes have been taking place simultaneously. Our present mode of living has been reduced to the microcosm of our home and a limited radius around it,

115

DEAR KRAFTWERK,

LÉON KRUIJSWIJK

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/letters/dear-kraftwerk-by-leon-kruijswijk

if we follow the impeded travel restrictions respectably. Nevertheless, Nicolò Pellarin, one of those 10 students, gives us tools to still be able to move to a place of refuge. Taking his Sisyphean attempts to reach Noorderhaaks, a deserted sandbank located in the north of Holland, as a starting point, the work lands end – 0223 621570 stems from the idea of the physical experience of a place as an object that can only be reached by our imagination. Would this be a strategy to deploy in order to go on adventure without neglecting safety measures? Cindy Wegner gives us advice on how to do this collectively, based on her experience of working with the spacious environment and community on Zeeburgereiland to find ways of making a common space, or a space for the commons. As formulated by Pedro Matias, They namely said the ‘I’ was never an island, and he recommends, if/anytime you get a chance, to immerse yourself in cotton candy clouds, or an imagined universe at large, to seize the opportunity to enter a fluid state of being. I second that. It will be Cóilín O’Connell who will teach us how to get blood from a stone, while being on such a trip/ tripping. The figure of speech expresses that you “make someone give or tell you something, when it is extremely difficult because of the character or mood of the person or organization you are dealing with”, but O’Connell gives it a different spin by scanning a number of Neolithic stone monuments dotting the landscape in his nearby surroundings. With this act of mapping valuable sites in his vicinity, he takes us from the idea that the sky is the limit back to the microcosm of a neighbourhood – familiar, pleasant and palpable. But can a neighbourhood be a safe space if it is ever changing? With the installation Neighbours of Zero Roman Tkachenko points out that, due to the real estate investments in our neo-liberal world, the future purposes of properties is as randomly defined as a gambling game. Such changes and developments can profoundly disrupt its nearby public spaces and the community living in a neighbourhood, as we have learned from the consequences of gentrification.

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DEAR KRAFTWERK,

LÉON KRUIJSWIJK

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/letters/dear-kraftwerk-by-leon-kruijswijk

So, dear Kraftwerk, what to do when life is unsettling on many levels, from the macrocosm of geo-politics to the microcosm of your neighbourhood? Luca Soudant investigated the mechanisms and potential of the sonic for healing purposes, and asked their peers over the phone when sonic vibrations offered a soothing moment for such feelings of disconcertedness. Or perhaps it is an excellent opportunity to look at mundane, repetitive acts done by our older relatives over the course of years, like collecting ribbons, as Gabriella Goldsmith has explored to eventually turn these findings into sculptures. Stephanie Schuitemaker demonstrates why such acts can resonate among us and are so touching that they can be considered a work of art. The days spent in confinement at home may also lead to a de-mapping of the self, in other words, exploring other selves, as Anto López Espinosa has among others been doing through a way of writing resembling the surrealist method of écriture automatique and by learning from lucid dreams. López Espinosa eventually plays with modes of representing the plural self with a lip-syncing performance, thereby stressing the impossibility of all-encompassing representations. Joanne Vosloo also embarked on an adventure of exploring the self and her alter ego Octo Jozer. The writings show with an unfettered imagination how fiction can become a fact, or how facts are actually fiction, and how fiction is all we need to articulate our lived reality. Dear Kraftwerk, can I invite you with your pioneering vision and taste for the undiscovered to a durational session of thinking, discussing, collecting, daydreaming and healing to formulate with sound, words and visuals a world we want to slip into through cracks and bursts? Greetings from the unknown, Léon

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DEAR KRAFTWERK,

LÉON KRUIJSWIJK

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/letters/dear-kraftwerk-by-leon-kruijswijk

Dear Kraftwerk,

First of all, I want to express my condolences on the recent loss of Florian Schneider – one of your founding members. All together you created a band that would change the understanding of tone, sound and music infinitely. You have started on the paved way of an Autobahn (1974), but your journey with an unknown destination led you off the beaten track, during which you explored, assessed and embraced the possibilities of a new mode of music creation through the sole use of electronic instruments. Not only the technique was new – your lyrical views were visionary of a world becoming ever more structured, defined and controlled by electronic devices. Considering your work as the prelude of an electronic turn, a plethora of other turns are taking shape at the moment, which we are only in the midst of grasping. An obvious turn emerging from the electronic sphere is the digital one, which, like a liquid entity, found its way to the deepest point possible, as the digital sphere has become one of the fundaments of many societies across the world. Naturally this phenomenon has been used as much as critiqued within the arts. For example, Nicolò Pellarin leaves behind a fictional landscape with non-alphabetic language in urban spaces, with which he unsettles everyday scenarios in real life to revert attention back from the digital sphere to the physical one. This might be a solution for the way we increasingly inhabit the world through our digital devices. Cóilín O’Connell contrastingly creates an abundant archive of digitized Neolithic stone monuments to scrutinise our methods of processing the past, present and imaging the future. How did you, dear Kraftwerk, continue to imagine the future while pandemics and disasters; fights for systematic changes and equality; economic and political crises; upheavals and wars were profoundly shifting the world around you throughout the years? While Roman Tkachenko has been investigating the political implications of the design of public spaces in order to disclose its vulnerabilities and misuses,

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DEAR KRAFTWERK,

LÉON KRUIJSWIJK

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/letters/dear-kraftwerk-by-leon-kruijswijk

the meaning of the term ‘public’ is shifting due to the COVID-19 pandemic. People across an entire globe have been confined to their private spaces, at least those who are privileged to stay at home and to have a home. The private sphere has never been so closely intertwined with the public one. Forced to meet with appropriate distance, over the phone or digitally, it has become clear that a sense of belonging among people is created not only within, but also beyond both these physical spaces. Communities have gathered through proxy moments of contact, considerably online. Some might even say that our online identity has become more important than the offline parallel universe, like Joanne Vosloo is exploring by crafting digital images as well as through the writings of her alter ego Octo Jozer. In addition, Cindy Wegner is looking into which actions have been undertaken to connect people when togetherness was missing. Wegner in particular focuses on the reunification attempts and processes of the former East and West after the fall of the Berlin wall, which also raised questions on the sense of belonging. Your electronic sound, dear Kraftwerk, actually travelled from West-Germany to the USA, where it laid the foundation for house music and influenced many musicians, as we among others can hear in Aquabahn (1994) by Detroit’s Drexciya. Some of their new sounds, as well as from many others, created on the other side of the Atlantic then crossed the ocean. From the late 1990s, the Berlin record label Tresor started for example to release records by Drexciya. Such sounds have heavily influenced the capital’s techno scene, which became world-renowned. So, my dear Kraftwerk, it is safe to say that we can feel connected through art regardless of its form, right? However, as Stephanie Schuitemaker is asking us, why do we resonate with art and why do some works resonate more than others? Over time, another wave of changes rooted in the era you started has become more and more layered in order to represent the complexity of issues at stake. The relationship between body, sexuality, gender and

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DEAR KRAFTWERK,

LÉON KRUIJSWIJK

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/letters/dear-kraftwerk-by-leon-kruijswijk

identity has increasingly challenged dominant norms and systems such as patriarchy and heterosexuality. This has led to more fluid ideas about this relationship, opening up space to let the actual mind and feelings reign, as in the work of Gabriella Goldsmith. Gender performativity in sound and music has been scrutinised too. Luca Soudant investigates the tactility of sound and the way it can touch a body, both emotionally and physically. They explore how we can use that to our benefit in order to bend it in ways we prefer to think about the world, away from rigid and normative structures. As a matter of fact, following Pedro Matias’ line of thinking, the future of the world is letting the body fully sink in softness, to eventually surrender into soft matter until we have no shape, with the purpose to accept and embrace liquidity, fluidity and continuous flux. Will an Autobahn or Aquabahn then still be needed to start journeys to the undiscovered? Can I invite you for a group discussion with these artists about such unknown futurities? Let me know, because I definitely want to embark on this adventure with these graduates, but before I do so, I will join Anto López Espinosa in uttering a goodbye: [...] A sonic farewell, towards nowhere, but the map of the one who got lost, on purpose, for the one who needed to find, not to achieve, to find where there’s nothing to be eaten, nothing, but the shadow, of the infinite blossoms, of the infinite ssssuns, of the infinite mooons. [...] Léon Kruijswijk

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DEAR KRAFTWERK,

LÉON KRUIJSWIJK

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/letters/dear-kraftwerk-by-leon-kruijswijk

Graduates mentioned: sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/nicolo-pellarin sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/coilin-oconnell sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/roman-tkachenko sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/joanne-vosloo sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/cindy-wegner sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/stephanie-schuitemaker sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/gabriella-goldsmith sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/luca-soudant sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/pedro-matias sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/anto-lopez-espinosa

Léon Kruijswijk is assistant curator at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin. Besides working on the main exhibitions and public program, he co-curates evenings at KW’s Pogo Bar – a bar in the basement of the institution with a discursive program focusing on emerging local and international artists. At KW, Léon started as a curatorial fellow in 2018 with support from the Mondriaan Fund. Besides his institutional affiliations, he also works as a freelance curator and writer. In the Netherlands, he organized exhibitions and events as a freelancer at Framer Framed, NEVERNEVERLAND, De School Amsterdam, ROZENSTRAAT — a rose is a rose is a rose, and Perdu, among others. His most recent articles were published on Mister Motley and were included in the graduation catalogue of the Sandberg Instituut. With his practice Léon addresses themes at the intersection of identity politics, queer and gender theory, activism, and institutional critique. He assesses how these themes come together across visual art, literature, experimental music, and performance.

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ANTIHYPERGRAPHY

• NICOLÒ PELLARIN • VENICE (ITALY) • DESIGN

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/nicolo-pellarin

122 64

A series of attempts towards the creation of a fictional-landscape generated-non-alphabetic language. A beyond the rational, web of visual and physical textualities generated and left by and through the land space, as infective, ephemeral forms of communication. Anti-hypergraphy questions the role of translation as a crucial tool in the definition of the relationship between human/landscape-landscape/human in contemporary practices such as visual communication and graphic design.

LANDS END – 0223 621570

• NICOLÒ PELLARIN • VENICE (ITALY) • DESIGN

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/nicolo-pellarin

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Starting from the deliberately impossible attempt to reach Noorderhaaks, a completely deserted sandbank located in the north of Holland, Nicolo Pellarin’s (Venice, Italy, 1993) lands end – 0223 621570 stems from the idea of the physical experience of a place as an object that can only be reached by our imagination. As a mirage that inaugurates a fictitious scenario, lands end – 0223 621570 arises from a series of recurring visits taken as personal methodology – “on the go” documentation and physical interactions collected as a series of images scattered throughout the space. Using a language devoid of literal meaning, created exclusively by the natural processes present in the landscape under discussion, Pellarin examines the potential implications and corrosive effects of "smokeless industries", such as tourism and leisure.

BLOOD FROM A STONE

• CÓILÍN O'CONNELL • DUBLIN (IRELAND) • DIRTY ART DEPARTMENT

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/coilin-oconnell

124 64

The title of Cóilín O’Connell’s (Dublin, Ireland, 1990) installation, Blood From A Stone, means “to make someone give or tell you something, when it is extremely difficult because of the character or mood of the person or organisation you are dealing with.” In the video there are numerous Neolithic stone monuments that dot the landscape; the stones have integrated in peculiar ways to their modern suburban surroundings. Following in the mould of obsessive UFO enthusiasts, amateur archaeologists and treasure hunters with a desire to extract explanations, value and meaning an archive has been amassed. A series of scans gleaned from the stones with a portable document scanner have been gathered from sites visits. Images from a peculiar book on the topic feature a recurring unnamed accomplice adjacent to the stones for scale. Some stones have become part of distorted mythologies or have been sprayed with graffiti.

BLOOD FROM A STONE

• CÓILÍN O'CONNELL • DUBLIN (IRELAND) • DIRTY ART DEPARTMENT

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/coilin-oconnell

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Beginning with an impulse to create an archive of surface scans of Neolithic stone monuments led to the gradual amassing and production of a collection of photos, videos, books, and drawings. Following in the mould of obsessive UFO enthusiasts, amateur archaeologists and treasure hunters with a desire to find explanations, value and meaning. It became clear that a space was needed to present the collection and as with any museum it reveals as much about the social environment it is located within, the hang ups of the curator and our methods of processing the past, present and imaging the future.

SWEET HOME-OFFICE WORK

• ROMAN TKACHENKO • ROSTOVON-DON (RUSSIA) • STUDIO FOR IMMEDIATE SPACES

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/roman-tkachenko

126 64

This work is a reflection on the current focus on private spaces where we are all confined, those who are privileged to stay home. And the attention it has brought up. Even though we are all at home, the world keeps running. Now from home to home. The current system still manages to interfere in private space and start to suggest or possibly dictate how a household should be run. What is home? Has home come closer to a farm, as a household that generates income and around which a full life revolves?

NEIGHBOURS OF ZERO

• ROMAN TKACHENKO • ROSTOVON-DON (RUSSIA) • STUDIO FOR IMMEDIATE SPACES

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/roman-tkachenko

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Roman Tkachenko (Rostov-on-Don, Russia, 1996) has been investigating the political implications of the built environment such as the design of public spaces, the architecture of public institutions, and domestic environments focusing on their vulnerabilities, misuses and il/legal redevelopments. Neighbours of Zero is a site-specific installation that playfully speculates on predestined futures of post-industrial architecture awaiting redevelopment. Inspired by the odds and probabilities system of Roulette, the algorithm bets on the future of this exhibition space at a former weapon factory in a game of luck. Neighbours of Zero plays with the language and vocabulary of developers, enabling new potential functions to blur and merge. Through creating these alternative futures, the former weapon factory is reframed for potential ambiguous, multi-use developments that manifest other creative or experimental potentials.

I, OBJECT

• JOANNE VOSLOO • PRETORIA (SOUTH AFRICA) • CHALLENGING JEWELLERY

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/joanne-vosloo

128 64 Experimenting with narrative form, Joanne Vosloo (Pretoria, South Africa, 1991) comments on the developmental influence of the “on” and “offline” world through garments while capturing the many stories that lifelong objects contain. Vosloo presents a sandbox inhabited by various created objects and baptized “digi-friends”. The installation I, Object is inspired by the longevity that sand possesses, a collectors item in-game as well as the actual presence a player is able to leave behind. An unvarnished translation of the term “sandbox game” (defined as an open world video game where one’s avatar can explore, collect and construct), Vosloo’s work is based on re-crafting a physical interpretation highlighting counter-experiences. Morphing this logic back into physical exhibition space, Vosloo invites viewers to speculate between physical and virtual systems.

ASSEMBLY LINE • JOANNE OF DREAMS: VOSLOO CRAFTING • PRETORIA OPPOSITES. (SOUTH AFRICA) • CHALLENGING JEWELLERY https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/joanne-vosloo

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She became a collector in this game. Finding pieces of this gem called “Eredium” that would add up so she could afford the skin for her mech. Although Mune could not see them physically in real life, their avatars represented cooler, more extreme versions of themselves; just like her. She was able to express herself in this digital realm. Most importantly collecting as many objects as she wanted to. If that black screen would go out without her saving, they would be lost forever. Objects collected to retain her online identity were more important than her offline reality’s parallel universe.

THE FOURTH WALL IS MISSING

• CINDY WEGNER • BERLIN (GERMANY) • THE COMMONERS' SOCIETY

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/cindy-wegner

130 64

The fourth wall is missing is about human togetherness. It advocates a new local collectivity. After the Berlin Wall fell, the peripheral borders of East and West disappeared. In the face of the “reunion” process in the 1990s, a social and urban restructuring process took place, raising questions on a sense of belonging. My research on urban developments in Berlin over the last decades are juxtaposed to a plot of land on Zeeburgereiland, a newly developed urban area on the east side of Amsterdam.

LANDSCAPE GARDEN PASSAGE

• CINDY WEGNER • BERLIN (GERMANY) • THE COMMONERS' SOCIETY

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/cindy-wegner

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LandscapeGardenPassage is an initiative and architectural design developed with the community of Zeeburgereiland, a newly developed urban area on the east side of Amsterdam. It is a spacious environment comprising a pathway, garden, library and a stage for music performances. Starting from the question ‘how to make a common space?’, Cindy Wegner (Berlin, Germany, 1990) asks why we even want to make a common space. Wegner chose four ‘main ingredients’ that served as a base for creation: 1. Participation; 2. Why are meeting places, communality and common spaces so fundamental?; 3. Transformation observed during the first Covid-19 confinement; 4. Landscaping with a social and creative ambition.

AMPLIFIER

• STEPHANIE SCHUITEMAKER • AMSTERDAM (NL) • CHALLENGING JEWELLERY

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/stephanie-schuitemaker

132 64

AMPLIFIER

• STEPHANIE SCHUITEMAKER • AMSTERDAM (NL) • CHALLENGING JEWELLERY

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/stephanie-schuitemaker

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Why do we resonate with art, and why do some works resonate more than others? In a series of videos I explore how resonance occurs from different design principles. Applying Bruno Latour’s Mediation theory, I research the agency of various works of art, questioning the conditions for resonance. Nurturing these conditions, I believe, allows us to deeply honour the objects, nature and the self.

A HOPELESS ROMANTIC

• GABRIELLA GOLDSMITH • ÅRHUS (DENMARK) • CHALLENGING JEWELLERY

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/gabriella-goldsmith

134 64

In overall the jewellery collection is inspired by the haute couture scene and a fascination of romanticism and surrealism. Each jewellery will consist of one avant-garde piece which will be followed by a more accessible jewellery line as a successor. The collection should consist of: a good level of craftmanship, a clear concept and coherency, and be accessible.

RIBBON COLLECTION

• GABRIELLA GOLDSMITH • ÅRHUS (DENMARK) • CHALLENGING JEWELLERY

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/gabriella-goldsmith

135

During her presentation at Het Hem, Gabriella Goldsmith (Århus, Denmark, 1991) live broadcasted her exploration into the design process of her Ribbon Collection while in residence with fellow Challenging Jewellery student, Silvia Faggiani, at their self-devised art residency and workshop in Italy. Due to the pandemic, Goldsmith abruptly relocated from Amsterdam back to Denmark. While being in quarantine at her parents’ house, she discovered an old bag with ribbons that her mom had been collecting over the years. Goldsmith imagined how these relics would come to life by weaving them into surreal sculptural pieces.

ON SONIC INTIMACY

• LUCA SOUDANT • CADIER EN KEER (NL) • CRITICAL STUDIES

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/luca-soudant

136 64

Under the name Carol Tactile, Luca Soudant (Cadier en Keer, The Netherlands, 1993) works on an ongoing project titled On Sonic Intimacy. For this work, they have phone calls with friends, loved ones, and *until then* strangers. Sonically close yet physically far, they dwell upon ways in which our bodies not only hear but also feel sound. It’s a collective investigation of the material impact of low frequencies and repetitive sounds. Sometimes the conversations enter intimate spaces in which (queer) healing tactics are being shared.

ON SONIC TOUCH

• LUCA SOUDANT • CADIER EN KEER (NL) • CRITICAL STUDIES

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/luca-soudant

137

Under the name Carol Tactile, Luca offers a service: a moment to speak over the phone about the tactility of sound. They offer a moment to share thoughts on the way voices, beats, noises, frequencies can touch a body. They do not only mean touch in an emotional sense here, but literally, how sound does something do the cells of our bodies (human and non-human). How sound pierces through our flesh, the chair we sit on and the people we hold, and, how we can use that thought to bend ways in which we might think about the world.

THEY SAID: ‘I’ WAS NEVER AN ISLAND

• PEDRO MATIAS • LISBON (PORTUGAL) • FINE ARTS

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/pedro-matias

Our future is letting the body sink in softness To listen closely to territories’ collapsing. All bending, The light intersects us. The shore is a never-ending collaboration Once arid-deserts of over-washed skin. From far, all islands are skin and bones. we break, and fall we break and fall.

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When too far from sustainable, we break and fall.

Look, there is no need to avoid thinking To surrender into the soft matter until we have no shape.

Slow sun rises. Eternal sunsets.

THEY SAID: ‘I’ WAS NEVER AN ISLAND

• PEDRO MATIAS • LISBON (PORTUGAL) • FINE ARTS

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/pedro-matias

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Pedro Matias’ (Lisbon, Portugal, 1984) They said: ‘I’ was never an island is a colorful installation bathing in pink light. The bright and fluorescent colors are at the same time candy-like, dystopian and otherworldly. To enter Matias’ installation is a psychedelic experience: “From far, all islands are skin and bones. When too far from sustainable, we break and fall. we break, and fall we break and fall. Look, there is no need to avoid thinking. To surrender into the soft matter until we have no shape. Slow sun rises. Eternal sunsets.” said Matias.

I DO HAVE THE INTENTION OF THIS, BEING, AN ACT OF LOVE

• ANTO LÓPEZ ESPINOSA • MADRID (SPAIN) • THE COMMONERS' SOCIETY

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/anto-lopez-espinosa

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Anto López Espinosa’s (Madrid, Spain, 1993) performance I do have the intention of this, being, an act of love could be described as an amalgamation of their nomadic selves, resulting in a lip-synced exquisite corpse of stories, manuals, secrets, dreamscapes, and other fleeting tricks, for the possibility of the ineffable to be invoked. The performance is situated in a decor with 27 sunflowers that “have grown in a field of emotions, and they seem to be fed by just acknowledging that they are alive.”

DEDE DDEDE SSSE SESE SERTRTTT

• ANTO LÓPEZ ESPINOSA • MADRID (SPAIN) • THE COMMONERS' SOCIETY

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/anto-lopez-espinosa

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“dededdedesssesesesertrttt” is an expanding amalgamation of encounters with my nomadic self, resulting an unfinished exquisite corpse of manuals, encounters, made up words, secrets, dreamscapes, and other fleeting tricks, presented on the form of a (sonic) farewell. (Whispers) My love, we have to remember these words forever: “The map is not the territory. A body is the shadow of something else”. My love, this is what we call “mothyfication”. (Darkness) (The whispers are still on the distance. They seem to come from below)

DEAR COUNTRYSIDE, https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/letters/dear-countryside-by-jules-van-den-langenberg

LETTER BY

JULES VAN DEN LANGENBERG EXHIBITION- AND FILM MAKER EDITORIAL LETTERS

SEVEN *CLICKING* INDEX FINGERS 143

GRADUATES MENTIONED

• ALEXANDER KUUSIK • BEATRIZ CONEFREY • CONSTANTIN DICHTL • DIMITRIS THEOCHARIS • EVA VAN KEMPEN • FRANCISCA KHAMIS GIACOMAN • HELEEN MINEUR • KAMILA KANTEK • JANINA FRITZ • JESPER HENNINGSSON • SOPHIA SIMENSKY • TALI LIBERMAN • SPAZIO CURA • CHARLOTTE ROHDE

DEAR COUNTRYSIDE,

JULES VAN DEN LANGENBERG

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/letters/dear-countryside-by-jules-van-den-langenberg

Dear countryside, Cc: Alexander Kuusik, Beatriz Conefrey, Constantin Dichtl, Eva van Kempen, Francisca Khamis Giacoman, Heleen Mineur, Kamila Kantek, Janina Fritz, Jesper Henningsson, Sophia Simensky, Tali Liberman, Spazio Cura, Charlotte Rohde EXT. CENTRAL STATION - MORNING It’s Fall break. We enter a rental bus that seats about thirty people. As the engine starts, the driver fills a cup with water and puts a leaf with a needle in it to float. His DIY compass points North. BUS DRIVER (grinning in an accent while cleaning up his navigation ritual) “Let’s take the country’s side today” Some smiles appear on passengers’ faces. The driver takes a sip of water. Building upon curator Sébastien Marot’s Agriculture and architecture: taking the country’s side on display during the 2020 Lisbon Architecture Triennale just before the global Covid-19 confinements started I want to invite you, organisations, companies and individuals on the countryside and graduates of Sandberg Instituut, to develop a renewed lens on the Dutch countryside landscape. How to redistribute where people travel? What does the post pandemic relationship between the cities and the countryside look like? How can outdoor leisure and (art) tourism coincide with for instance the actual production of food in the landscape? Dear Countryside, let’s meet in October and discuss how your ideas relate to the graduation works of Sandberg Instituut’s 747 by Alexander Kuusik, The Host by Beatriz Conefrey, A Wayfarer’s Journal by Constantin Dichtl, Mapping by Dimitris Theocharis, Tracing Filigree by Eva van Kempen, As far as I can remember by Francisca Khamis Giacoman, Epoch by Heleen Mineur, Now / here by Kamila Kantek, Auf Dem Wege Zur Quelle by Janina Fritz, Quinta del Sordo by Jesper Henningsson, St. Anthony’s Wilderness by Sophia Simensky, 145

DEAR COUNTRYSIDE,

JULES VAN DEN LANGENBERG

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/letters/dear-countryside-by-jules-van-den-langenberg

Unrendered Road by Tali Liberman, The Title of The Work by Spazio Cura and Control by Charlotte Rohde. Soon after the bus leaves the central train station of Amsterdam, a loud “Oh my god, oh my god, really?” comes from the bus speakers and fills the vehicles space. SPEAKERS (Loud) “Oh my god, oh my god, really?” Unsure of the sender, the crowd of tourists becomes alert and as the vehicle takes an unexpected exit towards the highway around town, heading much further North than the brochures advertised, a repetitive question fills the bus “Are you with me?” again via its speakers. SPEAKERS “Are you with me?” Looking to the roof and through the bus windows; an empty Boeing 747 in a grey sky crosses their route performing its final flight. Enticed by the unidentified voice, the passengers take sips from a milk carton found on their seats upon entering the bus. As they pass more and more flat landscapes with grass and cows one of the passengers in the back asks a person in his row of seats. PASSENGER IN THE BACK “Under what circumstances was this object made? Will it ever reach the public eye? What does it say? Does the place of creation travel?”. A milk mustached tourist gazes back at his fellow traveller in amazement. By merging the methodologies and notions of farming, art fairs and tourism industry: how to renew the lens we put on our regional land-

146

DEAR COUNTRYSIDE,

JULES VAN DEN LANGENBERG

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/letters/dear-countryside-by-jules-van-den-langenberg

scapes? Learning from the Triennale: “What we eat is arguably one of the strongest determinants of space, landscape and architectural structures and is a phenomenon which bridges different eras and multiple scales. Agriculture is at the centre of political and economic structures, community interactions and land management – agriculture was, after all, the reason why cities arose, in a centuries-long interaction that facilitated the development of modern civilisation itself. It is through food that geography and its potential are celebrated, that history is incorporated into tangible and intangible culture and that bonds are created between people of different generations, cultural backgrounds and incomes. Food is our common ground. However, current urban food systems are one of the main drivers of environmental destruction, negatively impacting land use, reducing biodiversity, exhausting and polluting water resources, and emitting a significant amount of greenhouse gases. On the other hand, cities – the main form of human habitat today – also pose challenges for environmental preservation and natural resource management in relation to their underlying economic and social dynamics. Nonetheless, cities aggregate huge intellectual and economic resources, openness to new behaviours and political power and will play a key role in our future. The interdependence between the urban and the rural has existed for significantly longer than the period prior to their mutual reliance. Therefore, in a context of growing world urbanisation, changing diets and lifestyles and with the growing threat of climate change, it is urgent to rethink the interaction between the city and its surroundings, the countryside, not as two antagonistic realities, but according to a dynamic of complementarity, in which the greatest potential for transformation may reside for the resolution of our current planetary challenges.” In a distance a silver colored farm-like construction reflects the sunlight; as the bus approaches the agricultural enterprise it appears to be entirely made of the silhouettes of steel corn plants. The bus drives past a filigree gate and pulls over and empties as the passengers take a breath of fresh air and take in some of the sun that warm October day. FARMER (Enthusiastically screaming)

147

DEAR COUNTRYSIDE,

JULES VAN DEN LANGENBERG

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/letters/dear-countryside-by-jules-van-den-langenberg

“Come, melt with us!”

screams the farmer walking towards the tourists from her field with cows. An uncanny encounter happens when a few of the tourists step onto the grass and approach the animals with their hands and feet on the ground. Between the grass, robotic centipedes crawl around dumped orange peels. The cows licking faces of tourists continues for a bit when the bus driver walks up to the group. BUS DRIVER “Toilet break’s over, we need to get back on our unrendered road”. A quick 3d scan of the group in the field is made before the vehicle departs further down the countryside. [...] Looking forward to meeting you on the countryside, Jules van den Langenberg

Graduates mentioned: sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/alexander-kuusik sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/beatriz-conefrey sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/constantin-dichtl sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/dimitris-theocharis sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/eva-van-kempen sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/francisca-khamis-giacoman sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/heleen-mineur sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/kamila-kantek sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/janina-fritz sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/jesper-henningsson sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/sophia-simensky sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/tali-liberman sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/spazio-cura sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/charlotte-rohde

148

DEAR COUNTRYSIDE,

JULES VAN DEN LANGENBERG

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/letters/dear-countryside-by-jules-van-den-langenberg

Jules van den Langenberg is an exhibition- and film maker. His scripted works focus on recreational fear, class mobility, talent, going to school, and life in between small towns and cities. In the past five years Van den Langenberg made exhibitions, programmes and publications at Sandberg Instituut, Van Abbemuseum, Het Nieuwe Instituut, Textielmuseum, 019 Ghent and Dim Sun Lausanne. His texts include De Witte Raaf, ZK/U Berlin, artist Wouter Paijmans and he lectured at Hochschule fĂźr Gestaltung Karlsruhe, Gerrit Rietveld Academie and Design Academy Eindhoven.

149

747

• ALEXANDER KUUSIK • BRISTOL (UK) • FINE ARTS

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/alexander-kuusik

150 64

A video in two parts. In the first, a planespotter films a Boeing 747 as it leaves Schiphol with no human passengers. Tracking its movement by intercepting radio frequencies and his own knowledge of the flight path. A final 747 flight, as the aircraft becomes obsolete and KLM retires the plane that defined the early jet age. In the second, a carillonneur rehearses within an empty building. Its bells ring out across the closed offices in Amsterdam Zuidas. Incorporating a musical cipher provided by the artist; a carrier of an encrypted message, transferred through the physical striking of bronze bells.

SEVEN FOUR SEVEN

• ALEXANDER KUUSIK • BRISTOL (UK) • FINE ARTS

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/alexander-kuusik

151

In his two channel video work Seven four seven, Alex Kuusik (Bristol, UK, 1991) shows images simultaneously which, at first sight, are very different: a plane spotter filming a Boeing 747 and bronze bells that are being played by a carillonneur. KLM’s jumbo jet is without passengers after it has become obsolete due to Covid-19. On the other screen a carillonneur is playing without an audience. Even the offices across the street are empty. The sound that breaks the silence is what connects the two videos.

MUSHROOM DREAMS

• CONSTANTIN DICHTL • ULM (GERMANY) • DIRTY ART DEPARTMENT

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/constantin-dichtl

152 64

Constantin Dichtl’s (Ulm, Germany, 1991) installation Mushroom Dreams consists of sculptures that look like odd organs springing up like corals on the coast of the deep sea. Similar to some kind of virus, they parasite the existing architecture, transforming it into a dreamscape with peculiar reality. The systematic build-up refers to the man-made environment. These hybrid objects continuously oscillate between the “natural” and “artificial”. The sculptures are accompanied by a video depicting a movement through living spaces, consisting of ghostly traces and uncanny encounters both with human and non-human objects. A heartbeat indicates the presence of time.

A • CONSTANTIN WAYFARER´S DICHTL JOURNAL • ULM (GERMANY) • DIRTY ART DEPARTMENT https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/constantin-dichtl

153

A movement through living spaces, consisting of ghostly traces and uncanny encounters both with human and non-human objects. In reality, we do not perceive things from a single perspective, we walk around them, experience things in different angles. It is a voyage not linear but with curves and turns consisting of elements layered together building a grid of indeterminacy.

MAPPINGS

• DIMITRIS THEOCHARIS • LIVADIA (GREECE) • FINE ARTS

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/dimitrios-theocharis

154 64

The work has as a starting point the creation of a DIY compass. If not for the intention to do a trip, and the need for orientation or exploration, what is the point of making a compass in a place that you more or less already know your position related to the geographical north? In which way the process of making an almost banal navigation tool, in a rather familiar space like your house, can still enable you to think in a time and space scale beyond your immediate experience?

HELICES

• DIMITRIS THEOCHARIS • LIVADIA (GREECE) • FINE ARTS

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/dimitrios-theocharis

155

Through his three works Helices 1 & 2, Callisto, and Mr. Frank’s schedule, Dimitris Theocharis (Livadia, Greece, 1987) is questioning whether it is possible to think in a space and time scale beyond our immediate experiences. Theocharis is fascinated by the impossibility of simultaneity. Take a diamond storm on Jupiter for example: the moment we observe it, it may no longer be active on Jupiter. Can we still say that the storm is taking place ‘now’? Theocharis references Galileo who confirmed that the earth is not the only center in the universe, “and neither are you […]. Still, the exhausting abundance of diamonds exploding from clouds on Jupiter doesn’t make their scarcity here any less of a thing.”

THE • EVA VAN FILIGREE KEMPEN AMBASSADOR • ROTTERDAM (NL) • CHALLENGING JEWELLERY https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/eva-van-kempen

156 64

Eva van Kempen’s (Rotterdam, The Netherlands, 1976) eclectic practice partly focuses on craft heritage and filigree, an ancient ornamental type of jewellery specialisation. In response to the impending extinction of this time-consuming technique in the Netherlands, and building on a recent resurgence of interest in craft inspired by the global lockdown, Eva has launched The Filigree Ambassador project. In lieu of mourning the loss of tradition in the face of technological change, Van Kempen steers the practice of filigree towards hobbyism and amateurism. She chooses to socialize filigree knowledge-production and emphasise its meditative aspects over a sellable end product. Van Kempen proposes that practicing an intangible cultural heritage while engaging in a new form of self-care in today’s fast-paced society can provide people with a sense of place and purpose, which ultimately serves their well-being.

TRACING FILIGREE

• EVA VAN KEMPEN • ROTTERDAM (NL) • CHALLENGING JEWELLERY

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/eva-van-kempen

157

One of the components of the craft of filigree is a zig zag. This is the start of a process exploring new materials and applications in relation to this dying out technique.

AS FAR AS I CAN REMEMBER

• FRANCISCA KHAMIS GIACOMAN • SANTIAGO (CHILE) • DESIGN

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/francisca-khamis-giacoman

158 64

There is a temporary void in moments of displacement that arises out of the merging of a loss of one place with the dreams and desires of a new one. Territoriality then becomes a set of relationships and affections that the individual generates with its environment and community, precisely through being in transit, in relation, in motion. It is perpetually changing.

AS FAR AS I CAN REMEMBER

• FRANCISCA KHAMIS GIACOMAN • SANTIAGO (CHILE) • DESIGN

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/francisca-khamis-giacoman

159

Transmission, translation, traces, loss. In an attempt to remember a house that lives on as a ghost in her family’s memory, Francisca Khamis Giacoman (Santiago, Chile, 1988) looks for ways of keeping the house alive, a house in motion, now in another shape, without time or territory. In the performance As far as I can remember Francisca repeatedly draws the floor plan of this house and memorizes the stories told by the ones who lived there. The performance reveals the fragility of the media, and the interrelations between memory, body, and space. Uniting past and present, singularity and multiplicity, temporal currents flow through the work as it appears and disappears throughout the three days of the exhibition.

I ATE THE • HELEEN LAST PIECE MINEUR OF CHEESE, • WOMB (NL) WRAPPED • DESIGN https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/heleen-mineur

160 64

In an attempt to grasp the Now, Heleen Mineur’s (Womb, The Netherlands, 1994) I Ate The Last Piece Of Cheese, Wrapped In A Piece Of Wax knits together contemporary conundrums, hypes and speculations, as if they are relics from the past; fantastically, satirically and poetically. As she cuts into the ongoing performance of the world, she seeks to convey our scattered and fragmented epoch with care and playful criticality: rather than factuality and regret. Among this polyphony of undetermined objects and sonic textures such as situated props, shaky video snippets, piercing melodies and rhythmic chatter, perhaps lies a glimpse of what a possible future could be.

IN A PIECE OF WAX

EPOCH

• HELEEN MINEUR • WOMB (NL) • DESIGN

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/heleen-mineur

161

A parallel Now; atmosphere, objects and information will provide elements of a tale that is not fully explained, asking the viewer to knit together. Non-linear scenes (video) will be played in a loop, with differences each time, providing a subjective sneak peek to this scenario. The robot insect is based on an ancient centipede, but has lights, antennae, possibly claws and eyes. The centipede portrays an element of ‘time’, where technology has found its ways through animal evolution.

NOW / HERE

• KAMILA KANTEK • WARSAW (POLAND) • THE COMMONERS' SOCIETY

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/kamila-kantek

162 64

Tracing nowhere of the mind to search for structure to persist in unbalanced and unknown ‘real’. Taking place in the virtual realm that represents memory – morphing and decay of digital representation of reality is examined to find tools to reconnect with the surroundings and define locality, question value and memory independency. By creating an independent mind space, memories and identities are reclaimed and reoccupied becoming a point cloud of references to care about and defend.

NOW / HERE

• KAMILA KANTEK • WARSAW (POLAND) • THE COMMONERS' SOCIETY

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/kamila-kantek

163

For her video Now/Here, Kamila Kantek (Warsaw, Poland, 1992) created a virtual world representing memory in collage-like frames. By morphing digital representations of reality, Kantek examines new ways to connect them to our surroundings in order to define locality. By creating an independent “mind space”, memories and identities are reclaimed and reoccupied. They become a point of reference in our contemporary world which is being dominated by digitization, causing friction in our reality. Now/Here can be seen as an attempt to get a grip on contemporary life.

THE MOST GLORIOUS DAY ON EARTH

• JANINA FRITZ • BREMEN (GERMANY) • DIRTY ART DEPARTMENT

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/janina-fritz

164 64

In the worlds sculpted by Janina Fritz (Bremen, Germany, 1995), the absurd and the everyday walk sideby-side, holding hands. Moving fluidly between materials, from ceramic to textile and wine, her works engage the senses to trigger divine impulses. With reference to the sacral and the monstrous, she constructs monuments and environments in worship of failed ideals. For The Most Glorious Day On Earth Fritz made a ceramic fountain which is inhabited by three figures and seven lamps.

AUF DEM WEGE ZUR QUELLE

• JANINA FRITZ • BREMEN (GERMANY) • DIRTY ART DEPARTMENT

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/janina-fritz

165

Wandering through the day towards the sunset, you notice a big pile of fleshy pink mass besides the path. Suddenly it forms a mouth and speaks: Come, melt with us! Surrounded by the ruins of tomorrow, humanoids are bathing in liquids that sprinkle from crying eyes and bleeding rocks. Enchanted by a sip of the High Chalice, you decide to linger on and watch the setting of a metallic sun.

QUINTA DEL SORDO

• JESPER HENNINGSSON • NORRKÖPING (SWEDEN) • FINE ARTS

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/jesper-henningsson

166 64

Under what circumstances was this object made? Will it ever reach the public eye? What does it say? Does the place of creation travel? Image: Francisco Goya’s house [scale: 1:432], 1830, León Gil de Palacio (1778–1849), Museo de Historia de Madrid.

BLYBLOMMA

• JESPER HENNINGSSON • NORRKÖPING (SWEDEN) • FINE ARTS

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/jesper-henningsson

167

Jesper Henningsson’s (Norrköping, Sweden, 1989) small linen wall panels are filled with graphite drawings of organic shapes that contrast with the more geometric figures and layout. The contrast between organic and geometric shapes mirrors the contrast between abstract and figurative elements like flowers. By using those contrasts, Henningsson emphasizes the tension between the mathematical and scientific and the cartoonish, questioning under what circumstances an object was made. Will it ever reach the eye? What does it say? And does the place of creation travel?

ST ANTHONY'S WILDERNESS

• SOPHIA SIMENSKY • ESSEX (UK) • DIRTY ART DEPARTMENT

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/sophia-simensky

Sophia Simensky (Essex, England, 1990) takes an archaeological approach to shifting landscapes – collapsing histories into non-linear narratives which judder together in the present. St Anthony’s Wilderness is a battlefield of allegorical fragments and poetic texts which spring from the marred landscape of Northeastern Pennsylvania and it‘s colonial and extractive past. Travelling through the abandoned coal towns and cloisters, through the fields of bluets and corn, the Blue Mountain and its sister ridges remain fixed points on the horizon. The mountains and valleys are littered with narrative fragments, which not only reveal a picture of the past, but speak to the present and colour it. Fragments found in the names of plants and places and blemishes left by industry.

168 64

ST ANTHONY'S WILDERNESS

• SOPHIA SIMENSKY • ESSEX (UK) • DIRTY ART DEPARTMENT

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/sophia-simensky

169

St Anthony’s Wilderness is a battlefield of allegorical fragments and poetic texts. Totemic steel corn plants, tussling water snakes and severed lion tails form a bestial landscape in which acts of violence and speculation are played out. Signs revel in the multifariousness of their meanings and the language of the natural and industrial world collide.

THE TITLE OF THE WORK

• SPAZIO CURA • THE PLACE OF BIRTH • STUDIO FOR IMMEDIATE SPACES

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/spazio-cura

170 64

THE TITLE OF THE WORK

SCENARIO 02

• SPAZIO CURA • THE PLACE OF BIRTH • STUDIO FOR IMMEDIATE SPACES

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/spazio-cura

171 Spazio Cura is a holistic approach to space investigating the bodies, objects, surfaces and gestures that constitute it. The performance Scenario 02 reconsiders the typology of the parking lot. The large, considerably brutal space defined by nothing but rigidly placed cars and gravel on the ground is turned into a variation of a traditional Japanese Zen garden. Instead of a steady formation of asymmetrically placed rocks, a performer arranges incoming cars to an ever changing composition of temporarily frozen objects. In order to stress the re-conceptualisation of the car from an object in movement to one in constant halt, the cars’ surfaces are enhanced with accumulations of leaves. A second performer accentuates the composition of cars by leaving traces in the gravel with the help of a drag net.

NO APPLAUSE • CHARLOTTE UNTIL ROHDE I SAY SO ;) • AIX-LACHAPELLE (GERMANY) • DESIGN https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/charlotte-rohde

172 64

In No Applause until I say so ;), Charlotte Rohde (Aix-La-Chapelle, Germany, 1992) explores the physical control and theatrical gestures that are necessary for a “good” performance. Thinking about female gymnasts at the Olympics, who have to be top athletes but also wear stage makeup; thinking about Lady Gaga, who performed for three months with a broken hip; the pieces speak about female performance versus performing femininity. Part of the presentation are YouTube tutorials explaining how to create bodies out of one’s own body, giving tips and tricks on how to deal with raw material. Somewhere between mainstream internet culture, hydrofeminism, and craft, No Applause until I say so ;) depicts a highly personal longing for unconditional intimacy, never-ending applause and ultimate (self-)control.

CONTROL

• CHARLOTTE ROHDE • AIX-LACHAPELLE (GERMANY) • DESIGN

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/charlotte-rohde

under a surface of dark hair ends a meadow waving in a softer breeze I can feel your scalp the ceiling of your scape there are snakes in the grass gently poisoning your thoughts I hear their peaceful rattling as they crawl by your lower neck running rivers with my hand a little bite stings now and then they don’t like invaders but you do you like the rivers in your hair later dripping from your chin my fingers run them down measuring your thirst

173

DEAR PUBLIC TRANSPORT COMPANY, https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/letters/dear-public-transport-company-by-adrian-madlener

LETTER BY

ADRIAN MADLENER WRITER

EDITORIAL LETTERS

SEVEN *CLICKING* INDEX FINGERS 175

GRADUATES MENTIONED

• WOUTER STROET • KYULIM KIM • GOYTUNG (WEI TUNG KUO) • ANDONI ZAMORA • AIMÉE THERIOT • KLARA WAARA • SILVIA FAGGIANI • FRANZISKA GORALSKI • AMBER OSKAM • DAVID C. KANE

DEAR PUBLIC TRANSPORT COMPANY,

ADRIAN MADLENER

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/letters/dear-public-transport-company-by-adrian-madlener

Dear Mr. Tjalling Smit, Nederlandse Spoorwegen Director of Commerce & Development, Cc: Wouter Stroet, Kyulim Kim, Goytung (Wei Tung Kuo), Andoni Zamora, AimĂŠe Theriot, Klara Waara, Silvia Faggiani, Franziska Goralski, Amber Oskam, David C. Kane I hope this message finds you well. COVID-19 poses innumerable challenges to transport systems throughout the developed world, but this paradigm-shifting pandemic also serves as an opportunity to envision and implement significant improvements. Nederlandse Spoorwegen is one of the entities best poised to enact these changes. While large-scale architectural and engineering programs are essential in the amelioration of our rail, road, and air infrastructures, softer solutions can also help enhance traveler and commuter experience. They perhaps even solve the unsolvable when it comes to customer satisfaction. Through initiatives that focus on the reprogramming of existing structures, not massive overhauls, much can be achieved through the simple rethinking of the frameworks and tools in place. I wanted to bring to your attention the projects of four recent graduates of the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam and suggested how they might put their diverse perspectives and skill set to good use in the improvement of the Nederlandse Spoorwegenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s various products; whether it be its comprehensive rail network, state of the art stations, efficient vehicles, or the various services offered on- and off-board. The Netherlands and its passenger railway operator have long been a moniker of competence around the world. Your extensive, well-served routes help connect cities like Delft, Eindhoven, and Amsterdam, which have each, in their own respect, emerged as hubs of innovation in recent decades. The rapid advancement in areas like technology and healthcare achieved in these metropolises are now joined by strides in creative fields like

177

DEAR PUBLIC TRANSPORT COMPANY,

ADRIAN MADLENER

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/letters/dear-public-transport-company-by-adrian-madlener

design and art. The push for these sometimes disconnected or aloof disciplines to have a broader sustaining impact on society has inspired practitioners to think and work with even more rigor. Along with its impressive engineering feats and pioneering urbanism, the Netherlands also boasts a world-renowned design scene and thriving cultural sector. There’s something inherent to the experimental, dynamic, and no-nonsense nature of this collective output that alludes to the country’s forbearance as an entrepreneurial and hard-working nation with a truly modern outlook. There is little fear in tackling some of our times’ most pressing and overwhelming dilemmas. Part of this distinctively Dutch quality is an openness to and acceptance of new ideas. In recent years, movements like social and service design have established interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary methodologies that have brought creative problem solving and critical thinking to almost all industries. Companies and institutions, large and small, have called on creatives to help implement products and applications in ways that better serve their customers. With the freedoms Dutch art and design schools afford their students, burgeoning practitioners are better poised to help in these collaborative efforts. Nederlandse Spoorwegen is an essential part of that fabric and is responsible to the people of The Netherlands in this respect. Though hailing from various countries and backgrounds, Sandberg Instituut graduates Wouter Stroet, Kyulim Kim, Goytung (Wei Tung Kuo), Aimée Theriot, Klara Waara, Silvia Faggiani, Franziska Goralski, Amber Oskam, and David C. Kane all embody this spirit. Having produced a vast body of work that addresses a wide range of topics and issues, this crop of recent talents explores space, time, routine, and behavior in different ways. Descriptions and images of their theses can be found on the following pages for your review and support of my recommendation.

178

DEAR PUBLIC TRANSPORT COMPANY,

ADRIAN MADLENER

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/letters/dear-public-transport-company-by-adrian-madlener

I would like to reiterate the proposal I put forward in my first letter and suggest these creatives as potential advisors for Nederlandse Spoorwegenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ongoing research and development projects, especially in conducting observation and ethnographic investigations. Statistics and other forms of quantitative analysis are fundamental tools that help in assessing what needs fixing. More quantitative research could reveal nuances in the commuter experience. It might even expose social, cultural, and economic inequities, the problems that might fall through the cracks of a spreadsheet. What do people truly want in their daily rail journey? I hope you will consider this proposal and see the potential artists and designers have in shaping Dutch commerce and culture. Sincerely, Adrian Madlener

179

DEAR PUBLIC TRANSPORT COMPANY,

ADRIAN MADLENER

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/letters/dear-public-transport-company-by-adrian-madlener

Dear United States Department of Transportation, Amtrak, Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, Delta Airlines, Nederlandse Spoorwegen, Prorail, KLM, and other related entities, Americans are currently coming to terms with systemic failure on three levels. Widespread protests spawned by police brutality and racial injustice have joined an economic crisis not seen since The Great Depression. Having claimed over 4 hundred thousand lives in the past five months, COVID-19 continues to cause trouble in parts of the world that opened too soon, suffer from poor infrastructure, or in which the proper measures have not been implemented at the right time. Across the developed world, this century-defining pandemic has uncovered fault lines in almost every aspect of our daily experiences and in the underlying structures that we might have taken for granted in the past. The adage “the straw that breaks the camel’s back” has come to define so much of this tumultuous period. Yet, such extremes are often a catalyst for rapid adaptations that allow us to move forward in new ways. One area where such a fissure has become even more evident is the state of our national transportation infrastructures. It’s no secret that a lot of our stations, airports, bridges, tunnels, railroads, roads, and highways are in bad shape. Though efforts in recent years have been made by local governments to ameliorate these essential arteries, more still needs to be done. This multivalent crisis has arisen as an opportunity to completely rethink what renewal should actually entail. While engineering feats like the soon-to-reopen Laguardia Airport in New York stand as finite testaments to new environmental standards and technological advancements, they do not yet fully reflect an evolved, holistic, and human-centric mindset; the cultural and social behavior that have rapidly changed in a short period.

180

DEAR PUBLIC TRANSPORT COMPANY,

ADRIAN MADLENER

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/letters/dear-public-transport-company-by-adrian-madlener

New approaches that rely on more immediate and softer interventions could improve our individual and collective experiences and allow us to adopt changes in a quicker yet more sustaining manner. Adhoc solutions like the painting of circles in a number of parks to better instruct city dwellers on how to follow social distancing protocols is one such example. In the past months, officials and planners have had to ask themselves a series of tough questions. How do we better facilitate the massive flow of people through our systems at different times of the day, month, year? How do we suggest, educate, and enforce that people maintain distance? How will these new measures impact our budgets and economies? How do we mitigate the impact of this crisis on the social structures that normally depend on a careful, unregulated balance of individualistic pursuits and coexistence in this new reality? What can new technologies and sets of tools do to ease these swift transitions? Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s clear that an interdisciplinary approach is necessary to better solve these dilemmas. Students at postgraduate art and design school Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam are familiar with these set of methodologies and often engage a wide range of skill sets to better comprehend, communicate, and alter the world around them. This letter is an open proposal to reimagine every step in the process of commuting or traveling in a pandemic and post pandemic context, as a point of inquiry from various vantage points. One condition reflects a more mundane routine and a certain set of factors whereas the other represents a more sporadic occasion for most and another set of elements. However both are accomplished by employing the rich tapestry of interconnected infrastructures and vehicles that are made available to them on a daily basis Achieved through different forms of empirical investigation, this multilayered research project would ultimately seek to understand how a wide range of

181

DEAR PUBLIC TRANSPORT COMPANY,

ADRIAN MADLENER

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/letters/dear-public-transport-company-by-adrian-madlener

people are adapting to new behaviors, cultural norms, and actual modes of transportation. The study would take in consideration practical issues of time, space, and value, but also the more intrinsic issues of shifting etiquettes, moods, and interpersonal relationships. As a measure of their completed or ongoing theses and particular interests, a select group of recent graduates from the Sandberg Instituut could offer their insight, intellectual focus, and practical aptitudes in the aim of drawing out a more meaningful set of results. Wouter Stroet employs cartographic techniques to understand better how our public spaces are direct reflections of those who decide on how they are planned and built. His images capture cataclysmic events in time and space. Kyulim Kim seeks to identify and highlight places in our concrete urban landscapes that have been overlooked. She employs both sound and image to question how global events have impacted the infrastructural environments we might take for granted. Goytung (Wei Tung Kuo) is currently developing a mobile application that guides people through their immediate environments, daily routes, and audio instructions that might make them reconsider and come to terms with different aspects of that transitory environment. Andoni Zamora questions the conventions of physical behaviors. She aims to draw links between these mannerisms and the cultural practices that define our societies. Together, these four artists, amongst other graduates AimĂŠe Theriot, Klara Waara, Silvia Faggiani, Franziska Goralski, Amber Oskam and David C. Kane, could comprise an invaluable resource to such a research project. Whereas Stroet and Kim could unearth the raw data of time and space, Chacartequi could help evaluate what

182

DEAR PUBLIC TRANSPORT COMPANY,

ADRIAN MADLENER

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/letters/dear-public-transport-company-by-adrian-madlener

changes in collective behavior are occurring. Tying it all together would be a mobile guide based on a multi-narrative paths model in which the users select their own desired journey through a set check in point. This tool would allow them to at once become more aware of their commute or trip and adaptable when it comes to navigating unforeseen road blocks. We would be honored to invite you to these talentâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s respective graduation presentations later this year, through either digital or virtual channels, and to introduce you to their work. Reflecting the nature of this research proposal, a guided tour that focuses on the most relevant projects through these shows would provide you with a more concise framework. Please let us know of your interest and we would be happy to provide you with further information. Sincerely, Adrian Madlener

183

DEAR PUBLIC TRANSPORT COMPANY,

ADRIAN MADLENER

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/letters/dear-public-transport-company-by-adrian-madlener

Graduates mentioned: sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/wouter-stroet sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/kyulim-kim sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/wei-tung-kuo sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/andoni-zamora sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/aimee-theriot sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/klara-waara sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/silvia-faggiani sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/franziska-goralski sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/amber-oskam sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/david-c-kane

184

DEAR PUBLIC TRANSPORT COMPANY,

ADRIAN MADLENER

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/letters/dear-public-transport-company-by-adrian-madlener

Adrian Madlener is a Brussels-born, New York-based curator and writer covering a wide range of designrelated topics. A graduate of both the Design Academy Eindhoven and the Parsons/Cooper Hewitt History of Design and Curatorial Studies programme, Madlener is particularly interested in exploring where craft and the social sciences intersect with design. His writings can be found in Archpaper, DAMn, Disegno, Domus, Frame, Icon Design, Metropolis, TLmag, The Design Edit, and Trend Tablet.

185

HOW TO • WOUTER LOOK AROUND STROET RATHER • AMSTERDAM THAN AHEAD? (NL) • DESIGN https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/wouter-stroet

186 64

In the spring of 2017 there was a gas explosion in the Schaafstraat, a street in the Hamerkwartier in Amsterdam Noord. Back then I used to live in that same street. After the fire two contemporary art galleries opened together with a warehouse for a craft beer brewery. The area that got completely destroyed by the fire now functions as a parking lot. Through documenting the material remains of the site I aim to investigate and digitally preserve the cracks, the spill-overs and the grow-overs to capture what was once a building in a neighborhood that is now rapidly changing.

SO SETTLER, • WOUTER ARE YOU STROET A PIONEER? • AMSTERDAM (NL) • DESIGN https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/wouter-stroet

187

Wouter Strout’s (Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 1995) So Settler, Are You a Pioneer? captures the structures of a rapidly changing peripheral neighborhood: material remains of an obsolete infrastructure, luxury apartments, and piles of bricks that once used to house people. The work re-assembles and digitally preserves sites that are often overlooked in tales of linear progress. The piece is a journey through distorted urban landscapes, an assemblage of partial perspectives. By adapting the cartographic technique of photogrammetry, Strout aims to question the authorities who decide what is and what is not in focus.

‹IN TRANSIT› • KYULIM KIM • DAEGU (SOUTH KOREA) • STUDIO FOR IMMEDIATE SPACES https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/kyulim-kim

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The work and research of Kyulim Kim (Daegu, South Korea, 1993) focuses on the spatiality of neglected spaces that arise from urban transformation and displacement. Kim mainly is interested in exploring the restraints and characteristics of the medium of video itself and its relationship to the space and context in which it is shown. The video work <In Transit> is an informed reflection of the site of Het Hem in Zaandam (NL) as an ammunition factory and starts with an imagined act of bringing an artwork on site. The act is embodied in a scene set at the building’s loading gates where the manufactured bullets were once shipped out, speculating on the relationship between contemporary spaces of supply chain logistics and art work transportation.

MOVE OR DIE

• KYULIM KIM • DAEGU (SOUTH KOREA) • STUDIO FOR IMMEDIATE SPACES

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/kyulim-kim

189

This video is being made during the Covid-19 outbreak period, questioning what is still running and what has stopped. The video mentions the global operation of UPS which sponsored Great migration project of National Geographic Channel, connecting this ‘move or die’ campaign to the circulation of the video itself. The video was filmed in A10 Highway and the railway built on the dike in Bos en Lommer area, Amsterdam.

CHOOSE YOUR JOURNEY

• GOYTUNG (WEI TUNG KUO) • TAIPEI (TAIWAN) • STUDIO FOR IMMEDIATE SPACES

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/wei-tung-kuo

190 64

It is not my graduation work but something I will do soon in June, on my way until the splendid finale. It is gonna be an audio walk for everyone who has never experienced the location the same way. A journey that you have to make a decision and follow the instructions. A journey about a concept that bother each of us so much in our lives, especially in this moment.

ONE WAY OR ANOTHER

• GOYTUNG (WEI TUNG KUO) • TAIPEI (TAIWAN) • STUDIO FOR IMMEDIATE SPACES

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/wei-tung-kuo

191

Goytung (Wei Tung Kuo) (Taipei, Taiwan, 1994) transforms emotional spaces into materials and tries to solve questions of life through multidisciplinary art expressions. The installation One Way or Another has been specially conceived and created for the exhibition space at Het Hem. Eight high-hanging light boxes serve as a tool for the visitors to be confronted with their constant, yet unconscious decision-making. We are constantly haunted by the act of evaluation, but an idea is a thought that hasn’t been realized yet. Will you know if it is good or bad, or did you already know it was bad? Either way, we all have to find our way, before or after, one way or another.

UNTIL THE FLAVOR LASTS

• ANDONI ZAMORA • LEKEITIO (SPAIN) • STUDIO FOR IMMEDIATE SPACES

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/andoni-zamora

192 64

Andoni Zamora’s (Lekeitio, Spain, 1992) practice is performance-based and circles around the hybridization of linear and circular perception of time and space and the processes of its representation and simulation thereof. Until the flavor lasts is a performative installation, performed by Candela Azpiroz and Maider Aldasoro, that overlays various temporalities and fictions that Zamora has collected and produced for this specific time and place, reflecting on the restrictions that have limited the visitors’ ways of looking at the exhibition. He makes use of different narratives to direct and deviate the perception of the public through different fragmented storylines that are presented by a single performer. The performer repetitively shifts through different scripted personas – from actress to the narrator, from fictional voices to real ones – blurring the boundaries of the site’s spatial qualities and its induced scripted reality.

OPENING AN ALREADY KNOWN CONTENT

• ANDONI ZAMORA • LEKEITIO (SPAIN) • STUDIO FOR IMMEDIATE SPACES

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/andoni-zamora

193

My project will consist in a live performance that will play with its very structure by being repeated loop. In every repetition of the scene the fictional content will lose its meaning and the linearity of the play will be fractured. The scene will be perceived from different fronts every time, turning the audience into an active factor that interferes directly in the narration. As well as the script, the set will be updated for each reenactment until it reaches its limits with the reality, caused by the accumulation of the material that is going to be replaced for each repetition.

SOUND IS THE SOFTEST TOUCH

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/aimee-theriot

A meditation on intimacy, closeness and aural erotics, parting from the phrase “sound is touch at a distance.”

194 64

• AIMÉE THERIOT • MÉRIDA (MEXICO) • CRITICAL STUDIES

*POP* THE SOUND OF A BURSTING BUBBLE

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/aimee-theriot

195

Somewhere between a silent concert, a performative reading and a live ASMR session, Aimée Theriot’s (Mérida, México, 1987) listening experience *pop* the sound of a bursting bubble reflects on the idea of bubble formation as a form of solidarity in a world that is at once globalized and atomized. Through the very intimate and introspective act of listening, this performance is a meditation on the ways in which subjectivity is not only created within, but through coming in contact with other bodies, and reflects on the ambivalence of a time when massive protests in show of solidarity happen at the same time as self-isolation mandates.

• AIMÉE THERIOT • MÉRIDA (MEXICO) • CRITICAL STUDIES

THE MIDDLE STATION

• KLARA WAARA • STOCKHOLM (SWEDEN) • FINE ARTS

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/klara-waara

196 64

Klara Waara (Stockholm, Sweden, 1992) presents a video and sculptures carved out of rotten, compressed wood. The objects function as transmitters and receivers, projecting fragmented memories of the future and past on one another. In her video The Middle Station, Waara observes the sculptures she made in her garden. By treating the materials with resilience, the wood has turned clay-like. The surrounding elements of light, weather and living creatures animate the objects, assisting them in communicating messages. By including the sculptures in her presentation, Waara explores their ability to communicate memories within an exhibition space.

SUNSCREEN • KLARA IN WAARA THE • STOCKHOLM CRYPT (SWEDEN) • FINE ARTS https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/klara-waara

197

For the digital part of the graduation, I am making a video in which objects carved out of rotten, compressed wood is under observation in my garden. I have treated the materials with resilience; the wood has turned clay-like. The objects function as transmitters and receivers, projecting fragmented memories of the future and past on one another as well as into the lens of the camera and the microphone. Echoes appear. The surrounding elements of light, weather and living creatures animates the objects in the truest sense of the word, assisting them in communicating messages.

I, CREATOR OF MOTIVATORI

• SILVIA FAGGIANI • ROME (ITALY) • CHALLENGING JEWELLERY

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/silvia-faggiani

198 64

As a necessary act of being confronted with the coming future and establish who am I, I, Creator of Motivatori started to exist as such and work towards defining what that means. I, Creator of Motivatori focus on investigating the necessity, and ultimately, to create tools without judgement, to make people aware of the power of individual contribution to the common good. Currently involving rituals and celebrations to build and strengthen a sense of togetherness.

I, CREATOR OF MOTIVATORI

• SILVIA FAGGIANI • ROME (ITALY) • CHALLENGING JEWELLERY

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/silvia-faggiani

199

Silvia Faggiani’s (Rome, Italy, 1994) research focuses on immaterial design relating to social networks such as businesses and educational institutions. Through her close involvement with the working group Overgraduation, she has developed embodied and speculative approaches to organizational theory and self-development. Rejecting the position of individual artistic authorship after graduation, Faggiani’s contribution to the Challenging Jewellery exhibition at Het Hem consists of a live broadcast to her self-devised residency and workshop space in Italy, where audiences are able to follow Faggiani with her as she works, eats and studies with fellow colleagues and peers. By subverting absence and refusal of the thesis show, and rendering the artwork as a portal to the outside world, Faggiani asks questions about participation and the need to assert safe spaces within design education.

QUEER COMMONING IS DESIRE. OR,

• FRANZISKA GORALSKI • RADEBEUL (GERMANY) • THE COMMONERS' SOCIETY

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/franziska-goralski

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Franziska Goralski (Radebeul, Germany, 1992) founded the Department Handlungspotential, describing the possibilities that gather the potential needed to start an action. The department was installed in the installation Queer commoning is desire. Or, now it’s time to stay awake. showing the paradox of insurmountable bureaucratic structures built by humans and the vital range to act. Emphasizing the potentiality to act, Queer commoning is desire. Or, now it’s time to stay awake. allows for bodily relations to conceptual issues. The department speculates how and where critical, artistic, queer, unsettling thinking and processes can be equally represented and rooted in society, valued and attention given. It transforms by time and comes in different shapes, varying to the environment.

NOW IT’S TIME TO STAY AWAKE.

DEAR • FRANZISKA AUTHORITIES, GORALSKI ... • RADEBEUL (GERMANY) • THE COMMONERS' SOCIETY https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/franziska-goralski

201

“Dear authorities,…” is a thought-model as well as a concept for a structural modification on the governmental level. It comes in the form of letters and speculates how critical, artistic, queer, unsettling thinking and processes can be equally represented and rooted in society, valued and attention given like e.g., the military. Flooding the ministry’s office. How does an adequate space for these processes would look like and enfold? Start with a name and call it the Department for Potentiality to Act.

SAND CASTLE

• AMBER OSKAM • HAARLEM (NL) • THE COMMONERS' SOCIETY

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/amber-oskam

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A year of research into sand extraction and movement of people. Following the lines along which sand is travelling and used. Untangling the power relations that are active in the phenomena of extraction. Collecting sand stories. Exchanging borderless sand in a world of borders. Control over contamination. Touching the different actors and their (in)ability to move. Building a sand castle on Zeeburger island. Alongside the current construction of residential buildings.

SAND CASTLE

• AMBER OSKAM • HAARLEM (NL) • THE COMMONERS' SOCIETY

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/amber-oskam

203

SAND CASTLE

THERE IS • DAVID C. A FUTURE KANE THE OTHER • LIVERPOOL SIDE OF THE (UK) • THE COMMONERS' PRESENT: SOCIETY THIS FUTURE IS ABANDONED https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/david-c-kane

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For his video There is a Future the Other Side of the Present: This Future is Abandoned, David C. Kane (Liverpool, United Kingdom, 1983) explores the concept of the future as mythology. The work consists of a series of video clips set to a non-diegetic soundtrack falling in and out of sync. Kane contemplates the collapsing of past-present-future temporalities while traversing new, weird terrains and the relationships between place, sound, and the psyche. What emerges is an audio-visual constellation of the future, haunted by the past as present. Using darkness as a situational framework, the work is a call to confront that which is outside our usual systems of reference in order to consider the future as simultaneously ominous and seductive.

EVERYONE'S • DAVID C. ALLOWED A KANE FUTURE THEY • LIVERPOOL DON'T CARE (UK) TO MENTION • THE COMMONERS' SOCIETY https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/david-c-kane

205

Magnetised by twenty-first century pandemonium the work is a series of video and sound installations that explore the future as a mythology. Each component is a stand alone audio-visual (re)imagining of lost and forgotten futures that searches for a destination that might not exist but moves towards them anyway – assembling each of the pieces in any given order creates new speculative fictions as an exercise in worldbuilding.

DEAR READER, https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/letters/dear-reader-by-laurens-otto

LETTER BY

LAURENS OTTO CURATOR & CRITIC

EDITORIAL LETTERS

SEVEN *CLICKING* INDEX FINGERS 207

GRADUATES MENTIONED

• DAVID C. KANE • FABIAN TOMBERS • BEN TUPPER • SARA SANTANA LÓPEZ • NICHOLAS REILLYMCVITTIE • MIRIAM KONGSTAD • MYRTO VRATSANOU

DEAR READER,

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/letters/dear-reader-by-laurens-otto

LAURENS OTTO

Dear reader, Cc: David C. Kane, Fabian Tombers, Ben Tupper, Sara Santana López, Nicholas Reilly-McVittie, Miriam Kongstad, Myrto Vratsanou, I’m writing this letter to you, because you are reading it now. If Modernity was an attempt to take hold of the present, our current times are geared towards the future. Or rather: the present is formatted by the future. The present can no longer be extrapolated from the past, it is supposedly governed by speculations on what’s believed to come. What happens today is based on a pre-emption of the future, or, so we are told. Extracted data sets determine actions in the present, based on predictions of the future. They provide models to predict crime, locate diseases, and determine consumer behaviour – in advance. When a website suggests products even before you know you need it, it is creating your pre-emptive personality. More detrimental are pre-emptive policing and drone-strikes, taking place before harm is done. It took me a few days to decide who to write this letter to: who holds the most sway over the future? Is it Amazon, as the company with the biggest investment in research & development? Or Alphabet, Google’s conglomerate, as the prime holder of internet services and other data-related businesses? Or, should I write to Bridgewater, the world’s biggest investment fund? As a hedge fund it anticipates movements that are yet to happen, producing returns uncorrelated to current market indices. But I prefer writing to you, dear reader, being in the now. No matter how much of the present is governed by corporate and state fuelled predictions of the future, abiding by that logic is fatalist. Neither the present,

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DEAR READER,

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/letters/dear-reader-by-laurens-otto

LAURENS OTTO

nor the future, are set 64in stone. Protests against racism and police violence, for instance, suddenly pushed for much more radical demands than earlier (more modest) requests to reform criminal justice. It made me see how much some of the graduates of the Sandberg Instituut in 2020 are vested in the present, even when their work appears to be future bound. Researcher and artist David C. Kane’s work explores the utopian impulse and the desire to (re)imagine the future through a political corrosion of late capitalism. Magnetised by twenty-first century pandemonium, the work Everyone’s Allowed a Future They Don’t Care to Mention is a series of video and sound installations that explore the future as a mythology. Each component imagines lost and forgotten futures, creating new speculative fictions as an exercise in world-building. Fabian Tombers investigates post-capitalist desires through fully automated luxury queer space communism, solar punk revolutions, domestic realities and psychedelic socialisms. He explores what a design practice of resistance may looks like, calling to ‘embody your utopias today’. Other works have a more imminent scope. Ben Tupper works with essay and fiction to explore how language can be understood as a site of social struggle. His stories aim to create a world that taps into the uncanny. Short Worlds for Radio is a collection of very short stories that are broadcasted during a moment of interlude, where listeners would usually hear a radio jingle or a commercial. Sara Santana López looks in the power relations inscribed in cultural practice, to find ambivalent strategies which implicate herself simultaneously as author, mediator, and part of the public. Her work Escribas Modernas is a long-term collective translation of Cristina Morales’ novel Lectura Fácil. The slow pirating process towards a free multi-authored publication, makes distribution

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DEAR READER,

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/letters/dear-reader-by-laurens-otto

LAURENS OTTO

political and transformative, a living process. Rather than an effort to project global solutions for the future, it’s a local proposition in the present. Nicholas Reilly-McVittie’s work is predominantly concerned with the relations between aesthetics and ideology. Worldviews is a video essay which traces relations and affinities between aesthetic ‘worldviews’ (artistic and scientific visual representations of the world) and ideological ‘worldviews’ (philosophies and belief systems), from the Renaissance period to the present day. In recognising the impossibility of a totalising worldview that could ‘see’ everything clearly, the video attempts to draw attention to what is lost from such views. Miriam Kongstad’s work expands from a background in choreography. It is discreetly violent, static but in movement, eclectic yet stylised – a form of cynical magic. Her work Chimera or Non Compos Mentis is a collaboration with musician Alexander Holm to unite harmonica compositions, breath, voice and text to form an intimate, sensorial and dystopian soundscape, unfolding and expanding views on the body. Nowhere is the sense of now more pronounced than in the dizziness induced by technology. Myrto Vratsanou’s practice revolves around the sensual aspects of technological, digital and material spaces. Free Immersion Notes is a non-linear journal that reflects on the potential of corrosions, glitches and aberrations in immersive technologies. The videos explore the relation between body, water, air, pressure, weight and object, expressing the scattered and oceanic feeling of being out-of-joint. It’s tempting to forego the present for an alchemy of the future, abiding by a world where speculation determines reality. It’s an accelerationist trap, that negates the power that every present moment holds. As Walter Benjamin cryptically assessed that every history turns to the present just as sunflowers turn to the sun, so should the present conjure the future.

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DEAR READER,

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/letters/dear-reader-by-laurens-otto

LAURENS OTTO

Dear reader, please accept my invitation to encounter these works in Sandberg Instituutâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Graduation publication The Subject of the Email. Letâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s use that moment to see how to deflect a pre-empted future. In the meantime, continue seizing the present. Take care, Laurens Otto

Graduates mentioned: sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/david-c-kane sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/fabian-tombers sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/ben-tupper sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/sara-santana-lopez sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/nicholas-reilly-mcvittie sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/miriam-kongstad sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/myrto-vratsanou

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DEAR READER,

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/letters/dear-reader-by-laurens-otto

LAURENS OTTO

Laurens Otto is a curator and critic working on questions of circulation and distribution within economies underwriting artistic production. He is editor-in-chief of RESOLUTION Magazine, a print magazine that explores the impact of the digital image. He worked as curator at Het HEM, Zaandam (2019-20) and associate curator at Human Activities, Lusanga, DR Congo (2016-19). His most recent exhibition is Prelude: Melancholy of the Future, curated with Antony Hudek at Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens.

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SOFT SPACES & DIGITAL DOMESTICS

• FABIAN TOMBERS • SEEHEIM JUGENHEIM (GERMANY) • DESIGN

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/fabian-tombers

214 64

A moment after the death of time. Psychedelic dreams, shattering the veil of the real. A sudden necessity to re-invent everyday life. How to make in times of crisis? We make a tale knitted with desiring strings. An Odonian House, a quiet revolution. Schools outside of schools, teaching without teachers and rooms without room. We want to learn to meet without expecting archetypes. To touch membranes without fear of the alien. In collaboration with Anouk Heltzel & Larissa Beyla Popanda.

ACID UTOPIA NOW!

• FABIAN TOMBERS • SEEHEIM JUGENHEIM (GERMANY) • DESIGN

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/fabian-tombers

Fabian Tombers (Seeheim Jugenheim, Germany, 1992) rethinks our relationship with production and being, through improvised performances with sound and spatial installations. The pandemic forced all of us to reimagine what everyday life could be. Acid Utopia Now! proposes that escaping the technocratic dictatorship of time might help us to find a place for radical imagination somewhere behind the curtains. With his sonic interventions, Tombers builds spaces and situations in which reality can be torn to pieces, revealing the timeless and the communal. By doing so, he shows the potential to change the space we inhabit and the way we treat each other.

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SHORT WORLDS FOR HALFTIME: A READING

• BEN TUPPER • KENT (UK) • CRITICAL STUDIES

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/ben-tupper

216 64

Ben Tupper’s (Kent, United Kingdom, 1992) Short Worlds for Halftime: A Reading is a collection of very short stories written for radio. Broadcast individually during a moment of interlude, perhaps where listeners would usually hear a radio jingle or commercial, the stories aim to create a world that taps in to the eeriness of the familiar yet unfamiliar.

SHORT WORLDS FOR RADIO

• BEN TUPPER • KENT (UK) • CRITICAL STUDIES

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/ben-tupper

217

Short Worlds for Radio is a collection of very short stories written for radio. Broadcast individually during a moment of interlude, perhaps where listeners would usually hear a radio jingle or commercial, the stories aim to create a world that taps in to the eeriness of the familiar yet unfamiliar.

ESCRIBAS MODERNAS

• SARA SANTANA LÓPEZ • MADRID (SPAIN) • DIRTY ART DEPARTMENT

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/sara-santana-lopez

218 64

Escribas Modernas is a long term project of collective translation. An English version of the novel Lectura Fácil is progressively built through the bilingual voices of various participants. It proposes a slow pirating process, from the original edited novel to a free multi-authored publication, which does not pursue a mass production-distribution of the content but for the distribution to be living process, politic and transformative.

ESCRIBAS MODERNAS

• SARA SANTANA LÓPEZ • MADRID (SPAIN) • DIRTY ART DEPARTMENT

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/sara-santana-lopez

219 Sara Santana López’s (Madrid, Spain, 1994) escribas modernas is a long term project of collective translation. An English version of the novel Lectura Fácil is progressively built through the bilingual voices of various participants. It pursues a slow pirating action, from the original edited novel towards a pirate free multi-authored publication. The translators are women whose mother tongue is Spanish and who have different experiences using English, translating themselves in their day-to-day lives. A vertical institution such as translation, based on expertise and transparency, is inhabited from an amateur, subjective and unofficial position. This pirating, instead of facilitating a mass distribution of the content, is built slowly and locally, through personal encounters and conversations, resulting in a polyphonic elaboration and publishing process.

UNREQUITED RECOGNITION

• NICHOLAS REILLYMCVITTIE • CREWE (UK) • CRITICAL STUDIES

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/nicholas-reilly-mcvittie

220 64

The video installation Unrequited Recognition by Nicholas Reilly-McVittie (Crewe, United Kingdom, 1993) and Benjamin Schoonenberg (The Netherlands, 1996) considers the nature of contemporary image-making technologies, examining their increasingly reflexive capacities in, for example, pattern recognition software. By drawing attention to their (mis)recognitions, the work considers how these technologies increasingly mirror the formation of a subjective identity (as understood in psychoanalysis) and thereby produce an unconscious that makes itself known through slips; when they cease to work as we expect them to.

MEASURES OF AN IMAGE

• NICHOLAS REILLYMCVITTIE • CREWE (UK) • CRITICAL STUDIES

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/nicholas-reilly-mcvittie

221

Measures of an Image is an ongoing research project concerned with images without observers. The project consists of a theoretical investigation into the ‘operational image’, seeking to situate the historical and epistemological basis for this phenomenon, alongside a series of moving image works that develop its implications.

CHIMERA / NON COMPOS MENTIS

• MIRIAM KONGSTAD • ODENSE (DENMARK) • FINE ARTS

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/miriam-kongstad

222 64

Chimera or Non Compos Mentis is the working title of a collaborative project between artist Miriam Kongstad and musician Alexander Holm. Their collaboration unites harmonica compositions, breath, voice and text which all together form an intimate, sensorial and dystopian soundscape. The breath functions as a choreographic link between the harmonica, the voice and the text in which an expanded, architectural and lyrical view on the body unfolds

THE ONSET OF FEVER

• MIRIAM KONGSTAD • ODENSE (DENMARK) • FINE ARTS

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/miriam-kongstad

223

The Onset of Fever by Miriam Kongstad (Odense, Denmark, 1991) is a touching and intense installation in which a human-like figure is the centerpiece. The creature is titled Foetus and is for the most part made out of concrete. The sexual pose and odd face with glass eyes make the sculpture alienating. A large wire is connecting it to the other sculpture, titled Corpus. Where Foetus still has human-like characteristics, they cannot be recognized in the corpus. Together the sculptures form a dystopian installation that raises questions about our relationship to the world around us: Kongstad seems to ask whether we have become totally alienated from our immediate surroundings and even from other human beings.

TWO LAPSES • MYRTO (THE HAUNTED VRATSANOU VILLA OF • ATHENS SPETSES) (GREECE) • FINE ARTS https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/myrto-vratsanou

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Myrto Vratsanou’s (Athens, Greece, 1994) presentation reflects on hoarding and haunting, memory, digital and physical accumulation, being out-of-joint and the oceanic feeling. The objects are drawing from free-diving traditions, exploring the relation between body, water, air, pressure, weight and object. Besides his video works A Hike and A Drive, Vratsanou is showing The Two Lapses, two small objects that are attached to the wall. The use of clay, natural pigment and copper make them reminiscent of fossils that have been put in a special container for display. On the one hand, this makes them look like valuable, special objects. On the other, their rough appearance allows them to enter into a dialogue with the damaged, rough walls of the exhibition space. Vratsanou reflects on this never-ending search for cause and effect where one thing becomes another over and over again.

FREE IMMERSION NOTES

• MYRTO VRATSANOU • ATHENS (GREECE) • FINE ARTS

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/draft/myrto-vratsanou

225

The project is a non-linear journal of relocations, reflecting on hoarding and haunting, memory, digital and physical accumulation, being out-of-joint and scattered and the oceanic feeling. The videos reflect on the uncanny potential of corrosions, glitches and aberrations in architectural structures and immersive technologies. The objects are drawing from free-diving traditions, exploring the relation between body, water, air, pressure, weight and object.

SANDBERG INSTITUUT GRADUATION 2020

THE SUBJECT OF THE EMAIL

ABOUT

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SANDBERG INSTITUUT

GRADUATION 2020

SANDBERG INSTITUUT As the postgraduate programme of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie Amsterdam, the Sandberg Instituut offers Master Programmes in Fine Arts, Interior Architecture and Design. The five Main Departments aim to deepen the practices of artists, designers and critics. In addition, the Temporary Programmes reflect on specific urgencies in society and the arts, and the Hosted Programmes focus on collaboration with other institutes. MAIN DEPARTMENTS Sandberg Instituutâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Main Departments are Critical Studies, Design, The Dirty Art Department, Fine Arts and Studio for Immediate Spaces. An average of only twenty students per programme allows each course to be flexible and open to initiatives from students and third parties. The course directors, who are prominent artists, designers, theorists and curators with international practices, invite tutors and guests who are able to challenge the students to critically reflect on their profession, their work and their progress. The Sandberg Instituut is open to candidates from many different backgrounds. We require a valid Bachelor degree in a field relevant to the programme you are applying for, as well as proof of proficiency in the English language. TEMPORARY PROGRAMMES Jurgen Bey, the Sandberg Instituut director since 2010, has sought to find ways to align the institute with the dynamics of contemporary society. Bey introduced two-year Temporary

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SANDBERG INSTITUUT

GRADUATION 2020

Programmes that are developed according to urgent world issues. Vacant NL – the first Temporary Programme – was launched in 2011 and explored the vast potential of the thousands of vacant buildings in the Netherlands. In 2013, two additional temporary programmes were introduced: the School of Missing Studies dealt with art and the public space, whereas Material Utopias investigated the shifting boundaries between materials and techniques. Other finished Temporary Programmes include System D Academy, Cure Master, Designing Democracy, Materialisation in Art and Design, Fashion Matters, Master of Voice, Reinventing Daily Life, Radical Cut-Up, and Shadow Channel. Current Temporary Programmes are Approaching Language, Resolution, Challenging Jewellery and The Commoners’ Society. The two new Temporary Programmes starting in 2021 are Blacker Blackness and Ecologies of Transformation. HOSTED PROGRAMMES The Sandberg Instituut is hosting a category of educational programmes in collaboration with partner institutes and companies since 2017. The Hosted Programmes attempt to intertwine existing agendas and stakeholders for a collective two-year studying period. The topics are essential for the future of our learning institute and of art education in a broader, international perspective. Therefore, the Hosted Programmes are surrounded by other in-house projects such as debates, writing, conferencing, etc. The first Hosted Programme was the Master Design of Experiences (2017–2019) in collaboration with the University of the Underground. It was part of joint investigations on the implications of ‘external funding’ for art education. Topics covered, but not limited to, were for instance cultural-diversity discussions, the implications of artificial intelligence or the relation of art to public-urban space.

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C S

SANDBERG INSTITUUT GRADUATION 2020

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/graduates_critical-studies

MAIN DEPARTMENT

CRITICAL STUDIES

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GRADUATES

• NICHOLAS REILLYMCVITTIE • PATRYCJA ROZWORA • LUCA SOUDANT • AIMÉE THERIOT • BEN TUPPER

Critical Studies is a two-year Master’s programme in research and theory. The programme offers an open, interdisciplinary environment for the development of an independent research practice, while providing a rigorous grounding in critical theory, research methods and writing techniques. We are especially interested in forms of inquiry and study that are at odds with traditional academic frameworks, including practiceled research and other intersections of research, practice and theoretical inquiry. Participants have the possibility to pursue a self-initiated research project with great autonomy, working individually or collectively with supervisors of their choice. Research projects are presented in a series of regular colloquia, which function as spaces for collective discussion and exchange. In addition to this, participants are provided with the support and resources for the development of collaborative projects related to their research, such as publications, exhibitions, screenings or symposia. Alongside the research trajectory, participants take part in a programme of seminars, lectures and workshops. This programme provides a thorough introduction to key concepts in critical theory and continental philosophy, explores research methodologies in relation to cultural practices and supports participants in the development of a writing practice. In addition to this general programme, each month specific themes are addressed in depth during lectures and seminars given by visiting speakers. Participants take an active part in shaping the educational programme and have the opportunity to organise workshops, seminars and excursions in parallel with it. Critical Studies welcomes applicants from a range of backgrounds, including writers, editors, theorists, artists, curators, educators and other cultural practitioners interested in exploring points of convergence between research, practice and writing. Critical Studies explicitly welcomes applicants who want to diverge from a trajectory that they have previously embarked on, seeking an environment that offers space for further development and experimentation.

SANDBERG INSTITUUT GRADUATION 2020

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/graduates_design

MAIN DEPARTMENT

DESIGN 231

GRADUATES

• EMIRHAN AKIN • CARMEN DUSMET CARRASCO • LEVI VAN GELDER • ANDREA GONZÁLEZ • FRANCISCA KHAMIS GIACOMAN • TALI LIBERMAN • HELEEN MINEUR • NICOLÒ PELLARIN • CHARLOTTE ROHDE • WOUTER STROET • FABIAN TOMBERS • HANNA VALLE

The Design Department is a two-year Master’s programme that provides a collaborative environment for students to develop their projects and practices. Due to the open structure of the curriculum, we are able to reflect on, and respond to urgent topics, current discourses, and the interests of our students and tutors. The students and tutors of the Design Department work through the complexities and contradictions of our current time. Their modes of expression range from print work, digital interfaces, films and videos, network infrastructures, games, performances, writing, educational platforms, audio tours, and more. The students at the Design Department share the necessity to communicate through their work, may it be through informative, lyrical, dialogical, discursive, or confrontational modes of expression. Considering design as a practice of ‘making things public’, we aim to analyse the politics inherent in design, through actively opening up, sharing and reviewing design in progress. The Design Department welcomes students that are underrepresented in the field of design, art, education, and beyond. We are looking for students from a variety of backgrounds who like to embark upon self-initiated projects, engage in collaboration with fellow students, start new coalitions, design new forms for working side by side, learning and unlearning together. Students of the Design Department want to challenge their existing practices, embrace their vulnerabilities, sincerely deal with their own dilemmas, and will put those up for discussion.

SANDBERG INSTITUUT GRADUATION 2020

MAIN DEPARTMENT

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/graduates_dirty-art-department

DIRTY ART DEPARTMENT

GRADUATES

• VERONIKA BABAYAN • CONSTANTIN DICHTL • JANINA FRITZ • NATALIA JORDANOVA • SARA SANTANA LÓPEZ • CÓILÍN O'CONNELL • OCTAVE RIMBERTRIVIÈRE • SOPHIA SIMENSKY • LINDA STAUFFER

The Dirty Art Department offers itself as an open space for all possible thought, creation, and action. It sees itself as a dynamic paradox, flowing between the pure and the applied, the existential and the deterministic, and the holy and the profane. It is concerned with individuality, collectivity, and our navigation of the complex relationship between the built world and the natural world, and other people and ourselves. It’s a place to build objects or totems, religions or websites, revolutions or business models, paintings, or galaxies. The Dirty Art Department comes from a common background of design and applied art, it seeks however to reject the Kantian division between the pure and the applied. Since ‘god is dead’ and ‘the spectacle’ is omnipresent, it sees the creation of alternative and new realities as the way to reconsider our life situation on this planet. The aim of the Dirty Art Department is to develop singular individual and collective practices, regardless of medium or subject, and to give an insight into how to place these practices into the existing contexts of art, design, performance, writing, pizza making, etc. The final challenge is to create a new context that is, the transformation of reality. The Dirty Art Department promotes a strong theoretical and philosophical agenda and is open to dangerous attempts and spectacular failures. It sees itself as a journey, and wherever it stops off, it remembers that ‘Any Space is the Place.’” Milestones: In collaboration with the Macao Collective, with which DAD has been collaborating for five years, the department was nominated for the inaugural Milan Design Prize in 2016 with the project the Wandering School, a collective living and social sculpture. In 2018 the department continued its trip with the Wandering School Part 2: Revolution or Bust!, a dérive that included meeting the oracle of Delphi, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, walking through the wilderness to Athens, clashes with Titans, a peace offering to the Gods, helping to rebuild a refugee centre, regular encounters with tear gas, and just simply being there. The collective film Revolution or Bust! was presented at the third Youth Biennale of Bolzano in 2018, curated by Christian Jankowski. The Dirty Art Department is open to students from all backgrounds, including designers, artists, bankers, sceptics, optimists, economists, philosophers, sociologists, independent thinkers, poets, urban planners, farmers, anarchists and the curious. Please enjoy the trip.

SANDBERG INSTITUUT GRADUATION 2020

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/graduates_fine-arts

MAIN DEPARTMENT

FINE ARTS

233

GRADUATES

• ANOUK ASSELINEAU • ANNA MARIA BALINT • JESPER HENNINGSSON • MIRIAM KONGSTAD • ALEXANDER KUUSIK • PEDRO MATIAS • YARA SAID • SASHA SERGIENKO • DIMITRIS THEOCHARIS • LIESELOT VERSTEEG • MYRTO VRATSANOU • KLARA WAARA

The Fine Arts Department retains a focus on autonomy and making, while addressing the social and economic roles of art production. During the Fine Arts Master’s, our students become more of them-selves, stronger in who they are and what position they intend to take on in society. They reflect on their own practice, and what it might mean on a grander scale, especially in relation to understand-ing one’s position in the world. The department helps to create and test a student’s individual parameters helping them to gauge the effect their work, and challenging them to be able to critically support a piece in the context of its exhibition. At the core of the programme are the consistent conversations held with the main tutors throughout the two-year period. Alongside these regular dialogues, guest tutors are invited for seminars and tutorials both in first and second year. Studio time thus alternates with an extensive series of workshops, seminars, and one-off events, that also steer the student to less familiar areas within their practice. In addition to these guests and activities, an annual group exhibition is held early on in the year and research excursions abroad take place twice annually. These trips are subdivided in focus and aim: for second-year students, an intense winter thesis writing & reflection period is organized abroad (in the past to the Arctic Circle, The Isle of Lewis and Delphi), while the first years partake in a shorter programmed excursion outside of The Netherlands. All students join in a department-wide spring research trip (in the past to Glasgow, Athens, Naples and Sharjah). Several times a year, students come together with staff and tutors to discuss common interests that have emerged and can be addressed with the help of experts who, following these sessions, are invited accordingly. Student-led activities, such as group crits, film nights and Monday lunches are encouraged, while internal platforms are in place to promote small-scale try-outs and experimentation in presentation. In short, the Sandberg Instituut functions as a base for the Fine Arts students, while encouraging participants to develop and test their practice both within and beyond the school. Candidates should be motivated to question their existing practice. An extreme curiosity is essential, as well as a willingness to enter into deep conversation with tutors and peers. Perhaps most crucially, students need to be able to work and think independently – and not be afraid to critically reflect on their work. Prospective students will be evaluated on their motivation, previous experience and portfolio. The admissions committee will focus on the authenticity, artistry and autonomous visual quality of the work presented.

S I S

SANDBERG INSTITUUT GRADUATION 2020

MAIN DEPARTMENT

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/graduates_studio-for-immediate-spaces

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STUDIO FOR IMMEDIATE SPACES

GRADUATES

• ANDONI ZAMORA • BEATRIZ CONEFREY • SPAZIO CURA • KYULIM KIM • GOYTUNG (WEI TUNG KUO) • MARÍA MAZZANTI • ROMAN TKACHENKO • MICHAEL WEBER

Studio for Immediate Spaces is a two-year Master’s programme on space-related practices. Questions of politics, ecology, society, technology, economy manifest in space. How they play out in reality also defines different possibilities of how to come together, how to manage work, leisure, resources and commons in a time of ecological collapse and social divide. Through site-specific works, location-based installations, situated research and context-driven scenography the course participants explore spatially engaging strategies beyond disciplinary boundaries. Space is both, a theoretical entity and a real thing – continuously informing one another. Thus the aim of the program is to explore possibilities to work in space and to find means to act on in. Therefore the Studio looks for ways to deepen the understanding of and knowledge about space and guide the course participants towards positions that positively and productively engage with the world around them. The Studio is set up as a post-disciplinary laboratory testing ideas that have relevance for how we live today and how we could live tomorrow beyond the disciplines of art, design and architecture that continue failing to bring about change as they stay trapped in their inherent logics and economic systems. The question „How to live together?“ serves as a guiding principle for the course’s approach. The practices developed during the course are informed by contemporary discourse on space, yet they foster independence and criticality and push for an execution on the scale of 1:1 to directly engage with a given context. As artistic positions they inform the discourse of spatial practices, as design positions they propose alternative solutions with artistic means. The Studio for Immediate Spaces invites ‘undisciplinary spatialists,’ who prefer the collective effort of making space to an alleged genius gesture of the individual master. It aims to develop practices that are informed by an uncompromised and autonomous perspective in a time when spatial experts are so direly needed to proactively and productively shape the world.

SANDBERG INSTITUUT GRADUATION 2020

TEMPORARY PROGRAMME

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/graduates_the-commoners-society

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THE COMMONERS' SOCIETY

Using visual, digital, and performative tools the Temporary Programme, The Commoners’ Society, proposed a new kind of metropolis that is focused on social interaction and equal opportunities over financial growth and profit.

GRADUATES

• ANTO LÓPEZ ESPINOSA • FRANZISKA GORALSKI • DAVID C. KANE • KAMILA KANTEK • KASPER VAN MOLL • AMBER OSKAM • LUCIA FERNANDEZ SANTORO • WILLEM SCHENK • SIMPSON TSE • CINDY WEGNER 235

The late writer, teacher and cultural theorist Mark Fisher (aka K-Punk) wrote extensively on the relation between neo-liberal politics and the rising numbers of depressions and suicides we see around us. He showed this is because we are caught within ‘capitalist realism’ and are no longer able to imagine alternative economic and social systems. According to the philosopher Byung Chun Han, this is specifically so because we became our own exploiters when the exploitation of others disappeared (or was removed) from our real life experience. We recognise that a way out is to actively see ‘the other’ again, to sense real presence so we can interrelate once more. With these perspectives on our current society in mind, the Temporary Programme, The Commoners’ Society, looked for new ways of living, making, owning, sharing, managing and maintaining; or generally for models for what we call ‘a new commoning’. The proposals we developed were manifold, conceptual and hands-on, and were always tested ‘on the ground’. Therefore the programme was partially located at an Amsterdam urban development area in Zeeburg where we had our actual work and test terrain. The site-specific campus allowed the commoners, who are the people that will live and work there, but which also includes the heads, tutors and students of the programme, who are artists, designers, researchers, educators, theorists and communicators, to propose models for alternative ways of living, leading to new urban landscapes. The programme started by building a temporary workspace for ourselves that is flexible and adjustable and makes crucial interaction with the surrounding living and working population possible. The programme took as its departure point city-making structures such as General Management, Economy, City planning and Infrastructure, Arts, Culture and Sports, Housing, Employment, Health, Environment and Climate, Mobility, Public Space, Co-habitation and relationships. These notions were fundamentally restructured and renamed from the moment the participants were involved. The Temporary Programme was contextualised by a theoretical reflection upon earlier utopian models and strategies and had a wider public programme. It was part of a larger frame where the University of Amsterdam, architectural platforms, the municipality, the project-developer, the building companies, etc. were involved. They all had specific roles and interests and we sought as much collaboration with them as possible to leverage the project and its effects. Partners include: University Amsterdam BPD (project developer), Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Archis/Volume, Municipality of Amsterdam, Studio Framis NL. Within this context, participants had the possibility to pursue a self-initiated research project with great autonomy, working individually or collectively. Research projects were presented in a series of regular meetings in the area or on other locations in the city. We used existing or built new spaces for collective discussion and exchange. Within the framework of the programme participants were also provided with support and resources for the development of collaborative projects related to their research, such as publications, exhibitions, screenings workshops, actions, events. The Temporary Programme, The Commoners’ Society, ran from 2018–2020 and welcomed applications from amongst others artists, writers, editors, theorists, curators, philosophers, sociologists, architects, activists, designers, dancers, lawyers.

SANDBERG INSTITUUT GRADUATION 2020

TEMPORARY PROGRAMME

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2020/final/graduates_challenging-jewellery

CHALLENGING JEWELLERY 236 64

GRADUATES

• SELINE DURRER • VERONIKA FABIAN • SILVIA FAGGIANI • GABRIELLA GOLDSMITH • TING GONG • EVA VAN KEMPEN • MORGANE DE KLERK • LAILA EL MEHELMY • MAREK MROWINKSI • MARGARET MUNCHHEIMER • STEPHANIE SCHUITEMAKER • MARILYN VOLKMAN • JOANNE VOSLOO

The Temporary Programme Challenging Jewellery focused on building a persuasive collective. One that could be defined as both a corporate association and a movement, driven by a common interest in ‘team spirit’ and the relevance of the silent side of the beauty. The initiative was driven and operated by way of a fully-functioning company structure. This process facilitated the study of current notions of human need focused on objects. Further investigations took place in fields that need aesthetic support in order to allow ‘healing’; which for example include employing aspects of jewellery in medical and political areas. Individual research and practices continuously interacted with the administrative, productive and communicative tasks that everyone in the team agreed to perform. Ideally the collective that formed over the course of the programme will naturally extend into a continued existence and significance beyond its set timeframe of two years. Tutors, guests and participants formed a mix that was characterised by its potential to explore while paying attention to the small, silent and private, the human handling, and the careful treatment of material thoughts, values and behaviours. The Temporary Programme challenged the subject of jewellery on a fundamental level – how it relates to our present time. The approach represented an attempt to think big on a small scale, and presumed an ability to understand ‘micro-working’. The input for Challenging Jewellery was based on intergenerational dialogue. An advisory board, comprising four key figures in the realm of jewellery and design, ensured that this was done in a solid cooperation with the relevant fields. The visiting tutors and guests – varying from theoreticians and curators to contemporary architects, designers and artists – guaranteed a continuous renewal of viewpoints on and insights into a discipline manifest in traditions, historical design and theoretical connotations.

CRITICAL STUDIES (CS)

THE COMMONERS' SOCIETY (TCS)

STUDIO FOR IMMEDIATE SPACES (SIS)

EXIT

PUBLIC SANDBERG (PS)

GENERAL

FINE ARTS (FA)

ENTRANCE

PUB

FINE ARTS (FA)

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HET HEM

CHALLENGING JEWELLERY (CJ) EXIT

VARIOUS GRADUATES

Floor 1

Mezzanine

Ground Floor

Tunnel

FLOOR PLAN SANDBERG INSTITUUT GRADUATION 2020

DESIGN (D)

Ground Floor

Floor 1

DESIGN (D)

DE DOOD

ENTRANCE Floor 1

ENTRANCE / EXIT

DE DOOD

Parking Lot

SIS

DIRTY ART DEPARTMENT (DAD)

Floor 2

Walkway

TCS

HET HEM

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SANDBERG INSTITUUT GRADUATION 2020 Emirhan Akin Anouk Asselineau Veronika Babayan Anna Maria Balint Carmen Dusmet Carrasco Beatriz Conefrey Constantin Dichtl Seline Durrer Anto López Espinosa Veronika Fabian Silvia Faggiani Janina Fritz Levi van Gelder Francisca Khamis Giacoman Gabriella Goldsmith Ting Gong Andrea González Franziska Goralski Spazio Cura Jesper Henningsson Natalia Jordanova David C. Kane Kamila Kantek Eva van Kempen Kyulim Kim Morgane de Klerk Miriam Kongstad Goytung (Wei Tung Kuo) Alexander Kuusik Tali Liberman Sara Santana López Pedro Matias María Mazzanti Laila El Mehelmy Heleen Mineur Kasper van Moll Marek Mrowinksi Margaret Munchheimer Cóilín O'Connell Amber Oskam Nicolò Pellarin Nicholas Reilly-McVittie Octave Rimbert-Rivière Charlotte Rohde Patrycja Rozwora Yara Said Lucia Fernandez Santoro Willem Schenk Stephanie Schuitemaker Sasha Sergienko Sophia Simensky Luca Soudant Linda Stauffer Wouter Stroet Dimitris Theocharis Aimée Theriot Roman Tkachenko Fabian Tombers Simpson Tse Ben Tupper Hanna Valle Lieselot Versteeg Marilyn Volkman Joanne Vosloo Myrto Vratsanou Klara Waara Michael Weber Cindy Wegner Andoni Zamora