The Place of Birth (final) by Sandberg Instituut

SANDBERG INSTITUUT GRADUATION INDEX A–Z

THE PLACE OF BIRTH ADELAIDE TO ZüRICH

final copy THIS PUBLICATION CONCLUDES THE 2019 GRADUATION EXHIBITIONS AND EVENTS OF THE SANDBERG INSTITUUT. NINETY-ONE GRADUATES FROM FIVE MAIN DEPARTMENTS, TWO TEMPORARY PROGRAMMES, AND ONE HOSTED PROGRAMME PRESENTED THEIR WORK AT VARIOUS LOCATIONS IN AMSTERDAM. 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/GRADUATION2019

INTRODUCTION From Adelaide to ZĂźrich, The Place of Birth compiles the draft and final works of the 2019 Sandberg Instituut graduates from Master programmes Critical Studies, Design, Dirty Art Department, Fine Arts, Studio For Immediate Spaces, Radical Cut-Up, Shadow Channel and Master Design of Experiences. The editorial series 9 Belly Buttons & 18 Cheeks includes texts by various guest writers and curators interpreting the works and occurring topics amongst graduated artists, designers and (interior) architects. The Place of Birth includes editorials by writer Adrian Madlener (BE/USA), designer & performer Yuri Veerman (NL), second year student Architectural Design at Gerrit Rietveld Academie Herman Hjorth Berge (NO), journalist Thomas van Huut (NL), writer & curator Sumaya Kassim (UK), curator Jules van den Langenberg (NL), urban and architectural geographer Mark Minkjan (NL), critic Laurens Otto (BE) and writer & researcher Tamar Shafrir (IL/USA).

The Place of Birth is part of an ongoing series of publications by PS (Public Sandberg). Previous editions are The Name of the Author (2018) and The Title of the Work (2017).

9 http://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/publication

9 BELLY BUTTONS & 18 CHEEKS EDITORIALS

nine belly bvttons and eighteen cheeks 9 BELLY BUTTONS & 18 CHEEKS is a series of texts interpreting the 2019 Sandberg Graduation Exhibitions and Events. Various writings, from personal reports to reviews and essays, add context to the work and address related topics and phenomena as perceived by a new generation of artists, designers and (interior) architects.

9 BELLY BUTTONS & 18 CHEEKS is compiled by curator Jules van den Langenberg and includes contributions by writer Adrian Madlener (BE/USA), designer & performer Yuri Veerman (NL), second year student Architectural Design at Gerrit Rietveld Academie Herman Hjorth Berge (NO), journalist Thomas van Huut (NL), writer & curator Sumaya Kassim (UK), curator Jules van den Langenberg (NL), urban and architectural geographer Mark Minkjan (NL), critic Laurens Otto (BE) and writer & researcher Tamar Shafrir (IL/USA). Contact ps@sandberg.nl if you are interested in contributing an editorial to next yearâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s publication.

10 http://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/editorials

9 BELLY BUTTONS & 18 CHEEKS EDITORIAL BY ADRIAN MADLENER

Shrewd Askew: From Adelaide To ZÃ¼rich Treating Post-Fact Geographical Representation As An Expressive Medium

SHREWD ASKEW: FROM ADELAIDE TO ZÜRICH This text seeks to speculate on the conditions of geography and its contemporary portrayal, a theme perused as a running thread through numerous theses from various departments of the Sandberg Instituut’s 2019 graduating class. However, this assessment was taken from a distance, based on gathered information from the school’s online catalogue and other sources. This unconventional format made for a discursive prompt to compose this (rambling) editorial musing.

Throughout the night of November 8th, 2016, an estimated 71-million T.V. viewers watched as Donald Trump gained the necessary amount of electoral college votes to become president of the United States. As they helmed various networks, top newscasters like CNN’s Anderson Cooper and Wolf Blitzer employed the latest integrated-technology to precisely map-out the results. As tallies ‘poured in,’ different states were periodically coloured-in as either blue or red. These sudden ‘projections’ and ‘too-close-to-call’ instances confirmed the aspirations of some and dashed the hopes of others. Perhaps in the bizarre but plausible duality of palpable anxiety and voyeuristic spectacle, viewers were kept at the ‘edge of their seats’, or at least till the ‘point of no return’ became inevitable. The entire happening was a performance of sorts and like any worthwhile gesamtkunstwerk mounted on a major opera or dance stage – a Broadway production of the Lion King or a revival of Pina Bausch’s Café Müller at the Brooklyn Academy of Music – the implementation of a full, holistic scope of external devices was crucial in maintaining the audience’s attention: lighting, costume, but also sound effects and sensationalist backdrop imagery. Though deploying the latest ‘data and whiz-bang’ interactivescreen technology on this night and no other, as to promote these branded innovations with the same amplitude as the event itself, the showman conductors attempted to provide a level of objectivity. Zooming deep into the seemingly homogenized, colour-blocked electoral map of the United States with hand and finger gestures, similar to swiping an iPad, the newscasters uncovered a far more complex picture.

ADRIAN MADLENER A more granulated breakdown of different regions emerged to, perhaps, dispel the simplified stigmas of so-called red and blue states. Even more telling in these geographic demonstrations was the complex nature of proximity: the extreme polarity of two neighbouring districts or between urban and rural areas; the sharp contrast between Los Angeles proper and its surrounding suburbs or how Houston and Dallas exist as blue islands, floating in a sea of red Texas. And yet, what these presenters failed to communicate, other than obvious categorizations, were the extenuating sociopolitical, historical, and ecological factors that might make portions of the postindustrial rust-belt vote differently than New York City; why traditionally blue states like Wisconsin and Michigan went red in this presidential election; or how the particular geography and shifting geology of one specific area could influence these statistics. Regardless of their attempt to provide a more accurate assessment, amidst the smokescreen fog of technological novelty, this ‘magical board’ phenomenon hinted at an even larger complexity. It’s become a cliche to talk about how our society is saturated by information or how it’s become harder to decipher what is true. However, we rarely consider how this changing reality impacts our comprehension of geography; how the representation and depiction of space itself is presented, packaged, twisted, and skewed. As much as the translation of quantitative data into visualized maps and other forms of imagery can appear dynamic and feel engaging, this method rarely accomplishes anything other than momentary gratification. One might argue that the fraudulence of the United States’ intermediary electoral college system is propagated, in part, by the ability to manipulate, dilute, and abridge Americans’ collective perspective of geography. Like with any other means

SHREWD ASKEW: FROM ADELAIDE TO ZĂ&#x153;RICH of dissemination, this condition stems from how a particular focus or argument is framed. One might suggest that the gross external product of The United States is its ability to fabricate war and maintain a military presence abroad. One misleading map depicts just that as a measure of aggregated time: highlighting every country the United States has invaded. The assessment is damning and even overwhelming in percentage. But what would happen if someone were to physically plot the areas where US military presence was actually felt rather than employ a map of the world to depict influence, as it corresponds to political borders and territorial definition. The difference would be drastic. Libya is a country primarily made-up of a sparsely-inhabited desert. Coloured demarkations should denote areas of impact rather than the entire nation. Drawing a broad stroke across a roughly-plotted plane or filling in a political map based on a colour-coded typology is less rigourous than trying to analyse data as it might metaphysically correspond to the topological corrugations or ecological intricacies of a given locale. We prefer to name cities and defined countries as finite entities rather than chart shifting geologies. The practice derives from Industrial Revolution-era standardization and works well within humanityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s cultivated superioritycomplex and colonialist mentality. Perhaps simplicity is more digestible and feasible, but ultimately more efficient. At what costs? Europeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s policy of rapidly sweeping through and dividing Africa in the late 19th-century reflected competition, conquest, and geometric simplicity, rather than an understanding or respect for existing cultural boundaries. Different colonial forces carved up the land mass as if was a loaf of bread. Perhaps their only informed concern was where highly-soughtafter natural resources could be found and extracted. The

ADRIAN MADLENER ramifications of this policy left a lasting mark on the continent and its continued instability, half a century after most territories achieved independence. Today, our collective perception of place, direction, and distance is inherently as unreliable as it was before the advent of the machine-age; when new modes of mechanised transportation – the antiquation of our own legs and feet – were supposed to help us improve these qualities. It could be argued that these innovations aided our exponential ‘discovery’ of every last parcel of shared earthly dominion but this hurried pace didn’t allow us to fully comprehend its scope and scale. Before, our perception of space was limited to our immediate surroundings or where a horse and carriage could bring us within an advantageous amount of time. Then again, it’s perhaps too nostalgic and romantic to think that our comprehension of geography was more visually complex and hence accurate before the Industrial Revolution. The ability to map and chart space – the differentiation of emotional awareness and machine-accuracy – was the result of this epochal shift. And yet, new forms of immediate and readily-available representation have not helped us in our quest to better understand space. We still require the age-old compass to orient our understanding of North, South, East, and West. The language we use to informally indicate distance or direction is still skewed and geographically inaccurate: “Downtown,” “Uptown,” “over there,” “deep Harlem.” These colloquialisms have come to mean entirely different things. Often our willingness to go to a codified area is informed by an economic, cultural, political attitude rather than a factual reality of geographic distance; however, defined by transportation and accessibility. As controversial as the consumer-grade novelty of Google Maps

SHREWD ASKEW: FROM ADELAIDE TO ZÜRICH and Google Earth might have been when first debuted in the early 2000s, these services were gradually adopted as another mainstay of our image-heavy material culture. These technologies merged into our daily lives as eventual necessities. Were the physical paper maps we used before any better at helping us ‘get situated’? Today, one could argue that the cultural perception of these tools cannot compare to how they are employed by larger entities, that make systemic use of them for both good and evil. A tool is a tool is a tool, and as an animated object, can be shaped by a number of interpretations and implementations. Why not then, play with the untidy nature of spatial interpretation, and allow it to mirror our gradual, non-linear, acceptance of social fluidity. We should allow space, at scales that are manageable within the scope of a group of individuals, to accommodate multiple functions and modes of identity making. At the same time, we should employ geographical representation as a medium that can be inverted, remixed, and subverted as ways to pose commentary about the medium’s own nature or other existential quandaries. In trying to fathom the complexity of how space, land, and environment shape our sense of heritage and identity, even if at a distance when forcibly displaced or choosing to emigrate, geographic perception becomes a malleable medium of representation. Is our place of birth, upbringing, cultivation, or education a determinant in how we define ourselves; our character, mentality, means of expression, thought processes, or how we choose to treat a given topic? The catalogue for this year’s Sandberg Instituut indexes its graduates by their date and place of birth (city and country), rather than the traditional indication of nationality, which in

ADRIAN MADLENER this case might be entirely different. Is this method successful in providing critical distance, removing the impulse to judge a graduate’s output – chosen scope of investigation and resulting form? One undeniable fact is that all of these students lived and studied in or around Amsterdam for some given amount of time. Did this context – the amalgamated culture and mentality it encompasses – impact each talent’s decisions? Did they come to this school for this influence or for its particular pedagogy? What would a map, similar to the one that charts every country the US has invaded or has had a military presence in, achieve with the roster of this year’s graduates. How would the sociopolitical and cultural stigmas of Italy, Lebanon, and the Netherlands play in how we might try to contextualise each project. This alludes to the age-old dilemma of trying to separate the artist from the artwork.

Adrian Madlener is a Brussels-born, New York-based art, architecture, and design writer. A designerturned-journalist, he studied at the Design Academy Eindhoven and at the Parsons/Cooper Hewitt History of Design and Curatorial Studies programme. Madlener has worked as an editor at Frame Magazine and TL Magazine. With a particular interest in critical, philosophical, and sociological topics that address the strongest demonstrations of craft-led experimentation. He contributes to numerous European and U.S.-based publications.

9 BELLY BUTTONS & 18 CHEEKS

SANDBERG INSTITUUT GRADUATION INDEX A–Z

INDEX

The Place of Birth (A – Z)

Adelaide Alkmaar Arcadia Aschaffenburg Ashford Asti Atlantis Bad Friedrichshall Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler Beirut Berlin Bogotá Bologna Breda Brest Brighton Buenos Aires Cambridge Campos Dos Goytacazes Chartres Chemnitz Cincinnati Clermont Ferrand Copenhagen Domkyrko Drunen Dublin Dumfries Ede Edinburgh Ekaterinburg Ermelo Eurasia

28 30 38 40 42 44 46 48 58 60 62 64 66 68 70 80 82/84 86 88 90 92 94 96 98/100 102 104 106/108 110 112 114 116 118 120

SANDBERG INSTITUUT GRADUATION INDEX A–Z

INDEX

Forlí Fredensborg Gothenburg Gouda Grantham Haarlem Haarlemmermeer Helsinki Home Huddersfield Iksan Innichen Kansas City Kaunas Koblenz Limerick Lincoln Lisboa Lomé London Madison Madrid Mexico City Miskolc Montréal Moscow Next To The River Norfolk Oakland Oxfordshire Paris Philadelphia Pittsburgh Pordenone

122 124 126 128 130 132/134/136 138 140 142 144 146 158 160 162 164 166 168 170 172 180/182 184 186 188 202 204 206/208 210 212 214 216 218/220 222 224 226

SANDBERG INSTITUUT GRADUATION INDEX A–Z

INDEX

Rosmalen Saarbrücken Saint-Brieuc Schwedt/Oder Seoul Sydney Tallinn Terrassa The Place Of Birth Turku Vilnius Watford York Zürich

228 230 232 234 236 246/248 250 252 254 264 266 268 270 272/274 The Name of the Author (A – Z)

Malena Maria Arcucci Andrea Belosi Adam Bletchly Mariah Blue Lucie De Bréchard John Charles Bricker Lou Buche Mark Buckeridge Tom Burke Rowena Buur Elia Castino Sun Chang Holly Childs Daan Couzijn Alexander Cromer Sara Daniel Mohamad Deeb

84 122 216 212 220 160 96 108 268 30 44 142 28 132 224 232 60

SANDBERG INSTITUUT GRADUATION INDEX A–Z

INDEX

Marijn Degenaar Rebecca Eskilsson Vita Evangelista Ryan Eykholt Lucie Fortuin Harriet Foyster Juan Arturo García González Kathrin Graf Elisa Grasso Heather Griffin Antoine Guay GVN908 Walter Götsch Juhee Hahm Jason Harvey Miquel Hervás Gómez Silke Xenia Juul Zsofia Kollar Nemo Koning Jeroen Kortekaas Sascha Krischock Selma Köran Leslie Lawrence André Lourenço Francesca Lucchitta Sekai Makoni Wes Mapes Kani Marouf Juliana Maurer Tessa Meeus Annamaria Merkel David Haack Monberg Barnaby Monk Rachele Monti

128 126 88 184 228 168 188 58 180 166 70 120 210 146 204 252 124 202 136 138 234 164 46 170 226 86 214 230 40 68 92 100 182 38

SANDBERG INSTITUUT GRADUATION INDEX A–Z

INDEX

Lana Murdochy Alex Murray Maria Muuk Wyatt Niehaus Elif Özbay Daniel Ordonez Munoz Jean-François Peschot Anna Petrova Joseph Pleass Mark Prendergast Julie Pusztai Léo Ravy Tina Reden Fabian Reichle Ada Reinthal Evita Eva-Maria Bianca Rigert Luke George Hardy Rideout Javier Rodriguez Samuli Saarinen Davide-Christelle Sanvee Fenna Schilling Farida Sedoc Miša Skalskis Tomasz Skibicki Anthony Smyrski Younwon Sohn Maike Statz Elizaveta Strakhova Mathilde Stubmark Emilia Tapprest Filippo Tocchi Andreas Trenker Jack Waghorn Alex Walker

114 246 250 94 104 64 90 206 130 270 218 254 274 48 102 272 80 186 264 172 134 118 266 62 222 236 248 116 98 140 66 158 42 144

SANDBERG INSTITUUT GRADUATION INDEX A–Z

INDEX

Aidan Wall Amy Winstanley Agustina Woodgate Karina Zavidova Valerie van Zuijlen Gediminas Žygus

106 110 82 208 112 162 The Title of the Work (A – Z)

Aluminium Duce All I See Is You Anatomy Of An Unreal Organ As The Cupboard Is To The Home, So The Home Is To The Town Beautiful Impact Between Now And Never Boxer/Biker Ring/Cycle Calling All Homo Sapiens Sapiens Capillary Malformation Chei Del Fouc Common Belongings Commoning The Bread Connecting Recollections Conspiratorial Mythologies Death Has Been Cured Diverse Fronts // Diverse Tactics Equanimous Perennation Everything Around, Including You Exit Athena Eye Fall From Here We Go Extreme From Her Teeth To Her Feet //$ %~~~*/ Good For One Fare Hardwood In Heart Wood

158 230 60 44 132 128 104 212 248 226 142 70 274 84 106 102 218 172 164 270 268 126 222 168

SANDBERG INSTITUUT GRADUATION INDEX A–Z

INDEX

Heterogeneous Waters 116 Honey For Blood 266 Hors Jeu 96/186 Hybris 40 Hydrangea I / Hydrangea II 28/162 Ice Don’t Drown. 224 Icons Made Without Hands 100 Idle Heroes 120 I’ll Give You The Entire Day 68 Impeto No. 1 38 Invitation 236 I’ve Been To Paradise 130 I Wanna Be Like You-oo-oo 48 I Wanted To Like My Work 146 Killing You Softly 202 Made To Measure 166 Mind Crisis 204 Natureza Morta-Viva 88 Neo Kemetic Assemblage II (NKAII) 214 Nutmeg Tales 136 Opera 108 Peek TV 160 Phoniness 184 Pilot 112 Psychic Medium Performs Exorcism On Visible Hand 42 Secure, Peaceful & Wild 98 Seven Year Old Self 180 Skinny City Cat And A Pot Of Murmurs 66 Slumming At The Rodeo Gardens 220 Small Studies In Opacity 144/264 Supply Chain Broadcast 80 Swell, Move, Circle, Slow And Vanish 110 Textures 228 The Dining Table 250

SANDBERG INSTITUUT GRADUATION INDEX A–Z

INDEX

The Future Ain’t What It Used To Be 118 Thę Hóąrdęr-Gąthęręr 62 The Inner Life Of Exterior Plants 188 The Man Who Was Thursday 46 The Settlement 210 The Show Must Go On, Everything Must Go 232 The Tales Of Dis-Belonging 206 Tools For A Postcapitalist Transition 182 Transmissions From The Archipelago 64 True Fake 272 Ultra-Face 246 Unable To Speak, This Kid Traces. 90 Unreal Estates: The Tale Of Liberty Hills 122 Untitled 58 Untitled 208 Untitled (Kartotheekdoos A6 163) 94 VPN (Virtual Pub Network) 82/234/252 We Are Already There! 114 We Are Not The Only Kind Of We 92 We The Labyrinths 134 Whole Earth Trilogy 216 Who’s Your Daddy? 254 With Flying Colors 138 Wormeaters. 170 Zhōuwéi.Network 56 1. Making Space For Faith And Spirituality In The Arts And Academia – Panel Discussion 2. Re-Imagining Church: Black, Queer-Affirming, Faith Ritual Re-Imaginings 86 1. Without Hope I Have No Dreams. 2. When Did You Become A Heterosexual? 30 2 124

SANDBERG INSTITUUT GRADUATION INDEX Aâ&#x20AC;&#x201C;Z

INDEX

Main Departments

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

279 280 281 282 283

Temporary Programmes

Radical Cut-Up Shadow Channel

284 285 Hosted Programme

Master Design of Experiences

286

Editorials 9 BELLY BUTTONS & 18 CHEEKS

Adrian Madlener Yuri Veerman Tamar Shafrir Mark Minkjan Laurens Otto Herman Hjorth Berge Jules van den Langenberg Thomas van Huut Sumaya Kassim

11 33 51 73 149 175 191 239 257

ADELAIDE, AUSTRALIA HOLLY CHILDS

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/holly-childs

HYDRANGEA I HYDRANGEA II

SHADOW CHANNEL

Holly Childs (Adelaide, Australia) is a writer researching languages and relationships of systems. Together with Gediminas Ĺ˝ygus (Kaunas, Lithuania, 1991) she developed the performative, immersive sound installations Hydrangea I and Hydrangea II. Hydrangea is a myth about myths, and within Hydrangea, each flower is a story, and forests contain never-ending branching tales. Plotlines mutate, and realities fork; some come to bear the weight of new blooms of stories, while others fade out, creating ground for further blooms. Each organism influences the entire structure.

ALKMAAR, THE NETHERLANDS ROWENA BUUR

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/rowena-buur

1. WITHOUT HOPE I HAVE NO DREAMS. 2. WHEN DID YOU BECOME A HETEROSEXUAL? 31

DESIGN

Rowena Buur (Alkmaar, The Netherlands, 1990) is a non-binary feminist and ‘artivist’ whose work revolves around identity, sexuality, gender, and family. Working with video, photography, and typography Buur’s work becomes a way of dealing with reality. Eight years ago, Buur broke contact with their father Renee, who did not have a stable place to live, and had been struggling with an alcohol addiction. When they heard that he found a stable home at a trailer park, Buur thought it was time to get in touch with him. The installation Without Hope I Have No Dreams is an intimate family portrait told through Buur’s eyes. With the work When Did You Become A Heterosexual? they address heteronormative attitudes that prevail in society.

SANDBERG INSTITUUT GRADUATION INDEX A–Z

THE PLACE OF BIRTH ADELAIDE TO ZüRICH

9 BELLY BUTTONS & 18 CHEEKS EDITORIAL BY YURI VEERMAN

Lights, Buttons And Switches

GRADUATE MENTIONED: ROWENA BUUR

LIGHTS, BUTTONS AND SWITCHES I saw this rusty old motorcycle the other day. It was standing at the side of the road next to a lawn, and some long blades of grass had found their way through the spokes of the front wheel. This lovely retired vehicle had a beautiful, clear display: it bore two big green dials, one for speed and one for rpm. Below these two green plates was a small black rectangle with four hexagonal lights in four different colours: orange, red, green and blue, respectively indicating turn, oil, neutral and beam. I found this piece of old machinery extremely attractive, the display in particular, as it almost read like a little poem on simplicity: you are either turning or you are not; you either have enough oil or you are running out. Now try to imagine your own life as one gigantic dashboard. This has switches that go either up or down, buttons that can be set from zero to ten, indicators that say minimum or maximum and lights in primary colours that are either on or off. For instance, there is a red light that says man and a blue light that says woman. One of the two is lit, the other one is off. Or, if it is a switch, it is either up for man or down for woman – or vice versa, whichever way you imagine it. Of course, having a switch implies that you can simply flip it and switch between male and female as if you are changing clothes, so that might be a bit inaccurate. So let us say that sex is a light and gender is a switch, or maybe a button. Or even two buttons – one male, one female – and you can choose your own setting for each, anywhere between zero and ten. Or should gender be an indicator? With a needle that just points to a certain percentage of male and female, which is how you feel and what you have to deal with for the rest of your life. Or, yet another option, the indicators change every now and then so that maybe you are ten per cent man in your twenties and then fifty per cent in your thirties? Which parts of us are buttons and switches, and which are

YURI VEERMAN lights and indicators? Or, in other words, which parts can be changed and which are fixed? Which are either on or off, and which are in a permanent grey zone. When we are born, there are two things that are instantly determined as being either one or the other: you are either a boy or a girl and you are either alive or dead. But out of the two, only one category leaves absolutely no space for ambiguity. So if we return to our dashboard metaphor, there is only one real switch that can only go up or down. Everything else is buttons, lights and indicators. In her* short video When Did You Become a Heterosexual?, Rowena Buur challenges the default setting for sexual preference by asking people exactly that question. A simple and effective strategy that flips the script by changing the default sexual preference setting from straight to gay. His follow-up questions follow the same strategy: when did you tell your parents, how did they react, are you sure you’re straight, maybe you just haven’t met the right guy/girl yet. The video is straightforward in content as well as in form: it is shot with a hand-held camera that only captures people’s legs and feet, preserving their anonymity and keeping the focus on their spoken answers. Despite being a graduate of the Department of Visual Strategies, Buur does not seem interested in applying an outspoken visual aesthetic; rather, she designs through asking questions. One could say that his style is the way he approaches people. The value of these condensed interviews lies not in their overall statement – we already know that heterosexuality is the norm all over the world. Instead, it lies in the questions themselves and the uneasiness of the answers their subjects give. A discomfort that comes from confusion over the questions – “But this is about heterosexuality?! Man and woman!” – as well as their personal nature, as questions that are usually

LIGHTS, BUTTONS AND SWITCHES directed to gay, lesbian or transgender people. Sometimes I did wonder whether the answers were not too correct, especially when a heterosexual couple answers that a penis is not required to have good sex: “You can also have foreplay”. That sounds a little too much like the respondents are trying not to offend the interviewer, who might just have a sex life that does not include a penis. The other video shown by Buur – clearly her central piece – is a documentary called Zonder hoop heb ik geen dromen (Without Hope I Have no Dreams): an intimate portrait of her father, who turned to the bottle and lost his grip on life after his seven-year-old son died from an unknown metabolic disease. The video consists of footage of Rowena visiting his father in his trailer mixed with old home videos of their family in better days: everyone still together, her father still sober. There is pain in almost every scene, but this is never thickened or dramatically underlined; nothing is made too heavy or sentimental, the pain is simply there, right in front of your eyes, caused by the stark contrast between a complete past and a broken now, between the dilapidated state of his father’s trailer and the heroic American flags that decorate his home, between the small talk they exchange and the grim reality of her father’s existence, between the longing to be seen and a vast distance caused by loss, grief and alcohol. Again, Rowena’s visual style is dry and without any effect or ornament, but his work is compelling because her subject is; the story is convincing because his approach is convincing. Not to mention the fact that making a graduation piece about the conflicted relationship with your alcoholic father is a courageous move. Such private subjects always carry the risk of becoming too personal, losing their possible relevance for a broader audience. Luckily, Rowena manages to skilfully balance between painfully personal and professionally distant.

YURI VEERMAN Out of all the painful contradictions in this video, the thing that struck me the most was to see the light in her fatherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s eyes amidst all the dimness of his lonely life (am I getting sentimental now?). We see a big, broken man with swollen fingers and tattooed hands trapped in a small trailer, boasting about his fist fights, drinking alcohol from a five-litre jug, slowly losing grip, but still with a flickering light on his dashboard that says hope. Or is it a button? Can you turn hope up or down as if it were the volume of a song? I guess that making a video like this is a testament to having hope, an exercise in searching for that button and then turning it up a notch. * As Rowena Buur does not fully identify him/herself as male or female, the writer has chosen to flip the switch between he and she, and him and her, throughout the article.

Yuri Veerman is an artist, designer and performer who lives and works in Amsterdam. Through posters, books, videos, websites, campaigns, flags and performances, he tells seemingly simple stories about an increasingly complex world. Yuri also teaches Graphic Design at HKU University of the Arts, Utrecht.

ARCADIA, ANCIENT GREECE RACHELE MONTI

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/rachele-monti

IMPETO NO. 1

DIRTY ART DEPARTMENT

Gravitating between the solid world and sensorial experiences, Rachele Montiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s (Arcadia, Ancient Greece, 1990) work thematizes the symptomatic transformation of emotions into images. Technicalities of the photographic medium are challenged by the deliberate use of light, color, layering and sound, as tools to touch upon oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s sensations and memories of all that is unspeakable. In the multimedia installation Impeto No. 1 the image has a body and a voice. Its surface is a skin to be explored, and a portal to unspoken desires and fears. Only fragments of the photographs remain perceivable after passing through various stages of manual distortion and subsequently soaked in rubber and appended with gasping sounds.

ASCHAFFENBURG, GERMANY JULIANA MAURER

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/juliana-maurer

HYBRIS

RADICAL CUT-UP

Originally trained as a graphic designer, Juliana Maurer (Aschaffenburg, Germany, 1992) researches nature, fungi and various materials like glass and ceramics. Her main sources of inspiration are contrasts between aggregate states like liquid and solid and the revelation of surprising material effects. In Hybris the materials manifest a contest between human work and natureâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s resilience: ubiquitous man-made materials come up against organic matter and high-tech materials confront the most primitive life forms.

ASHFORD, UK JACK WAGHORN

PSYCHIC MEDIUM PERFORMS EXORCISM ON VISIBLE HAND

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/jack-waghorn

MASTER DESIGN OF EXPERIENCES

Jack Waghorn (Ashford, United Kingdom, 1994) explores and confuses authenticity and sincerity in contemporary cultural mediums. Psychic Medium Performs Exorcism on Visible Hand is a short film that uses the genre of horror to depict a story of social housing haunted by the free-market. The project translates a body of research into the current state of social housing and uses horror as a methodology to interpret that research. Waghornâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s film centers around the context of the Dutch housing market, the aim being to communicate the research to policy makers and politicians, and to provide reflection and new insights to the conversation on social housing reform.

ASTI, ITALY ELIA CASTINO

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/elia-castino

AS THE CUPBOARD IS TO THE HOME, SO THE HOME IS TO THE TOWN 45

STUDIO FOR IMMEDIATE SPACES

Elia Castino (Asti, Italy, 1992) works on the intersection of art, architecture and design. His current area of research is domesticity, with a focus on the precarious living conditions of international students in the city of Amsterdam. In a context where housing struggle is rampant, the project As the cupboard is to the home, so the home is to the town reflects the way daily life unfolds without the conventional structure of the house: the domestic becomes scattered, hybrid, ephemeral, the home a series of habits, rituals and routines.

ATLANTIS LESLIE LAWRENCE

THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/leslie-lawrence

DIRTY ART DEPARTMENT

Leslie Lawrence (Atlantis, The Lost Continent of Atlantis, 1989) works on the application of psychoanalysis and anarchist philosophy to collaborative models of production with a focus on ambitious communal film projects. Filmed according to a collaborative method that uses the context of shared art production to produce a fantasy narrative, The Man Who Was Thursday follows a wild anarchist plot to destroy the world. Under the cover of ‘art practice’, an esoteric cabal publicly flaunts their dangerous activity while moving forward with a deadly plan. At the heart of their scheme is a mysterious briefcase that one undercover operative must find before the mysterious figure known only as ‘Sunday’ has the chance to use it.

BAD FRIEDRICHSHALL, GERMANY FABIAN REICHLE

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/fabian-reichle

I WANNA BE LIKE YOU-OO-OO

RADICAL CUT-UP

By observing himself and his environment as subjects, Fabian Reichle (Bad Friedrichshall, Germany, 1991) examines and analyzes conscious and unconscious imitation of influences. For his I Wanna Be Like You-oo-oo Reichle explored his artistic environment by copying, imitating and reenacting works that inspire him, in order to find the thin line that defines his own language. He presented a conglomeration of deliberately remade works of art to illuminate something like an overlapping area, where similarities between his own language and the one of copies convene.

SANDBERG INSTITUUT GRADUATION INDEX A–Z

THE PLACE OF BIRTH ADELAIDE TO ZüRICH

9 BELLY BUTTONS & 18 CHEEKS EDITORIAL BY TAMAR SHAFRIR

I Don’t Think It Can Go On Like This GRADUATES MENTIONED: LÉO RAVY EVITA EVA-MARIA BIANCA RIGERT DAAN COUZIJN FABIAN REICHLE GVN908 VALERIE VAN ZUILEN EMILIA TAPPREST HARRIET FOYSTER ROWENA BUUR MARIJN DEGENAAR ZSOFIA KOLLAR SELMA KÖRAN REBECCA ESKILSSON

I DON’T THINK IT CAN GO ON LIKE THIS The Milanese writer Nanni Balestrini, who died on 20 May 2019, could be considered the inventor of the algorithmic love story. Every copy of his novel Tristano is a unique sequence of 300 paragraphs, one of 109,027,350,432,000 possible narrative unfoldings. While the prototype was made in 1966, the first print run became technically feasible only in 2007 (the same year that launched both the iPhone and the global financial crisis). How might we interpret Tristano given its simultaneous endurance and contingency of meaning? On one hand, it suggests that love is different for every reader; on the other, it reveals the creative act as little more than a set of combinatorial coincidences. If we needed more evidence for an ontology of aleatory senselessness, modernity could offer us no shortage of examples, as much in art and design as in war and natural disaster. But the general impression of our recent history would imply the opposite, that is, a system of intention, explanation, analysis, critique, and rationalisation. Art and design have proven particularly amenable to this apotheosis of rhetorical meaning; love, however, seems both sacrosanct and impervious to any such regime. Love would appear to be transhistorical, innate, inexplicable, and enigmatic; love might be shareable as interpersonal emotion or affect, but it could never be given as information, performed as service, alienated as object, or generated on demand. In other words, love could never be invented, designed, or fabricated as an outcome of creative production. That idea certainly has its charm, within a lived experience of a perpetual beta version of the present. But as my copy of Tristano (#13726) begins: “According to this vision everything that can be of benefit to humanity can also harm it.” And a bit further: “I don’t think it can go on like this.” Perhaps love

TAMAR SHAFRIR is what we need to design and reimagine more urgently than anything else. The Sandberg graduation projects that evoked this feeling did so by posing critical questions, revealing vulnerable reflections, and offering poignant speculations on the matter of love. A LOVER’S INTERLUDE

A study of exchange as if people mattered. LR Money can buy you love. ER x BK Pay me. DC We disenchant love. FR x SZ We worship full-on opacity. AB You could love an image of air. VVZ Because we are traveling in the same direction. ET Can we get together? LR Feels just like the real thing. HF How dare you imitate FR my narcissistic desire to suffer? DC When did you become a heterosexual? RB Between now and never. MD We are slowly becoming ourselves ... our own monsters. ZK Exit Athena SK and enter Pandora. RE IS LOVE MORE OR LESS THE SAME, OR PRECISELY NOT THE SAME? Do we love what we love because it is like us, because it is not like us, because it is what we expected it to be, because it is nothing like what we imagined? Or are these only trivial distinctions within love as the act of wanting, imagining, trying to become like or trying to become? If so, the active creator is, by extension, the lover, and – ironically – the passive desirer is the artificer, illusionist.

I wanna be like you-oo-oo. FR You are not yourself. ER x BK Euphoria in unhappiness ... to love and hate what others love and hate. ER x HM An object of desire is a cluster of promises we want someone or something to make us and make possible for us. ER x LB The labour of love trumps the reality of mass production. HK

I DON’T THINK IT CAN GO ON LIKE THIS Fabian Reichle throws three balls in the air to get “Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line” by John Baldessari (1973); he seeks comfort in “Seeking Comfort in an Uncomfortable Chair” by Bruno Munari (1944). Evita Rigert sunburns Nike swooshes onto Monsanto plant hybrids and patches together printed leather and fake fur in a crossover between Gucci and Disney’s The Lion King. Love is a striving that circumstantially produces its own unintended consequences – the unacknowledged lovechild, the bastard, the unauthorised clone, the fraternal twin, the uncanny mutant. TO TAKE OR TO REMAKE, THAT IS THE QUESTION But is the lover’s desire to capture what one does not own or to recreate something as one’s own? Is the object of desire more loved for being your own or for the exact opposite? Is the recreated facsimile less lovable for not being the original, or is the original less lovable for no longer being the only one? As more and more technological facilities become available in order to make anew what one loves, the phrase “to render obsolete” acquires a double meaning. The act of rendering makes that which was once needed no longer necessary as surrogates take the place of one true loves.

The light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of a car approaching you from the opposite direction. DC The encounter between two powerful forces. MD The heart spins until your loved one opens the lid and discovers your message inside. VVZ It confirms who we are or who we want to be. DC It makes us think we are loved by many. VVZ x CP And then for a brief moment, it feels as if you are. DC For her it was the image of happiness ... she had tried several times to link it to other images, but it never worked. VVZ Come here, I want to see you! VVZ x AGB But you can’t see anything, because of all that fucking light. DC

TAMAR SHAFRIR Valerie van Zuijlen films a helicopter imitating a bird of prey in “AIREAL” flight paths; she models a woman’s face with slightly pocked skin and jagged lips and eyes, a photorealistic skin draped over a geometrically unrealistic skeleton frame. Daan Couzijn’s simulation is a heartbreakingly “Beautiful Impact”, a rain-drenched young man with bloodied lip and scraped chin and nose, blinking and breathing subtly against a sped-up sunset video background, his shaggy black hair preternaturally frozen around his face. Marijn Degenaar records human bodies and pieces of earth as alien constructions, disfigured by ephemeral veils of sand, foam, and incandescent light. These reiterations make grotesque what is charming, make beguiling what is familiar, make poignant what is automatic. JEALOUS BY NATURE, SLEEK BY DESIGN, LOVE IS A STRANGER, FALSE AND UNKIND AL + DS If to love is to appropriate and to reproduce, imperfectly and with poetic license, then it is also to apprehend unawares, to seize haphazardly and grasp blindly without knowing beforehand where the process might lead – to attempt to imitate something without actually knowing what it is, exactly. In that sense, artistic techniques of registration, animation, composition, and interpretation without predetermined objectives or strictly authorial mechanisms – like Tristano and its logic of order and disorder – could constitute a new form of love in an era at a time when all contingency and happenstance are being designed out of it. The challenge is to engage in the creation of the unknown without slipping into the production of meaninglessness.

The render has so far played the role of incarcerator ... could real-time render be the virulent infection that will re-animate the Timeline’s corpse? AB Demasking Eros in single-handed combat, so that he dissolved into immateriality and turned to

I DON’T THINK IT CAN GO ON LIKE THIS vapour in the atmosphere, freed from the pain of servitude of the whimsical gods. SK The random variations between copies enact the variegation of the human heart, as exemplified by the lovers at the centre of the story. AB Stories don’t have a middle or an end anymore. They have a beginning that never stops beginning. AB x SS I want my voice to be covered by the lyrics of this song. LR As if the rest of the song didn’t have to be there. AB x RP If you say I am a product, why can I not see it? LR Why can’t I draw this fucking apple? LR x JP In Selma Köran’s work, olive-like grapes roll down a rollercoaster plasticine tongue; phallic protuberances swell and droop like a sea anemone; nipples cover the surface of jugs. People covered in paint, jewellery, masks, and wrappings shout and gesture towards one another in the chaotic flux of narrative ethos. Emilia Tapprest’s characters float through swimming pools, highways, abandoned concrete structures, urban megalopolises, and beaches in search of information, meaning, and one another. Rowena Buur documents the moment of reunion with an estranged parent, but opens up the spectator’s experience of the encounter by layering different perspectives and angles taken with film cameras, webcams, and archival footage; this form destabilises how we read a relationship with a father. Love is an apple – the apple of knowledge, the poisoned apple, the Apple computer, the apple of discord.

This essay is dedicated to Esteban Gomez-Rosselli, who calls love a mise en abyme.

TAMAR SHAFRIR CITATION KEY AB AGB AL BK CP DC DS ER ET FR HF HM JP LB LR MD RB RE RP SK SS SZ VVZ ZK

Alessandro Bertelle (GVN908) Alexander Graham Bell Annie Lennox Barbara Kruger Crystal Pitch Daan Couzijn David Stewart Evita Eva-Maria Bianca Rigert Emilia Tapprest Fabian Reichle Harriet Foyster Herbert Marcuse Jaakko Pallasvuo Lauren Berlant Léo Ravy Marijn Degenaar Rowena Buur Rebecca Eskilsson Ron Padgett Selma Köran Steven Spielberg Semir Zeki Valerie van Zuijlen Zsofia Kollar

Tamar Shafrir is a design writer and curator based in Amsterdam. She was acting co-head of the Design Curating & Writing master’s programme at Design Academy Eindhoven and also teaches theory at Sandberg Instituut and London College of Communication. She collaborates with Arif Kornweitz in the design research studio A Control.

BAD NEUENAHR-AHRWEILER, GERMANY KATHRIN GRAF https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/kathrin-graf

UNTITLED

FINE ARTS

Kathrin Graf (Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler, Germany, 1984) works with various media such as sculpture, installation and digital images to explore the nature of entanglement. Together with painter Bettina Marx she forms the artist duo ‘tiefkeller’. For Untitled, Graf examined the relationship between matter in a process-oriented approach and the question of how bodies are constituted as part of the world. Important sources are ideas on New Materialism and insights of quantum field theory.

BEIRUT, LEBANON MOHAMAD DEEB

ANATOMY OF AN UNREAL ORGAN

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/mohamad-deeb

CRITICAL STUDIES

Mohamad Deeb’s (Beirut, Lebanon, 1994) work spans from spatial interventions to theoretical writing with a focus on psychoanalysis and structuralism. He founded Het Slapende Bureau, a research agency that studies the body and its subjugation to language. Anatomy of an unreal organ consists of an installation and an essay. The work takes as a starting point the notion of ‘organ’ and its various conceptions. Instead of presenting a historical survey of it, the work examines the ‘worldviews’ constructed around the concept of ‘organ’ and the ‘type’ of subjects they produce.

BERLIN, GERMANY TOMASZ SKIBICKI

THĘ HÓĄRDĘRGĄTHĘRĘR

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/tomasz-skibicki

DIRTY ART DEPARTMENT

Tomasz Skibicki (Berlin, Germany, 1991) produces sculptures, films and installations based on what he likes to call “first- hand encounters with second-hand stuff.” In the manner of a forensic scientist, he performs autopsies on abandoned spaces and objects, incorporating found fragments as signs of the vernacular into his work. A hoarder of objects and stories, Skibicki uses traditional craft techniques such as wood carving and assembling to create riddles in personal and arcane narratives that speak to broader concerns of migration, consumerism and death. thę hóąrdęr-gąthęręr is a series of sculptures and video works that incorporate nomadic research with material accumulation. Experienced as a training trail that explores different ways of moving through space and time – both bodily and mechanic – thę hóąrdęr-gąthęręr traverses abandoned buildings, forests, cemeteries and a test drive in a Tesla Model X.

BOGOTÁ, COLOMBIA DANIEL ORDONEZ MUNOZ

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/daniel-ordonez-munoz

TRANSMISSIONS FROM THE ARCHIPELAGO

DIRTY ART DEPARTMENT

As a reaction to traditional mainstream education and its outdated modernist principles of standardization and authority, Daniel Ordonez Munoz (Bogotá, Colombia, 1993) designs and leads creative workshops for children of primary school age. These workshops are based on speculative fiction narratives that incorporate different artistic approaches that guide the participants to experiment, imagine and create radical alternative visions of future societies. Transmissions from The Archipelago is a workshop that took place for children at the I Am Jong Foundation, a youth center in Bijlmer. Based on the notion of a ‘subverted curriculum’ that aims to build upon children’s instinctive ways of learning, it seeks to guide participants to create the new culture needed for the coming automation age.

BOLOGNA, ITALY FILIPPO TOCCHI

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/filippo-tocchi

SKINNY CITY CAT AND A POT OF MURMURS

CRITICAL STUDIES

Filippo Tocchi’s (Bologna, Italy, 1991) practice moves between writing, off-site curatorial projects and installations. Skinny City Cat and a Pot of Murmurs plays out inherited sociocultural habits- and allocation-systems. Central to the work is the examination of the subconscious and ‘abnormal, pathological’ deviances as judged from a bourgeois-normative perspective. Formally it investigates the productivity of the Grotesque as a possibility to move beyond registers – from comical pitches to a poetic of abjection.

BREDA, THE NETHERLANDS TESSA MEEUS

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/tessa-meeus

I’LL GIVE YOU THE ENTIRE DAY

DESIGN

Living in an elderly home in the South of Rotterdam for over two years, Tessa Meeus (Breda, The Netherlands, 1987) researches the political context of ill bodies from within the bureaucratic structure – conversing in the garden, sleeping, and volunteering in the drawing club. It is in this complex that she experiences the victim-esque narrative that her neighbors are subjected to on a daily basis. Je krijgt van mij de hele dag (I’ll give you the entire day) presents a series of design interventions in the personal space of this inclusive community. By creating work with residents, and incorporating their preferences and collective memory, Meeus creates objects and spaces with personal value. Reflecting a process of design from the inside, her work goes beyond raising awareness, to transform living conditions.

BREST, FRANCE ANTOINE GUAY

COMMONING THE BREAD

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/antoine-guay

STUDIO FOR IMMEDIATE SPACES

Antoine Guay (Brest, France, 1989) focuses on how an alternative appropriation of existing space can be organized to force the public sphere to redefine itself. Concerned with individualized markets and the privatization of space, Commoning the bread proposes to turn a parked dumpster into a communal bread oven. It aims to explore the potential for resistance making use of an alternative economy based on solidarity and collective practice.

9 BELLY BUTTONS & 18 CHEEKS EDITORIAL BY MARK MINKJAN

Rewriting Space For A Shared Future GRADUATES MENTIONED: TESSA MEEUS YOUNWON SOHN BARNABY MONK ELIA COSTINO MATHILDE STUBMARK ELIZAVETA STRAKHOVA ANTOINE GUAY

REWRITING SPACE FOR A SHARED FUTURE “I believe in a scaled world,” said Jurgen Bey as he welcomed people to the 2019 Sandberg Institute graduation exhibition and events. He was probably talking about extrapolation from the incidental to the cultural, and about the lightness of things in the model world where things have an equal weight. But it made me think of Brats, the 1930 short comedy starring Laurel and Hardy in which they play not only themselves but also their two sons, Stan Jr and Ollie Jr. A simple scenographic illusion did it: the entire set, including the furniture, was built twice, with the second twice the dimensions of the first. All it then required was for the two actors to dress up in oversized children’s clothing (and for Hardy to remove his moustache) and the illusion was complete. It is a trick often repeated. A more recent example is that of the Swiss contribution to the 2018 Venice Biennale of Architecture, showcasing an out-of-scale interior for their country’s pavilion. That was an Instagram hit and won the Golden Lion for best national participation. I do not necessarily want to talk about scale here, though. Rather, I want to talk about how spatial interventions can rescript the narrative of a space, especially when that is more than a visual trick. It can be the politics, economics, ritual, touch, scent or history of a space that is rigged, hacked, rewritten or overlaid in order to create a different story for that space. Something else Bey stressed during the opening was that he hopes the graduates present us ways in which culture rather than economics can be the foundation for society. I was eager to find alternatives to dominant spatial stories. Crossing the various Sandberg departments and temporary programmes, there were many graduates addressing the ills of

MARK MINKJAN social spaces governed by economic scripts. In her work, Tessa Meeus (Design Department) challenged the narrative of homes for the elderly. Herself living in such a home in Rotterdam for two years – an unfancy place where only those with little choice and little time left end up – she participated in its rituals. She describes it as institutional architecture; in much of the home the lights are always on. Standardization pushes out personal stories and cultural preferences. Creating work with residents in drawing classes, she retrieved memories and aspirations by talking and sketching. Later, she and the residents organized the growing of a garden on an empty plot next to the home. Instead of focusing on life ending and mitigating misery, notions with which such homes are usually associated, Meeus organized a collective project that bore a sense of creation. More literally manipulating space, Younwon Sohn’s (Fine Arts) work Floor tested understandings of interior-exterior, material and habitable surface. The top corner of a three-by-fourmetre piece of vinyl flooring, simulating herringbone-patterned wooden parquet, was laid in the corner of a modernist pavilion, with the other 90 per cent or so lying outside it – for the most part on a neat, decorative lawn and wet from the rain. This was confusing in that it was inviting and uncanny at the same time, and left me questioning why we design and use floors the way we do. I was also reminded that skeuomorphic design, or material mimicking, is a comforting human undertaking. In the Radical Cut-Up Temporary Programme exhibition, Barnaby Monk’s Digital Riot Shield expanded my idea of space. Developing tools to “facilitate and drive a Postcapitalist transition”, he combined and appropriated symbols of what he would probably classify as Late Capitalism. As a badge of all-round financialization he took the stock-market digital ticker display, and from the militarization of public space the riot shield. The

REWRITING SPACE FOR A SHARED FUTURE digital ticker was installed behind a transparent riot shield. Rather than communicating market fluctuations, though, I unravelled messages about global crises – some despairing, some hopeful. Bringing the shield and the ticker together, Monk changed an established space and the people interacting with it. He turned the hypothetical police officer holding the shield from a device of oppression into a person watching out for others and caring for the natural world. Perhaps the human protagonist of a Postcapitalist world. The takeover of Amsterdam’s Van Ostadestraat by the Studio for Immediate Spaces (SIS) was a festival of rewritten space. The group who collectively squatted a vacant building at Schiphol Airport for their end-of-year assessment one year ago now rerouted the logic of a typical Amsterdam residential street. The work of all the graduates was situated in that street, playing out in real time throughout the day, turning public space into an urban interior. (Using simple plastic chairs and the steps of a structuralist former church right next to a busy cycle path, for example, they created a functional but confusing outdoor stage for their degree ceremony.) The graduates operated individually but shared a strong common attitude: one challenging the privatization of healthcare, housing and amenities and the transformation of public space from a collective arena of encounter, interdependence and productive conflict into a place of flow, efficiency and alienation. In his performance installation, Elia Costino exposed Amsterdam’s housing crisis, which is not usually played out in the street. With a handful of interior elements including a privacy screen, a rubbish bin and a cupboard holding essentials from tableware to pyjamas, Costino tested out how to perform conventional domesticity in the context of a stressed-out

MARK MINKJAN housing market. He used the street’s fixed furniture to enact the different scenes of typical homeliness around the clock. His domestic street drama is more than a satirical form of playing house. With flats becoming smaller and smaller to squeeze out more profit per square metre, fewer homes have enough space to hold all kinds of conveniences – from desk to dining table to washing machine – forcing their occupants to use collective amenities. The most positive projection of this development could mean a revival of public life. More likely and less communally, it will lead to the commercialization of everyday activities through increasingly automated services. A more sinister scenario foreshadowed in Costino’s work is a kind of designer homelessness. In their works, Mathilde Stubmark and Elizaveta Strakhova reminded me of the usual absence of softness and care in public space. Stubmark introduced scent, textile and privacy with her installations just under the size of a fitting room. Stepping inside offered an experience of intimacy, stillness and softness, addressing the senses in ways unexpected in a space of concrete, brick, traffic and regular sensory stress. Scent is often a byproduct of spatial production. Stubmark’s attempt to start designing an urban setting with the nose is refreshing. Meanwhile, Strakhova created a large open-air communal foot bath, converting three parking spaces into a neighbourhood bathing facility. I remember bathing rituals providing a very bonding experience. As well as personal care, they can also nurture healthy relationships between the people using them. The bath is one of the few spatial typologies associated with letting go, along with the toilet, the sauna, the massage parlour and one or two more. Letting go is an attitude that is never quite achieved in the street, and with public health and care facilities disappearing it is in fact a radical act to situate one so out in the open.

REWRITING SPACE FOR A SHARED FUTURE Another graduate who reclaimed parking spaces – the infrastructure for one of the great forces of privatization, the car – for the public good was Antoine Guay. He identified and appropriated another device crucial in the urban transformation processes: the builder’s skip. The size of a car, this is always placed on a parking spot to collect the debris and rubbish torn from apartments undergoing upgrading (and so raising their cost). Guay discovered that no permit is required for skips left in one place for a maximum of six weeks. Skips are also perfect holders for ovens in public space – ovens always having been a central focus for Guay. Unlike barbecues, which are open fires, an oven inside a skip is considered a closed fire and that is allowed in the street. Guay is interested in the oven as an instrument to run a social space, saying that Amsterdam offers few places where it is easy and affordable to meet people. He used the oven he constructed to bake bread, which he swapped for anything but money that passers-by were prepared to offer in return, from cigarettes and toy dinosaurs to a dance. His ambition is to create a commons that surpasses this individual oven but also consists of similar meeting places in other settings. In order to do so, he has shared instructions on how to set up the same bread oven anywhere in The Netherlands (and beyond). The 3D drawings of the skip and the oven are accessible online. Scaling these and other graduate works, we could start sketching a society of shared ownership, collective facilities and interdependence. Many of the graduates share a critical position toward residential stress, spaces designed for consumption, economies producing physical and mental exhaustion, unimaginative materials and spatial scripts dictating outdated social roles. Projecting the selection of model futures I encountered ahead in time, we would see the abolition of profit from housing, other basic needs and public amenities. It would

MARK MINKJAN also involve carving out space from the landscape of economic optimization and functional efficiency for personal care, collective health, idling and mutual support. The development of â&#x20AC;&#x201C; or rather a return to â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the commons would be a logical culmination. Common could be one of the most important words of a Postcapitalist world. common [ kom-uhn ] 1. belonging equally to, or shared alike by, an entire community 2. joint; united 3. widespread; ordinary

Mark Minkjan is an urban geographer and architecture critic.

BRIGHTON, UK LUKE GEORGE HARDY RIDEOUT

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/luke-goerge-hardy-rideout

SUPPLY CHAIN BROADCAST

MASTER DESIGN OF EXPERIENCES

Through active research within diverse communities, Luke George Hardy Rideout (Brighton, United Kingdom, 1993) imagines alternative institutional structures. Rideout investigated the possibility of using the global supply chain as a platform for learning and empathy between communities around the globe instead of transporting goods only. Supply Chain Broadcast is a digital audiovisual station, which shares the life and stories of communities along the chain with each other, uniting them in the knowledge of their individual contributions to production. In collaboration with Juhee Hahm.

BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA AGUSTINA WOODGATE

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/agustina-woodgate

VPN (VIRTUAL PUB NETWORK)

RADICAL CUT-UP

In her work Agustina Woodgate (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1981) focuses on the politics and poetics of landscapes and infrastructures as a conceptual and public geography. Her approach is speculative, and context specific, presenting critical alternatives for information distribution. The work VPN (Virtual PUB Network) is an eight-node Virtual Private Network installed throughout the exhibition venues during Sandberg Instituut’s graduation event. Visitors are able to access this alternative internet by connecting their devices via Wi-Fi at each location. Resisting the platformization of the educational institute, the work explores autonomous infrastructures as zoned of trust and situated knowledge. In collaboration with Miquel Hervás Gómez and Sascha Krischock.

BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA MALENA MARIA ARCUCCI

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/malena-maria-arcucci

CONSPIRATORIAL MYTHOLOGIES

MASTER DESIGN OF EXPERIENCES

Malena Maria Arcucci (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1989) is a theatre designer whoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s interested in challenging our established way of thinking through creating alternative realities. Conspiratorial Mythologies is a three part project that looks into ancient Greek forms of storytelling, with the purpose of unveiling the truths hidden in conspiracy theories. The project consists of a video essay, a performance in five acts and a series of vases, which are re-interpretations of Greek Amphora.

CAMBRIDGE, UK SEKAI MAKONI

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/sekai-makoni

1. MAKING SPACE FOR FAITH AND SPIRITUALITY IN THE ARTS AND ACADEMIA – PANEL DISCUSSION 2. RE-IMAGINING CHURCH: BLACK, QUEERAFFIRMING, FAITH RITUAL RE-IMAGININGS 86

CRITICAL STUDIES

Core to Sekai Makoni’s (Cambridge, United Kingdom, 1986) practice are Blackness, colonial histories, faith, emotion and songs. Her podcast Between Ourselves is an important part of her practice. She is currently exploring Black church, faith rituals and how to speak about spirituality in the arts and academia. The panel discussion Making Space for Faith and Spirituality in the Arts and Academia explores the ways in which faith isn’t so readily spoken about within the arts and academia. Possibilities to create latitude for these discussions were discussed, focusing on examples that are liberative and non-traditional. Re-imagining Church: Black, queer-affirming, faith ritual re-imaginings is a private POC ceremony centered around the Biblical symbolism of the washing of feet.

CAMPOS DOS GOYTACAZES, BRAZIL CRITICAL STUDIES VITA EVANGELISTA https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/vita-evangelista

NATUREZA MORTA-VIVA

In her work Vita Evangelista (Campos dos Goytacazes, Brazil, 1905) reflects on the material, embodied, and affective repercussions of epistemic violence, which urge decolonization. Natureza Morta-Viva consists of two works that both resulted from her investigations into familiar public spaces that belong to the cities of Amsterdam and Rio de Janeiro. For both the performance, Natureza Morta-Viva (embodied), and the video Natureza Morta-Viva (there/not there) Evangelista used the top-down satellite perspective from Google Earth VR.

CHARTRES, FRANCE JEAN-FRANÇOIS PESCHOT

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/jean-francois-peschot

UNABLE TO SPEAK, THIS KID TRACES.

DIRTY ART DEPARTMENT

Jean-François Peschot (Chartres, France, 1992) explores the mechanisms at work in the production of signs under semio-capitalism. In his analysis, imagemaking devices do not serve their users, but rather, the other way around. Users are there to fulfill the design of technologies programmed by the corporations that produce them. The effect of this reversal of things is the homogenization of people’s imagination. The installation Unable to speak, this kid traces consists of two inkjet printers connected to each other in order to create a single image – that of a trigger from a gun one can 3D-print at home.

CHEMNITZ, GERMANY ANNAMARIA MERKEL

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/annamaria-merkel

WE ARE NOT THE ONLY KIND OF WE

MASTER DESIGN OF EXPERIENCE

As an artistic researcher and designer Annamaria Merkel (Chemnitz, Germany, 1990) builds her practice on a magic understanding of the world. Merkelâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s research examines experience marketing as designed ritual. By using performance she detects loopholes for reclaiming personal agency. Her work We are not the only kind of we is a series of site-specific choreographies with twelve performers, who instantaneously invade and react to the environment of art spaces. Wearing corporate outfits and interlinked with radio units, they come unsolicited and observing everyone, whispering detailed descriptions in their radios. From time to time an individual tries to revolt against a hidden higher supervision to reclaim personal agency, to eventually get pulled back into what seems to be a corporate ritual.

CINCINNATI, OHIO, USA WYATT NIEHAUS

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/wyatt-niehaus

UNTITLED (KARTOTHEEKDOOS A6 163) 94

FINE ARTS

Wyatt Niehaus’ (Cincinnati, Ohio, USA, 1989) works operate around the institute’s archive and collection policy. He presents a series of photographs and sculptural works at IISG and Rongwrong. Niehaus’ photographs address shifts in the use of certain spaces and documents. For his exhibition at Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis, Niehaus used vitrines that had been empty for a very long time prior to this exhibition. For his work Untitled (kartotheekdoos A6 163), he filled them with a particular archive box used for the storage of miscellaneous and non-uniform small scale objects.

CLERMONT FERRAND, FRANCE LOU BUCHE

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/lou-buche

HORS JEU

RADICAL CUT-UP

Lou Buche (Clermont Ferrand, France, 1991) and Javier Rodriguez Fernandez (Madrid, Spain, 1991) are both graphic designers and artists. After they met in 2017 they decided to form Robuche, a character born from the fusion between their two forces. Robucheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work is trademarked by their wit, honesty and playfulness. The installation Hors Jeu is a reenactment of the architecture of Robucheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s idea of a playroom: a space fusing recreational activity and work. The space represents a combination of iconic objects and references that reveal a palpable link between analog and digital media and open new perspectives to the viewer.

COPENHAGEN, DENMARK MATHILDE STUBMARK

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/mathilde-stubmark

SECURE, PEACEFUL & WILD

STUDIO FOR IMMEDIATE SPACES

Working as a multidisciplinary architect, Mathilde Stubmark (Copenhagen, Denmark, 1991) explores the universe of architecture, art, fashion and other disciplines in order to create spaces. She takes inspiration from the architecture to research the intersection of aesthetics and experience. Taking inspiration from the design of therapy gardens, her installation Secure, Peaceful & Wild explores how scent can be incorporated into materials typically used in architecture, such as plaster, concrete, ceramics or textiles. Stubmark questions the way space can affect the perception we have of our surroundings.

COPENHAGEN, DENMARK DAVID HAACK MONBERG

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/david-haack-monberg

ICONS MADE WITHOUT HANDS

101

DIRTY ART DEPARTMENT

The work of David Haack Monberg (Copenhagen, Denmark, 1992) moves between history and fiction in order to explore how the technological replacement of artefacts summons a more total annihilation of memory than that caused by the physical destruction resulting from iconoclastic terror. Icons Made Without Hands exists of 3D printed sculptures and an installation with a dead mouse.

DOMKYRKO, GOTHENBURG, SWEDEN ADA REINTHAL https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/ada-reinthal

DIVERSE FRONTS // DIVERSE TACTICS

102

MASTER DESIGN OF EXPERIENCES

Ada Reinthal (Domkyrko, Gothenburg, Sweden, 1989) is a filmmaker and commoning researcher, exploring prefigurative process design and creative democratic practices. Diverse Fronts // Diverse Tactics is an exploration of political and social actors of today and aims at identifying design principles of democratic consensus methods. By embedding herself within groups who are championing very different causes, Reinthal seeks to identify universals within their organizations and to compile a database, a tool-belt for todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s radicals.

DRUNEN, THE NETHERLANDS ELIF ÖZBAY

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/elif-ozbay

BOXER/BIKER RING/CYCLE

105

SHADOW CHANNEL

Elif Özbay (Drunen, The Netherlands, 1989) explores the visual language of displacement through moving images. The visual pieces she produces are based on true events and folk tales. Core to Özbay’s practice is her observation of her surroundings where she encounters incidental and mysterious occurrences. After capturing these moments, Özbay edits them adding classical effects such as suspense. What developed as a creative method to solve issues around image right, was turned into another postproduction effect. In such moments her reports of past events become indistinguishable from performances she has staged. Using these techniques, Boxer/Biker Ring/Cycle visualizes a hidden narrative. A story told by inarticulable characters.

DUBLIN, IRELAND AIDAN WALL

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/aidan-wall

DEATH HAS BEEN CURED 106

CRITICAL STUDIES

The research of artist, musician, writer and game designer Aidan Wall (Dublin, Ireland, 1990) relates to the overlap between play and work, and particularly how game systems reflect oppressive systems of governance under contemporary capitalism. Death Has Been Cured is a work of fiction about humanity’s relationship to two para-human entities: artificial intelligences and landlords. It is published as a limited edition book accompanied by collectible cards that bear illustrations from the story’s swampy and familiar world. Set during the continuous Dublin housing crisis, the story follows weirdos Siún and Fledge as they live under the surveying eyes of a curiously coded intelligence who they have accidentally welcomed into their home.

DUBLIN, IRELAND MARK BUCKERIDGE

OPERA

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/mark-buckeridge

109

FINE ARTS

Artist and musician Mark Buckeridgeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s (Dublin, Ireland, 1991) Opera is performed by a group within the context of the Saint Sebastian chapel at Oude Kerk, Amsterdam. The libretto is divided into three acts and has numerous scenes. The opera is about pain, traveling, institutions, cars, fine art, ships, lamenting, spirituality, the sky, disillusion and new possibilities.

DUMFRIES, SCOTLAND AMY WINSTANLEY

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/any-winstanley

SWELL, MOVE, CIRCLE, SLOW AND VANISH

110

FINE ARTS

Amy Winstanley (Dumfries, Scotland, 1983) explores painting to reflect her experience of the world from love, death, to the mundane and spiritual; all underpinned by a fascination with humanityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s relationship to nature and an interest in the act of painting itself. With her paintings Swell, Move, Circle, Slow and Vanish, Winstanley reflects her experience of the world. Within this there is movement, gesture; the act of hand and paintbrush on paper or canvas. All paintings include this energy of movement, a potential to change.

EDE, THE NETHERLANDS VALERIE VAN ZUIJLEN

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/valerie-van-zuijlen

AIREAL

113

SHADOW CHANNEL

Valerie van Zuijlen (Ede, The Netherlands, 1994) is a digital artist and filmmaker. She is interested in the ability to be present at multiple locations at once, in which different time zones, the past, the future and the now, the virtual and the physical, become an apparent feature within her film ontologies. For her film AIREAL Van Zuijlen suggests dreams can be part of a totality, a gigantic collective dream of which the entire universe may be the projection.

EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND LANA MURDOCHY

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/lana-murochy

WE ARE ALREADY THERE! 114

FINE ARTS

Within her practice, Lana Murdochy (Edinburgh, Scotland, 1995) delves into relationships with her friends and family and explores the transference of language between individuals through listening and mediating conversation, finding connections and a sense of community. For her work We are already there!, Murdochy filmed the group of women she has grown close too, gathering together to paint one anotherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s portrait. Murdochyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s film shows how gathering, repetition and difference builds connectivity, displaying her own friendship group and the collaboration involved throughout life. The video has been shown alongside the painted portraits.

EKATERINBURG, RUSSIA ELIZAVETA STRAKHOVA

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/elizaveta-strakhova

HETEROGENEOUS WATERS

117

STUDIO FOR IMMEDIATE SPACES

As an artist and designer, Elizaveta Strakhova (Ekaterinburg, Russia, 1993) experiments with formats of social gathering with a focus on the changing terms of inclusion and intimacy in society today. Heterogeneous Waters is a communal bathing experience that takes place in public space, addressing the increase of privatized rituals and self-care since the disappearance of the public bathhouse.

ERMELO, THE NETHERLANDS FARIDA SEDOC

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/farida-sedoc

THE FUTURE AINâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;T WHAT IT USED TO BE

118

RADICAL CUT-UP

By using screen prints, graphic design, patchwork, fashion and textile, Farida Sedoc (Ermelo, The Netherlands, 1980), creates multi-layered narratives and site-specific works closely connected to the ideology of street culture and hip hop, meeting points for the city, its citizens and the interrogation of identity. In her work, Sedoc explores and questions contemporary cultural identity and the influence of monetary policy, heritage and politics on the future of globalism. With The Future Ain't What It Used To Be, Sedoc tells a story of printed cloth, also known as pagne, from historical and contemporary viewpoints of Dutch transatlantic trade with Indonesia and West Africa, through which the cloth became an essential consumer item and material transfer of wealth. The manufacture and circulation of objects are intertwined with power, which mobilizes people and shapes political, economic and gender relations.

EURASIA, EARTH GVN908

IDLE HEROES

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/gvn908

121

SHADOW CHANNEL

GVN908 (Eurasia, Earth, 2015) is a tethrathoth-tentacled kraken emerging from the darkest waters of the deep web. It has been devouring our identities since its invoKation. Almost nothing is left now. We worship full on opacity and armored encryption. The work Idle Heroes is set in a Multiplayer Online Battle Arena that has to be performed. A heroâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s journey with no return. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the third act and the bubble bursts, swallows every character into a spiraling vortex of denial, despair and fear. Synchronous regurgitation and ingestion of virtual realities, beginnings that never stop beginning. Forever respawning.

FORLĂ?, ITALY ANDREA BELOSI

UNREAL ESTATES: THE TALE OF LIBERTY HILLS

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/andrea-belosi

122

STUDIO FOR IMMEDIATE SPACES

In his multidisciplinary, architectural practice Andrea Belosi (ForlĂ, Italy, 1991) focuses on idealized space, the digital image and the impact of technology on the urban environment. Unreal Estates: The Tale of Liberty Hills is a CGI-animated short film that tells the story of young city-dwellers that look to move to the countryside exhausted by the struggle for entrepreneurial success in the city. The film uses the virtual model of a typical modern countryside home as its setting and as immediate narrative material.

FREDENSBORG, DENMARK SILKE XENIA JUUL

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/silke-xenia-juul

125

CRITICAL STUDIES

In her work, Silke Xenia Juul (Fredensborg, Denmark, 1992) explores sickness, sleep, and existential dying through poetry, ritual and performance. During her ceremony, entitled 2, participants mourn themselves, transferring present voices through handmade vessels, paying a tribute to unreached potentials with continuous ceremonial singing and acts of metaphysical remembrance. While past and future selves are commemorated, the awareness remains that present selves become increasingly dispersed, as they morph into porous multiplications of another.

GOTHENBURG, SWEDEN REBECCA ESKILSSON

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/rebecca-eskilsson

FROM HER TEETH TO HER FEET //$ %~~~*/

126

RADICAL CUT-UP

Photographer Rebecca Eskilsson (Gothenburg, Sweden, 1987) follows her eye and fascination for combining materials and creates layered installations and imagery that reveal the tension between society and symbolism. Through photographs, clay figures and installation, her work From her teeth to her feet //$%~~~*/ invokes the myth of Pandora, the first human woman and eternal scapegoat for all the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s evils. The work addresses our increasingly digitized world where images and desires flood our senses. It questions societyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s obsession with unreal female figures and the male gaze that constructs them.

GOUDA, THE NETHERLANDS MARIJN DEGENAAR

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/marijn-degenaar

BETWEEN NOW AND NEVER

129

SHADOW CHANNEL

Marijn Degenaar (Gouda, The Netherlands, 1987) is a filmmaker with a background in graphic design and music. His latest work explores contemporary anxieties of a world in a liminal moment. Between Now and Never is a hallucinogenic exploration of the near future. Channeling anxieties related to the unfolding climate breakdown into an abstract collision between mythical characters lost in a deserted wasteland.

GRANTHAM, UK JOSEPH PLEASS

I’VE BEEN TO PARADISE

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/jospeh-pleass

130

MASTER DESIGN OF EXPERIENCES

Designer Joseph Pleass’ (Grantham, United Kingdom, 1990) practice revolves around exploring ways to combine research with interactive narrative. I’ve Been To Paradise is an interactive narrative that explores euthanasia and end-of-life services through dialogue led gameplay. The game allows the player to role-play the last remaining days of a loved one’s life, who has decided to perform euthanasia. The narrative takes place on a euthanasia cruise ship, a fictional platform to explore hypothetical and speculative approaches to the dying process within.

HAARLEM, THE NETHERLANDS DAAN COUZIJN

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/daan-couzijn

BEAUTIFUL IMPACT

133

RADICAL CUT-UP

Daan Couzijn (Haarlem, The Netherlands, 1994) has a background in music and performative arts, resulting in a multidisciplinary artistic practice, focusing on notions of authenticity, existentialism and the way external, in particular digital, influences shape human. The film Beautiful Impact is about flirting with rescue without having the intention of being saved; about accepting that the light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of a car approaching you from the opposite direction; and about being damaged in the most beautiful way. Couzijn examines his narcissistic desire to suffer emotionally. In another stage of this process, he shows the aftermath of a beautiful, unexpected impact.

HAARLEM, THE NETHERLANDS FENNA SCHILLING

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/fenna-schilling

WE THE LABYRINTHS

134

RADICAL CUT-UP

Fenna Schilling (Haarlem, The Netherlands, 1990) seeks out the possibilities offered by juxtaposition in both her visual practice and DJ sets. With the use of a scanner, she creates dreamlike landscapes and mind-bending compositions out of paper. In her DJ sets, she has a similarly psychedelic artistic approach, blending already existing material into new rhythmic configurations. As an intersectional feminist, she bridges the gap between theory and practice, creating works for individual and collective healing. We The Labyrinths is an installation that consists of visual collages, accompanied by a soundscape, trying to arrive at a language that heals as much as it separates.

HAARLEM, THE NETHERLANDS NEMO KONING

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/nemo-koning

NUTMEG TALES

137

CRITICAL STUDIES

Nemo Koning (Haarlem, The Netherlands, 1994) researches the emotional aspects of food and explores the critical potential of affective food writing, especially in a Dutch context. His Nutmeg Tales is a lecture performance, following the smell of the Dutch home right down to its roots in colonized Indonesia. What once started off as a personal inquiry into a Dutch cookie called ‘taai taai’ and Koning’s sense of home, took the form of a historic research into the Dutch settlers’ greedy and violent monopolization of the nutmeg spice – an important ingredient of the taai taai. How to dwell in a native home that finds its comfort in the fruits of a rather bloody history?

HAARLEMMERMEER, THE NETHERLANDS DIRTY ART JEROEN KORTEKAAS DEPARTMENT https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/jeroen-kortekaas

WITH FLYING COLORS

138

Jeroen Kortekaas (Haarlemmermeer, The Netherlands, 1991) creates sculptures and illustrations in which motifs of transportation â&#x20AC;&#x201C; such as flight, cruises, traffic signals and signage â&#x20AC;&#x201C; become metaphors for metamorphosis. His works present crossroads; a space of infinite possibilities and choices. With Flying Colors is a series of crafted kinetic light sculptures, which hold the ambiguous status of signaling objects, alluding to the question of how individuals relate to space and its boundaries, markers and objects. Taking the signpost as the image of guiding life along a beaten path, his work can inspire us to reimagine those and our other boundaries. With the urgency of an emergency vehicle and the joy of fairground rides, they oscillate between crisis and ecstasy.

HELSINKI, FINLAND EMILIA TAPPREST

ZHŌUWÉI.NETWORK

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/emilia-tapprest

141

SHADOW CHANNEL

Through her work, Emilia Tapprest (Helsinki, Finland, 1992) (NVISIBLE.STUDIO) researches the social and psychological implications of emerging technologies. Her speculative short films tackle themes such as human connectedness, surveillance and freedom in the accelerating development of pervasive computing. ZHŌUWÉI.NETWORK is a practicebased research project investigating visceral implications of automated surveillance. The work introduces three speculative worlds differing in who has power over data and how this power is used. The main output of the research is a proof-of-concept for a sci-fi short film depicting the parallel lives of ‘V’, Long and Dimian – each struggling with questions of agency and belonging in the quantified age.

HOME, MY HOME SUN CHANG

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/sun-chang

COMMON BELONGINGS

142

DIRTY ART DEPARTMENT

Sun Changâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s (Home, My Home, 1994) participatory projects respond to concrete daily-life problems such as a lack of student meals and excess of food waste and loneliness. Common Belongings is an ongoing program grounded in the Sandberg student community. Initiated in November 2018 in collaboration with fellow student, Sara Santana, it first sought to provide care and connection through a mobile food service. Based on a donation system, Common Belongings has evolved into a sustainable structure that not only provides lunch, but also functions as a platform for the Sandberg community to meet on a regular basis and discuss topics of collective interest, such as the housing shortage, immigration and the legal status of non-EU students. Common Belongings then supports events initiated by other members of the community, helping to establish a culture of discussion, shared decisionmaking and collective emotional labor. Its ultimate goal has become to help its participants and co-initiators to regain a sense of belonging in the face of institutional pressures and shortcomings.

HUDDERSFIELD, UK ALEX WALKER

SMALL STUDIES IN OPACITY

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/alex-walker

145

DESIGN

Alex Walker’s (Huddersfield, United Kingdom, 1990) interests are rooted in the deconstruction of language and aesthetics. His studies have focused on the position of graphic design – as a tool of rationalist sense-making through ordering, categorizing, representation – in relation to Western philosophy, colonialism, and environmental destruction. Small Studies in Opacity comprises a selection of designed objects – knickknacks, trinkets, conversation pieces (if you will), decor (if you must) – that meditate upon (and dance around) the conceptual tensions between opacity-transparency, contamination-purity, shit-value, commodity-fetish, and surface-depth. In collaboration with Samuli Saarinen.

IKSAN, SOUTH KOREA JUHEE HAHM

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/juhee-hahm

I WANTED TO LIKE MY WORK

146

MASTER DESIGN OF EXPERIENCES

In order to explore the future of work, Juhee Hahm (Iksan, South Korea, 1987) proposed to investigate the phenomenon of ‘Bull-Shit Jobs’ focusing her research on the body of work collected by David Graeber in Bullshitjob.com. Hahm took coffee as the starting point of her investigation that resulted in I Wanted To Like My Work, a waiting room where audiences are asked to experience their own ‘Bull-Shit Jobs’ while earning fuel in the form of caffeine. The installation is designed to spark discussion about the contemporary value of labour.

9 BELLY BUTTONS & 18 CHEEKS EDITORIAL BY LAURENS OTTO

(Not) Giving Form To Interfaces On Bureaucracy, Datafication And Supply Chains

GRADUATES MENTIONED: KARINA ZAVIDOVA MIQUEL HERVÁS GÓMEZ SASCHA KRISCHOCK AGUSTINA WOODGATE JUHEE HAHM DAVID HAACK MONBERG WYATT NIEHAUS LUKE GEORGE HARDY RIDEOUT

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(NOT) GIVING FORM TO INTERFACES With work in general becoming more and more “creative”, artists – conversely – are turning to the mundane. Focusing upon bureaucracy, datafication, supply chains and the factory (a prepost-Fordist place), the terms and conditions of technology, media and economics have become the object of artistic practice. I get that. But how do these interests materialise artistically, as artworks? l say mundane because the artists in question are “interested in working with subjects and fields which are considered uncreative”. 1 Expanding their scope beyond solely analysing the working conditions in the creative field (currently a common trope in contemporary art), these artists dive deeper into the very legal, economic and technological underpinnings of social configurations. I say materialise and I say artwork tentatively, because a current running through Sandberg Instituut’s 2019 graduation show is that of networks, interfaces, software, data and digital infrastructures; all terms that have no object-form as such and materialise only by conversion. How to present entities that are, by their essence, not visual? From the 1960s onwards, conceptual art made both moves as well, albeit with entirely different motives.2 The first parallel is that it also tried to assault traditional paradigms of visuality, aiming to overcome the retinal conventions of painting and sculpture. Taking a leap to present-day practices, the material manifestation of the artwork is now challenged for different reasons: its subject – the regulation of the flow of people, things and data, which I regroup under the term “interfaces” – simply does not have a distinct material form.3 A second similarity with conceptual art bears on the preoccupation with the structures of administration and legal organisation. It employed an administrative style and a legalistic language to resist traditional aesthetic criteria (mostly that of artistic

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LAURENS OTTO competence and taste). Today, administrative and legal processes are again in focus, but now as the object of research, not as the final form of the work. The stakes are now different, as there simply is no single accurate representation possible of the underlying networked mechanisations and broader implications of the interfaces we encounter. The graduation works of Miquel Hervás Gómez, Sascha Krischock and Agustina Woodgate (assembled in VPN, Virtual PUB Network), and of Juhee Hahm, David Haack Monberg, Wyatt Niehaus, Luke Rideout, and Karina Zavidova, all seem to riddle the hegemony of the visual. They foreground an interest in legal, economic and technological processes. This puts the possible materialisation of their engagement with abstract systems – they attempt to present this interest in the form of artworks – under pressure. For instance, the rather voluptuous work Icons Made Without Hands by David Haack Monberg addresses the material effects of datafication on history, memory and identity. It consists of a video, two sculptures and four wall objects. The piece departs from the resurrection on Trafalgar Square of the Arch of Triumph of Palmyra, which had been destroyed one year before by ISIS in Syria. A copy of the Roman monument was unveiled by then Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, as a reproduction from digital scans. The wall objects are the result of glitches that appear in the scanning process and I read the sculptures, wrapped in plastic foil, as an expression of the aesthetics of transportation and its alleged transparency. The sculptures, shrouded in the same satin cloth used in Trafalgar Square, contain several dead chameleons (they turn grey when dead). These have the same shifting skin as the scanned monuments. One sculpture also contains the last known scan of a packing slip of one of his artworks, that was lost in transit – alluding

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(NOT) GIVING FORM TO INTERFACES to the conditions of the international transport of data and objects, and its implications for his own work. In his thesis, Monberg further elaborates on what happens when archaeology becomes virtual: “What does the term virtual archaeology mean here? The key concept is virtual, an allusion to a model, a replica, the notion that something can act as a surrogate or replacement for an original.” 4 His work examines the fate of collective memory when it becomes based on datasets instead of original material. Pointing to the infrastructure and functioning of archives, Wyatt Niehaus’ abstraction does not operate on the level of the photographs he presents, but in the absence of any further descriptions. As Walter Benjamin mused in the final lines of A Short History of Photography, “Will not the caption become the most important component of the shot?” 5 Niehaus engages with urban developments from within an institute for social history, in the form of the exhibition Related term (RT). He installed various photographs and placed archive containers in three empty display cases at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, which houses archive collections of the radical left. His photographs link to the collection’s content and the institute’s history. Niehaus traces the transformation of various spaces (such as a former sugar factory west of Amsterdam) into new economies that include yoga studios, coworking spaces and tech offices. The presentation of these pictures, in turn, accentuates the boundaries of the public and private staff areas of the institute. Juhee Hahm and Luke Rideout explore something as vast and supposedly abstract as a supply chain – in this case that of coffee – by collaborating on a research journey in Amsterdam and Kenya. They follow the different stages in the process

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LAURENS OTTO of coffee production, from farm through auction house, warehouse, roasting house, port and coffee company, to cafés in Amsterdam. This has led to season one of the Supply Chain Broadcast, 6 a “digital audiovisual station” which shares the stories of disconnected global communities from the same supply chain. In a sense reclaiming the lost promise of globalism, it aims to empower the different groups in understanding their position in this global system. Rideout tries to approach all the actors in the supply chain equally, with as little bias as possible. He aims to investigate “whether the global supply chain can be used as a platform for learning, trust and empathy between communities around the globe.” 7 Against naive or malevolent tentatives to advance creative capitalism, Rideout tries to reclaim labour as a fundamental cultural expression. Asking questions such as “How much time do you have for breaks?”, “What would you say to another member of the supply chain?” and “When do you feel fulfilment in your work?”, Rideout takes up the deadpan role of a consultant, but now expanded to the scale of an entire value chain. In her work, Juhee Hahm connects coffee culture to the cult of productivity, and to “bullshit jobs” in particular. In the installation I Wanted to Like My Work, Hahm creates a coffeefuelled waiting room that lets participants experience the infrastructure of what David Graeber called “bullshit jobs”. These are pointless administrative positions that have appeared in the wake of increasing bureaucracy in modern society. Hahm links the precarity of her own position as a creative worker to the disenchantment of bureaucratic jobs – two sides of the same coin. Both situations beg the question: if work is no longer about production, then what is the value of human labour?

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(NOT) GIVING FORM TO INTERFACES Karina Zavidova tackles the abstraction of bureaucracy by drawing a suggestive parallel between two value systems: the creative field and immigration policy. As a non-EU student, she faces triple tuition fees along with looming expatriation if her value to the Dutch society as a “creative” is not ascertained. The resulting work is primarily the self-published book Untitled – Practice within the Limitations of Citizenship (with a Smile), which can also be consulted in an installation by walking on a treadmill. The book lays out the aesthetics and the legal framework of “ambition” as a criterion for immigration and creative practice. Interestingly, Zavidova relies explicitly on the automation of processes and the use of templates and default software. Apart from the cover, the book is coded and printed entirely as an exported HTML file. In her encounter with immigration policy as an interface, she opts for an artistic creation that dodges the use of an interface (typically being InDesign). Miquel Hervás Gómez, Sascha Krischock and Agustina Woodgate have gone as far as not proposing any physical objects. They assembled from different departments to create VPN, Virtual PUB Network. “This virtual network,” they write, “explores the possibilities of autonomous infrastructures by building a zone of trust and situated knowledge opposing itself to the platformisation of the institute. By building a local network and designing its architecture, VPN aims to link all the distributed departments and generate space in between.” The three creators each present one-third of the project’s description in the publication of this year’s graduation. In order to read the full statement about the work, the reader must browse through the pages just as they have to with the network itself, which cannot be fully accessed at once. The work thus does not propose a form, but creates an infrastructure. Enabling users to access data by connecting directly

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LAURENS OTTO to a private network, the VPN was installed physically at four exhibition venues during the graduation show. The network and the archive it hosted were thus only accessible to visitors on site via the wi-fi settings of their smartphone. “But are you also showing a work?”, I naïvely asked one of the creators. Case in point, the network is the work. In these cases, artists’ and designers’ increasing encounters with precarity have not led to navel-gazing but to starker attention to systems that determine social configurations in general. I allow myself to quote Karina Zavidova at length: “I have been having conversations with people who are developing their entire projects around their own elephant in the (class)room, such as affordable housing, [ ... ] affordable meals, being paid for your work ... This is not the problem. The problem is that these kind of works are seen as contributing to the image of the school as ‘woke’ simply because they exist. They are well-made, well-articulated, made public in corridors and on our Instagram channels, while the legal ground on which the school exists remains invisible.” 8 Against the temptation to focus on issues that are hiding in plain sight – the precarity faced by a student at an art school – there is the desire to dig deeper into underlying legal, but also economic and technological, frameworks. When speaking of these infrastructures, the lingering question is how these “abstractions become flesh”. 9 To quote Sascha Krischok’s essay Deep Learning from Las Vegas, “Information, at once both graphical and spatial, has become the main mediator in urban space, overcoming physical and moral limits to shape and automate human behaviour and emotion.” 10 Objects can hardly be singled out, because they are entangled in complex infrastructures. If an object cannot represent the network on which it depends, it does however undeniably bear

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(NOT) GIVING FORM TO INTERFACES the mark of the networks in which it is immersed. The answer to the question “How to present entities that are, by their essence, not visual?” is thus twofold: on the one hand there is a zooming out from concrete cases to analyse their broader legal, economic or technological framework 11, on the other a zooming in on the tangible ramifications of those governing spheres. Rather than the graduation works being an aestheticisation of a networked reality, they act as a seismograph, measuring the material effects of abstract interfaces. 1. This is quoted from the biography of Karina Zavidova. I am consciously applying this singular phrase to all the artists mentioned, regardless of their apparent differences. 2. For an exhaustive historicisation of conceptual art, see: Benjamin Buchloh, Conceptual Art 1962 – 1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions, October vol. 55. (winter 1990), pp. 105 – 143. 3. Miquel Hervás Gómez goes so far as thanking each platform he used in his thesis essay, acknowledging amongst others the influence of aaaaarg.fail, WeTransfer, PayPal and FlixBus for his work. Miquel Hervás Gómez, Last_Last_Final_Final.PDF, Design Department Issue #4, 2019 (no page number). 4. Paul Reilly, Towards a Virtual Archaeology, (CAA ’90. BAR Intern.s. vol. 565, 1991), p. 133. Cited in David Haack Monberg, Viscosity, 2019, p. 20. 5. Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street and Other Writings. Trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter. London: New Left Books, 1979. 6. See: https://www.supplychainbroadcast.net/. 7. Luke George Hardy Rideout, Exploring Forms of Cultural Stewardship – An investigation into the cultural landscape of global trade, with focus on documenting opportunities for enhanced socioeconomic relations, 2019. 8. Karina Zavidova, Untitled – Practice within the Limitations of Citizenship (with a Smile), 2019, p. 41. 9. Karina Zavidova, The Argumentation Machine, Design Department issue #4, 2019 (no page number). 10. Sascha Krischok, Deep Learning From Las Vegas, Design Department issue #4, 2019 (no page number). 11. It is not about a destroyed monument but its resurrection as data; not only about urban developments but also the organisation of social history; not about precarity but underlying legal structures; it is about labour conditions to the level of entire supply chains; and lastly, VPN, Virtual PUB Network is itself an infrastructure.

Laurens Otto is a writer and curator. He is the editor-in-chief of RESOLUTION, a magazine that focusses on the circulation of digital images. He serves as the associate curator of the Institute for Human Activities (DR Congo, Netherlands).

156

INNICHEN, ITALY ANDREAS TRENKER

ALUMINIUM DUCE

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/andreas-trenker

159

DESIGN

In his work, Andreas Trenker (Innichen, Italy, 1990) examines the socio-political implications by the invisible power structures behind an image. For his documentary Aluminium Duce Trenker traced back the story of a fascist monument from blueprint to its destruction in 1961, exploring the violence performed by and against the effigy. Bringing together a variety of archival material, and conducting interviews with witnesses, the documentary captures opposing views regarding the monument and what it represented. Trenkerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s installation poses questions about the treatment of material remnants of recent history, and the consequences of their preservation or destruction. The work brings to light the complexity of a multilingual border region, and functions as a lens to the geopolitical landscape of the early 1960s, when insurgent turmoil formed in the heart of Europe.

KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI, USA JOHN CHARLES BRICKER

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/john-charles-bricker

PEEK TV

160

MASTER DESIGN OF EXPERIENCES

John Charles Bricker (Kansas City, Missouri, USA, 1994) is a writer, cartoonist, and musician who focuses on listening, comprehending large ideas, and appreciating small details. Peek TV is a variety show format created in order to celebrate local communities and connect them with kindred spirits all over the world. The showâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s central setting is a cartoon-vortex-clubhouse hosted by a friendly and sometimes confused human called John.

KAUNAS, LITHUANIA GEDIMINAS Ĺ˝YGUS

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/gediminas-zygus

HYDRANGEA I HYDRANGEA II

163

SHADOW CHANNEL

Gediminas Ĺ˝ygus (Kaunas, Lithuania, 1991) is an artist working with sound, performance and film. Their work offers to devise alternative genealogies of metaphysical architectures. Together with Holly Childs (Adelaide, Australia) they developed the performative, immersive sound installations Hydrangea I and Hydrangea II . Hydrangea is a myth about myths, and within Hydrangea, each flower is a story, and forests contain never-ending branching tales. Plotlines mutate, and realities fork; some come to bear the weight of new blooms of stories, while others fade out, creating ground for further blooms. Each organism influences the entire structure.

KOBLENZ, GERMANY SELMA KÖRAN

EXIT ATHENA

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/selma-koeran

164

DIRTY ART DEPARTMENT

Working with animation, video, painting and sculpture, Selma Köran (Koblenz, Germany, 1991) deploys mythology and narrative in order to subvert, mock and pastiche gender roles and hierarchies. Every detail of her work is hand crafted and subjectified, overlaying her own political and conceptual position on the narrative. Exit Athena is a film installation based on Köran’s own version of the famously missing last chapter of Hesiod’s “Theogony”. In her vision, Hesiod’s last prophecy is fulfilled; Zeus is annihilated at the hands of goddess Athena. Aiming to dismantle patriarchal hierarchy by adding a missing piece of its literary history, Exit Athena is a feminist satyricon located in the world of the Olympic gods. It is a baroque musical full of pink clouds, perfume and genitals.

LIMERICK, IRELAND HEATHER GRIFFIN

MADE TO MEASURE

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/heather-griffin

167

MASTER DESIGN OF EXPERIENCES

Heather Griffin (Limerick, Ireland, 1983) analyses and utilizes mythologies, social phenomena, alternative histories and the rhythms of everyday life, thereby critiquing the absurdity of our capitalist reality and challenging the status quo. Made to Measure is an exploration of citizen resilience in an age of the surveillance economy and data extractivism. In it, Griffin proposes a near-future city setting where tech corporations are taking over administrative roles in smart cities and digital surveillance is normalized in our everyday lives.

LINCOLN, UK HARRIET FOYSTER

HARDWOOD IN HEART WOOD

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/harriet-foyster

168

CRITICAL STUDIES

Harriet Foyster (Lincoln, United Kingdom, 1992) collages text, video, performance and set to study socio-emotional implications of neoliberal capitalism on the subject. Within a work like Hardwood in Heart Wood she examines relations of language and subjectivity once processed through mechanisms and logics of private property.

LISBOA, PORTUGAL ANDRÉ LOURENÇO

WORMEATERS.

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/andre-lourenco

171

SHADOW CHANNEL

Musician and composer André Lourenço (Lisbon, Portugal, 1988) developed a concert entitled wormeaters, a piece for instruments and pre-recorded sounds grounded on a story by the composer.

LOMÉ, TOGO DAVIDE-CHRISTELLE SANVEE

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/davide-christelle-sanvee

EVERYTHING AROUND, INCLUDING YOU

172

STUDIO FOR IMMEDIATE SPACES

Davide-Christelle Sanvee (Lomé, Togo, 1993) is a performance artist who focuses on spaces and staging. With the desire to question individuals and their roles in public space, she proposes a performance that encompasses the entire street. How do we perceive each other? How do we generate social interaction? By using social codes and existing architectures, her work Everything around, including you integrates itself in the daily routine of the Van Ostadestraat, and questions it.

9 BELLY BUTTONS & 18 CHEEKS EDITORIAL BY HERMAN HJORTH BERGE

Carspotting At A Graduation Show GRADUATES MENTIONED: FABIAN REICHLE TOM BURKE ELIZAVETA STRAKHOVA ANTOINE GUAY DAVIDE-CHRISTELLE SANVEE

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CARSPOTTING AT A GRADUATION SHOW A black Renault Clio II drives into frame and stops with a screech of tyres as the front wheels lock. The driver steps out of the vehicle, attaches a cargo strap to the tow hook and starts pulling the vehicle with pure muscular power. The video is entitled Man Pulling Tugboat, but suggests a different relationship between the macho man and the machine: one in which they are working together or against each other with excellent choreography. Radical Cut-Up graduate Fabian Reichle is reversing the car – dragging it back to where it came from in a painful, slow and tedious process compared with its gracious entry into frame. As an automotive enthusiast, I look for cars in the works of this year’s graduates and hope to find parallels with a motor show. The Nissan Navara floats effortlessly across a dirt road on a salt flat, leaving a cloud of dust in its wake. In a droughtstricken Chilean village, the utilitarian vehicle serves its purpose transporting what is left of the harvested wheat. In Tom Burke’s From Here We Go Extreme, we hear the account of a boy living on a local farm: “... every five days we buy water for us. For drinking, for showering, for the animals. And sometimes if we don’t have money we don’t buy bread because water is more essential.” In one scene a group of elderly men from the Penablanca community are giving their first-hand accounts of the devastating impacts of climate change. The man speaking has an almost melodic voice, somewhere between crying and singing. The film ends with a powerful dance performance from a young girl and what looks like her dad, featuring rapid cuts scored with ominous electronic music. Burke uses the wisdom of the people with the closest relationship to the land, rather than scientific facts and statistics, to provide an informative and incredibly emotional climate-change video. The salt flats in Chile are used for lithium extraction, a process that pollutes potential drinking water. Demand for lithium

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HERMAN HJORTH BERGE is increasing due to its application in electric cars – part of the current green revolution, aimed largely at continuing business as usual. We are used to seeing cars in music videos, a format used almost exclusively to sell products. Tom Burke blurs the line between documentary and music video, and uses the format as a tool for education and information about an urgent topic. Van Ostadestraat in east Amsterdam is filled with parked cars, but offers some public amenities. Occupying one of the street’s parking spaces is an oversized back-garden kiddie pool with light structure suggesting some sort of functional ritual. The thin wooden frame holds an opaque plastic sheet resting on a bed of straw and grass, offering benches, a foot bath – and a degree of privacy from passers-by. In this communal foot bath you encounter people in a new setting in public space. A girl from the neighbourhood joins in and a bulky personal trainer peeks his head over the partition wall, wondering what’s going on, and says, “Whatever it is, it’s cool”. Elizaveta Strakhova’s Heterogeneous Waters shows us new possibilities for the occupation of communal space and shared public functions – if the city is willing to sacrifice a few parking spots. Farther down the same street, a builder’s skip has been converted into a wood-burning oven where Antoine Guay is baking bread that he serves to local residents and grad show visitors. Guay’s work cleverly exploits the liberal regulations afforded to the construction industry – a skip is allowed to stay in the same place for six weeks without any form of licence or permit – and shows how public space can also facilitate production. Strakhova and Guay both offer citizen-driven solutions to pressing urban issues. When your workplace is your parking lot the commute is obsolete. And when every parking space is a potential bakery,

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CARSPOTTING AT A GRADUATION SHOW the relationship between living and working in a city is altered drastically. Guay’s work effectively cuts out the middleman, but remains mobile – delivery and pickup are included in the cost of renting the skip. Davide-Christelle Sanvee’s Everything Around, Including You also deals with transport, through a one-to-one performance in a parked car on the same street. It is hard to tell if the vehicle is a specific choice for the (SIS) graduate or if dealing with any urban context means including the omnipresent car. Either way, these works show what is possible in spaces currently occupied by parked cars. They give value to the parking lot and make the argument for the urban car a lot weaker. More immediate than questions of transport, the street itself is very important. SIS chose a street with genuine diversity: at one end it has a launderette, at the other a natural wine bar. A street with a strong history of squatted spaces, activist headquarters and an anarchist print workshop, community centres and a homeless shelter. Here, graduates’ works interact with the street’s usual population, standing out and blending in to various degrees – and changing its programming through simple interventions. Plastic garden chairs offer stages for assembly, and add public seating next to existing fixed benches and Aldo van Eyck playground elements. When walking down the street, a performer might approach you pretending to be a member of the public. The result is a heightened focus upon everything happening in the urban context, a paranoia making you both question and appreciate what goes on in a city street. A graduation show is often very much like a motor show: a place where manufacturers exhibit a concept as a proposal of their products to come – often depending on the success of the exhibition and the reaction from the visiting crowd. Its

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HERMAN HJORTH BERGE own commodification is of course inherent in any presentation of a work, but this SIS presentation explicitly manages to break the typical grad-show dynamic. While seeing promising futures for the participating graduates as spatial designers, we also see in it a promising future for the city where public space offers generous affordances to its users. Despite this yearâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s show (annoyingly) being anything but a motor show, in it the role of the car is directly or inadvertently questioned in a constructive way by the graduates. They are not afraid to take on global issues, either, sometimes even skipping the steps of outlining, critiquing and proposing and going straight to a viable solution. One similarity to automotive expos remains, though: they both present exciting but grounded visions of what is to come.

Herman Hjorth Berge is a student currently based in Amsterdam, but rooted in his native Stavanger, Norway. Studying Architectural Design at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, his evolving practice focuses upon providing alternatives to current states and uses of space, grounded in social and environmental ideals.

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LONDON, UK ELISA GRASSO

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/elisa-grasso

SEVEN YEAR OLD SELF

181

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In her films, Elisa Grasso (London, England, 1988) explores intuition as a creative process. Through analogue and digital image techniques her visuals observe the human subconscious, empathy and memory as a form of artistic therapy. The work Seven Year Old Self is a fantastical self-investigation into the present effects of childhood memory and emotion. Grasso used a conversation she had with her therapist as a starting point. Her therapist asked her to visualize her child self sitting next to her, sad and crying. She told Grasso to treat herself the way she would treat her child self.

LONDON, UK BARNABY MONK

TOOLS FOR A POSTCAPITALIST TRANSITION

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/barnaby-monk

182

RADICAL CUT-UP

Barnaby Monk (Herbert Luciole) (London, United Kingdom, 1977) has a multidisciplinary practice, focusing on social and political projects. Monkâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work seeks to disrupt established political devices and ideologies. His work Tools for a Postcapitalist Transition explores, iterates and evolves a variety of different tools that seek to facilitate and drive a Postcapitalist transition.

MADISON, WISCONSIN, USA RYAN EYKHOLT

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/ryan-eykholt

PHONINESS

185

MASTER DESIGN OF EXPERIENCES

Ryan Eykholt (Madison, Wisconsin, USA, 1995) is training to be a professional snowflake. Playing with writing and performance, they practice vulnerability in all the wrong places and stretch logical systems into incoherence. Phoniness is an emerging method for projecting private discomfort and queer ambivalence onto public institutions, reshaping systems in a more pluralistic way. Connecting the dots between the 2020 U.S. Census and automatic grammar checkers, the project involves graphic and choreographic experiments in disrupting binaries.

MADRID, SPAIN JAVIER RODRIGUEZ

HORS JEU

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/javier-rodriguez

186

RADICAL CUT-UP

Javier Rodriguez Fernandez (Madrid, Spain, 1991) and Lou Buche (Clermont Ferrand, France, 1991) are both graphic designers and artists. After they met in 2017 they decided to form Robuche, a character born from the fusion between their two forces. Robucheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work is trademarked by their wit, honesty and playfulness. The installation Hors jeu is a reenactment of the architecture of Robucheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s idea of a playroom: a space fusing recreational activity and work. The space represents a combination of iconic objects and references that reveal a palpable link between analog and digital media and open new perspectives to the viewer.

MEXICO CITY, MEXICO SHADOW CHANNEL JUAN ARTURO GARCÍA GONZÁLEZ https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/juan-arturo-garcia-gonzalez

THE INNER LIFE OF EXTERIOR PLANTS

189

Juan Arturo García González (Mexico City, Mexico, 1988) is a designer who explores accented ways of living, their biopolitical affordances, and tactics for their representation. His ongoing investigation delves into the correlations between the political, territorial and linguistic implications of cosmopolitanism. In his docu-fiction film The Inner Life of Exterior Plants a panel of botanic experts is challenged to discuss contemporary trends in gardening, scientific classification, and mono-cultural crops by an astute interviewer. The hidden politics of the experts’ positions are uncomfortably exposed and confronted with reality, as they render themselves suspicious of their own language.

SANDBERG INSTITUUT GRADUATION INDEX A–Z

THE PLACE OF BIRTH ADELAIDE TO ZüRICH

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9 BELLY BUTTONS & 18 CHEEKS EDITORIAL BY JULES VAN DEN LANGENBERG

I Find A Little Giggle-Gas Before I Begin Gives Me Immense Pleasure GRADUATES MENTIONED: AGUSTINA WOODGATE SASCHA KRISCHOCK MIQUEL HERVÁS GÓMEZ ROWENA BUUR HOLLY CHILDS GEDIMINAS ŽYGUS JUAN ARTURO GARCÍA GONZÁLEZ

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I FIND A LITTLE GIGGLE-GAS BEFORE I BEGIN GIVES ME IMMENSE PLEASURE We are now in the office of Orin Scrivello, D. D. S. Seymour nervously enters stage L holding a paper bag which reads “Mushnik’s Skid Row Florists”. ORIN (emerging through “door” UC)

Next!

SEYMOUR I guess that’s me, Dr Scrivello.

ORIN Do you have an appointment?

SEYMOUR We met yesterday. Seymour Krelborn.

Eden was no forest growing wild. It was a garden that mankind was to tend – “to dress and keep” – which presupposes an ordered disposition of plants in beds and terraces. Among the rows of trees and beds of flowers there must have been places to walk, to sit and to talk. A hoe, rake or spade might have been there as well, in order to maintain the garden. If the fruit of the trees was made into anything like wine, this would also suggest the presence of jars and cups; and these in turn stores and sideboards, and so on to rooms, ladders and all that. A house, in fact. And yet historic documentation, so specific about the onyx found near Paradise, says nothing about this implied house.

ORIN Oh, of course. The guy with the plant. SEYMOUR

Right.

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JULES VAN DEN LANGENBERG ORIN

And the Band-Aids. SEYMOUR

Right.

(Seymour timidly pulls a gun from the paper bag and levels it)

And the gun.

ORIN

R ... right.

SEYMOUR

The shadow or outline of an inferred house has dogged many builders and architects just as much as the enigmatically described plan of the Garden of Eden, with its four rivers, has inspired so many decorators, weavers and makers of carpets, as well as gardeners. All of these folks have spun their fantasies around the framework of the lost plan, since every paradise must – as Proust observed – necessarily be a lost one. In the ongoing search for the infrastructure of Paradise, a plastic poison ivy plant reoccurs in the venues of the graduation exhibitions and events of the Sandberg Instituut, which are scattered over multiple locations in the city of Amsterdam. Whenever one finds a bush of this artificial vegetation, it leads to a walled garden: a closed digital ecosystem like the one developed by artists Agustina Woodgate, Sascha Krischock and Miquel Hervás Gómez. Their VPN (Virtual PUB Network) is both a connectivity display and an emancipatory file server; an open-source structural instrument where guests at the exhibitions are able to share information and resources, hosting the circulation of knowledge as a methodology within its radius of action. VPN reveals the physical process of a com-

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I FIND A LITTLE GIGGLE-GAS BEFORE I BEGIN GIVES ME IMMENSE PLEASURE munication system by creating an interface that allows visitors to engage at each stage of this process. Where Adam and Eve were forbidden to eat from the tree of wisdom (also referred to as the tree of immortality), and in essence were the only users of their world, Woodgate, Krischock and Gómez simply use a tagline and plastic poison ivy to attract exhibition visitors to make use of their VPN, tempting them into a site-specific community where data is a common good to be shared, only accessible on the exact spot of their installed works. ORIN So why are you pointing a gun at me, Seymour? I ... I ...

SEYMOUR

ORIN (crossing L. toward Seymour; sweetly taking charge) Hey. Are you a little bit nervous about seeing a dentist? SEYMOUR No ... no, I’m not nervous, I ... ORIN (easily taking the gun away from Seymour, depositing it on the tray and grabbing him around the shoulder at the same time) It’s gonna hurt a little. SEYMOUR No, you don’t understand. I don’t want my teeth examined, I ...

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JULES VAN DEN LANGENBERG ORIN Of course you want your teeth examined. (Twisting Seymour’s arm painfully behind his back) Say “Ah”! No!

SEYMOUR

ORIN (twisting harder) SAY “AH’! SEYMOUR (in pain) AAAAHHH!

Adam and Eve, according to the creation myth of the Abrahamic religions, were the first man and woman. They are central to the belief that humanity is in essence a single family, with everyone descended from a single pair of original ancestors. They also provide the basis for the doctrines of the fall of man and original sin that are important beliefs in Christianity, although not held in Judaism or Islam. In the best-known Abrahamic version, God fashions Adam from dust and places him in the Garden of Eden. Eve is created from one of Adam’s ribs to be his companion. Up until that moment, the garden was like a one-person “Männergärten” or “Herrengarten”. That is a kind of temporary day-care and activities space visited by men in German-speaking countries while their wives and girlfriends go shopping. The name is a compound literally meaning “men’s garden”, formed by analogy to kindergarten, and has also been used for genderspecific sections of lunatic asylums, monasteries and clinics.

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I FIND A LITTLE GIGGLE-GAS BEFORE I BEGIN GIVES ME IMMENSE PLEASURE The first “Männergarten” in Germany opened in Hamburg in 2003. Each Saturday at the Bleichenhof shopping centre, for a flat fee men were entitled to two beers, a snack and access to male-oriented amusements: a model railway, handicrafts, men’s magazines and sports on TV. “Männerparkplätze” or “Männergärten” seek to meet a special need for gender-specific marketing. Taking an approach reminiscent of these “gärten”, artist Rowena Buur tackles two important men in their life by involving their father and brother in their graduation works for the final exhibition of the Sandberg Instituut’s Design Department. One of the men is portrayed extensively in a documentary film projected on a large surface, with plastic garden chairs for viewers to sit and watch the work. The other is present by means of a brick wall placed opposite the film projection, dividing the exhibition space but at the same time also creating a more intimate setting, as if the visitor is placed in the outdoor environment of a trailer park. Eight years ago Buur broke contact with their father, who was struggling with alcohol addiction and only recently found a stable home at the trailer park. The work is an intimate family portrait told through Buur’s eyes and revolves around the question of whether it’s possible to leave the past behind and create new memories together. ORIN (wrenching Seymour down into a “tango-dip” position and looking into his mouth) Oooh, your mouth is a mess, kid. You’ve got cavities. You’ve got plaque. You’re impacted. You’re abscessed! I am?

SEYMOUR

196

JULES VAN DEN LANGENBERG ORIN You need a complete oral examination. We’ll start with that wisdom tooth! NO!

SEYMOUR

ORIN (flips Seymour up out of the “dip” and spins him into the chair, where he will remain through the rest of the scene) We’ll just rip the little nugget outa there. Whatdya say? I gotta go!

SEYMOUR

ORIN There’s always time for dental hygiene, Seymour! Have you ever seen the results of a neglected mouth? (From behind the chair, he pulls out a large picture of a nauseatingly neglected mouth: diseased gums, rotten teeth) Look, Seymour! This could happen to you. It could?

SEYMOUR

ORIN Unless I take immediate action! Let’s get started!

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I FIND A LITTLE GIGGLE-GAS BEFORE I BEGIN GIVES ME IMMENSE PLEASURE Providing visitors to the graduation exhibition with a new metamyth are artists Holly Childs and Gediminas Žygus, who developed Hydrangea I and II in which they position flowers as a story and as forests containing never-ending branching tales. The work is set in one of the botanical gardens of Amsterdam, where performers wear petal-shaped headpieces and stand around the audience, who in turn are sitting in the midst of tropical plants, listening to a soundscape. Childs and Žygus aim to put to use each organism that influences the entire structure in a mythical storyline. Unlike the Biblical account, the Quran does not speak of a lush garden, but mentions only one tree in Eden – the tree of immortality – and adds some exegesis in form of an account about Satan disguised as a serpent. There are several mentions of “the Garden” in the Quran, although without the word “adn” – Eden – and this is commonly situated in the fourth layer of the Islamic heaven; it is not necessarily thought of as the dwelling place of Adam.

(Orin drops the pictures and crosses US of Seymour to stage R side of chair)

SEYMOUR Wait! Aren’t you gonna give me Novocain? ORIN What for? Dulls the senses! SEYMOUR But it’ll hurt! ORIN Only ’til you pass out! (Orin picks up the drill. It makes a threatening buzz)

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JULES VAN DEN LANGENBERG We see men harvesting and packing bananas, interspersed by recordings of botanical gardens and an animated male figurehead. Unveiling the biopolitics of Earth, in The Inner Life of Exterior Plants, a film by graduate Juan Arturo García González set on a banana plantation and in a botanical garden, a panel of experts is challenged by an astute interviewer to discuss contemporary trends in gardening, scientific classification and monocultural crops. The film is beamed onto a wall in a wide horizontal view and so provides a broad window onto our world as a production landscape for food, thus exposing our relationship with inanimate life forms such as plants. The work reminds us of the blood-sucking plant Audrey II from the black comedy film and musical The Little Shop of Horrors, in which plant shop employee Seymour is dragged into a problematic relationship when taking care of an alien plant. After he feeds it a drop of blood from his finger, Audrey II starts growing uncontrollably – as does its lust for blood – until we end up in a world dominated by flesh-eating vegetation. What’s that?

SEYMOUR

ORIN That’s the drill, Seymour! It’s rusty!

SEYMOUR

ORIN (Fondly) It’s an antique. (With sincere respect and admiration) They don’t make instruments like this any more. Sturdy, heavy, dull.

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I FIND A LITTLE GIGGLE-GAS BEFORE I BEGIN GIVES ME IMMENSE PLEASURE (Beat, getting excited) This is gonna be a challenge. This is gonna be a pleasure. I’m gonna want some gas for this one! (Starts up C) Gas?

SEYMOUR

ORIN Nitrous oxide.

Bibliography Griffith, Charles B., The Little Shop of Horrors, musical script, 1960. Rykwert, Joseph, On Adam’s House in Paradise: The Idea of the Primitive Hut in Architectural History (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1972).

SEYMOUR Thank God. I thought you weren’t going to use any ... ORIN (Stops at opening in screens and turns back to Seymour; sweetly) Oh the gas isn’t for you, Seymour. It’s for me. (Getting excited again) I want to really enjoy this and I find that a little giggle gas before we begin increases my pleasure enormously. In fact ... (A great idea dawns on him) I’m gonna use my special gas mask! Just relax, Seymour. I’ll be with you in a moment.

Jules van den Langenberg is an independent curator, exhibition-maker and writer based in Amsterdam. His projects derive from ongoing dialogues with artists, architects, designers, cultural institutes and educational programmes. Key to his practice is redefining notions of representation, scripted spaces and talent with a focus on – but not limited to – the cultural field. Van den Langenberg collaborates with the Sandberg Instituut, Creative Industries Fund, Van Abbemuseum, Studio Makkink & Bey, Studio Edelkoort, Het Nieuwe Instituut, Thomas Eyck, Simon Becks, Wouter Paijmans, Saskia Noor van Imhoff & Arnout Meijer and Brecht Duijf & Lenneke Langenhuijsen.

200

SANDBERG INSTITUUT GRADUATION INDEX A–Z

THE PLACE OF BIRTH ADELAIDE TO ZüRICH

201

MISKOLC, HUNGARY ZSOFIA KOLLAR

KILLING YOU SOFTLY

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/zsofia-kollar

202

RADICAL CUT-UP

Starting from her fascination with materials Zsofia Kollar (Miskolc, Hungary, 1991) developed unique ways of treating them. Through experimentation, she seeks their hidden qualities and forms new narratives by presenting them in different and unexpected configurations. For Kollar, the design discipline is not fixed, but in flux. She questions the human mind by playing with the tension between art and design and between fiction and reality. Killing you softly is a reflection on consumer culture, which while comforting our needs, simultaneously destroys us. The work addresses the objects we own and surround ourselves with and asks to what extent they represent our identities.

MONTRĂ&#x2030;AL, CANADA JASON HARVEY

MIND CRISIS

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/jason-harvey

205

DIRTY ART DEPARTMENT

Jason Harvey (MontrĂŠal, Canada, 1987) is interested in proposing new variations of the world, investigating the limits of stupidity and exploring the natural entropy of our modern atomized inescapable macro system of capital. His focus lies at the invisible monetary, erotic and scatological matrix that ties our lives together, connects us all and forms the root of every valuable idea. His installation, consisting of billboard Mind Crisis, video and flags Proposed Flags for Assorted Potential Micro-States and video Reclaimed Offshore Drilling Platform Lifestyle Facility, attempts to draw a map of delicate boring moments, modern lifestyle solutions and new micro-countries for everyone. Harvey examines the financial, political, technological, geopolitical and scatological systems, which govern both the small and big moments in our lives in order to create a sense of some sort of human connection together.

MOSCOW, RUSSIA ANNA PETROVA

THE TALES OF DIS-BELONGING

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/anna-petrova

206

SHADOW CHANNEL

Anna Petrova (Moscow, Russia, 1994) works in the field of Virtual and Augmented realities. She focuses on the topic of cultural adjustment, integration, and searching for the identification of ‘home’ through moving image and organic materials. The film installation THE TALES OF DIS-BELONGING concerns integration and adjusting in relation to the question what can be called home.

MOSCOW, RUSSIA KARINA ZAVIDOVA

UNTITLED

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/karina-zavidova

209

DESIGN

As a non-European creative living in the Netherlands, Karina Zavidova (Moscow, Russia, 1991) examines the systems of value to which non-European practitioners ought to comply. Looking past her own struggles as a single case, at the system and its ramifications, the book Untitled critiques the rhetoric of ‘terms and conditions’, which are designed to be impenetrable. The book chronicles an active relation with the ‘terms and conditions’, in opposition to the framing of migrants as passive ‘victims of policies’, which offers locals a position of ‘compassionate bystanders’, but does not enable alliances.

NEXT TO THE RIVER WALTER GÖTSCH

THE SETTLEMENT

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/walter-goetsch

210

DIRTY ART DEPARTMENT

Coming deep from the Taiga, Walter Götsch (Next to the river, beneath the mountain, 1990) creates textile-related tools and artifacts to survive and make sense, or further confuse the meanings of domesticated life. They are the essentials of a journey of discovery beyond the bourgeois lethargy of the daily settlement – a travel through objects, dresses and rituals. The Settlement consists of a number of artifacts that could be best described as future relics. They are anthropological objects meant to show future generations how human beings today organize their life and ensure their own future.

NORFOLK, VIRGINIA, USA MARIAH BLUE

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/mariah-blue

CALLING ALL HOMO SAPIENS SAPIENS

213

FINE ARTS

Within her multidisciplinary practice Mariah Blue (Norfolk, Virginia, USA, 1977) investigates themes surrounding technology that range from stone age pottery techniques to machine learning algorithms. For her project CALLING ALL HOMO SAPIENS SAPIENS, Blue developed Sleepeels, a youtube personality as well as a collaborative sound performance workshop with Tina Reden, titled Sonic Meditation and Vibrational Bodies.

OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA, USA WES MAPES

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/wes-mapes

NEO KEMETIC ASSEMBLAGE II (NKAII) 214

RADICAL CUT-UP

Wes Mapes (Oakland, California, USA, 1982) creates mixed media artworks, paintings, sculptures and installations. His work draws inspiration from a vast pool of influences ranging from post-colonial theory, ‘alternative’ history, mathematics, modern architecture to PanAfrican identity. Neo Kemetic Assemblage II (NKAII) is a hoodtronic amalgamation of different media rooted in a shared, timeless narrative. The vernacular of this hyper trill work introduces past, present and future through ritual and relic: ‘Illustrated slang, Soul On Ice, an homage to The Town, our people, our beauty, our strength. Our language unadulterated-visually.’

OXFORDSHIRE, UK ADAM BLETCHLY

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/adam-bletchly

WHOLE EARTH TRILOGY

217

RADICAL CUT-UP

In his work, Adam Bletchly (Oxfordshire, England, 1988) explores possibilities of image reproduction through techniques based in print and textiles. His Whole Earth Trilogy acts as a response to the dry discourse of the modern scientific publication and explores subjects as nuclear power, cities and genetically engineered crops. While robust theory and data can prove hard facts, a visually iconographic creation enables a more broadly digestible form of an idea to pass through time and eventually embeds itself within the public sphere. Utilizing existing canonical, scientific imagery, this work aims to de-objectivize the process behind such ideas.

PARIS, FRANCE JULIE PUSZTAI

EQUANIMOUS PERENNATION

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/julie-pusztai

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FINE ARTS

Mainly through sculptural gestures that arise from her writing, Julie Pusztai (Paris, France, 1991) questions emotional contingency ant its inherent after-effects. The work Equanimous Perennation consists of an audio installation as well as the composure of floral leaves as reflectors of the perpetual balancing of being on a knife-edge.

PARIS, FRANCE LUCIE DE BRÉCHARD

SLUMMING AT THE RODEO GARDENS

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/lucie-de-brechard

221

DESIGN

In her multimedia installations, Lucie de Bréchard (Paris, France, 1995) bridges the dichotomy between the personal and the political, proposing new critical approaches within the design field. Her installation Slumming at the Rodeo Gardens intermingles theory and practice to propose a resistance that embraces the personal, the mystical, the not-knowing, and the crooked. The work aims to dissolve boundaries between political engagement and sensible encounters. Singing in a polyphony of aesthetic experiences, Slumming at the Rodeo Gardens argues for processes of self-recovery and a collective liberation. The work is an urge to find joy in the process of becoming – in nursing, care, self-work, and healing – literally, being made whole again.

PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA, USA ANTHONY SMYRSKI https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/anthony-smyrski

GOOD FOR ONE FARE

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RADICAL CUT-UP

By traveling constantly Anthony Smyrski (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA, 1980) studies culture, urban environments, and global patterns of human interaction. He weaves findings and insights from his travels throughout his work. Good for One Fare consists of ten replicas of the SEPTA Token, the discontinued fare instrument for the city of Philadelphia’s public transit system. The work is a talismanic entry into a city’s story of memory, loss, hate, affection and redemption.

PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA, USA ALEXANDER CROMER https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/alexander-cromer

ICE DON’T DROWN.

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MASTER DESIGN OF EXPERIENCES

Alexander Cromer (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, 1984) is a storyteller, poet, researcher, and designer. Narrated by different versions of Alexander Cromer, from different times in his life, Ice Don’t Drown. explores post-colonial, chattel slavery, and maritime themes through spoken word, film, music, and sculpture. The video essay features interviews from Vera Carasso, Director of Scheepvaartmuseum, Urwin Vyent, Director of Het Nationaal Instituut Nederlands slavernijverleden, and Dr. Jerzy Gawronski, Chief Municipal Archeologist of Amsterdam.

PORDENONE, ITALY FRANCESCA LUCCHITTA

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/francesca-lucchita

CHEI DEL FOUC

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STUDIO FOR IMMEDIATE SPACES

By exploring the intersection between architecture, nature and anthropology, Francesca Lucchitta (Pordenone, Italy, 1993) tries to understand how historical changes bring about a different perception, use and memory of natural areas. Chei del Fouc is a fictional community suspended between experience, desire and imagination. They are living in the mountains of the Alps and are the result of moments of contact with different communities and ways of relating to a mountain environment. They existed in the past, are existing in the present and will probably exist in the future. They represent a parallel way of living in relation to that of the people living in the city, far away from nature.

ROSMALEN, THE NETHERLANDS LUCIE FORTUIN

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/lucie-fortuin

TEXTURES

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CRITICAL STUDIES

In her work, Lucie Fortuin (Rosmalen, The Netherlands, 1990) questions the normative structure of knowledge production, arguing for intuition and imagination as the basis of critical thinking. Textures is a performative reading of a prose poem taking place in the fictive city Asude. It investigates the psychosomatic effects of a future trauma on people, cats, and their surroundings. Those roaming the city seek to find their way between resurfacing memories and a looming present, between fragile desires and the dripping water that quietly traces their steps.

SAARBRÜCKEN, GERMANY KANI MAROUF

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/kani-marouf

ALL I SEE IS YOU

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SHADOW CHANNEL

Kani Marouf (Saarbrücken, Germany, 1991) is a filmmaker. In her first feature-length film, she is exposing moments of glorification by embedding them back into the reality they came from. The release of the subject’s imprisonment, rooted in the punctuality of a still, guides her filmmaking and research. All I see is you is a film set in Kurdistan. It finalizes a two-year long research about numbness in an overtaking image presentness. The film stages various moments of a subject’s glorification as acts of intervention. Creating cinematic scenes unravels an examination of cinema’s impact on the subjects it wishes to narrate.

SAINT-BRIEUC, FRANCE SARA DANIEL

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/sara-daniel

THE SHOW MUST GO ON, EVERYTHING MUST GO 233

DIRTY ART DEPARTMENT

Originally trained as a product designer, Sara Daniel (Saint-Brieuc, France, 1992) has developed an interdisciplinary practice dedicated to rethinking the possibilities of social and political engagement. In her work, she combines forms associated with activism such as sit-ins and protests with the making of context-based scenarios, complete with props, music, costumes and performances. For her work The show must go on, everything must go, Daniel utilizes the spectacle for her own means: self-written songs of protest performed live for the neighborhood. She thus reclaims entertainment as a potential site of social interaction and political engagement.

SCHWEDT/ODER, GERMANY SASCHA KRISCHOCK

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/sascha-krischock

VPN (VIRTUAL PUB NETWORK)

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DESIGN

Being a graphic designer, Sascha Krischock (Schwedt/Oder, Germany, 1987) responds to political and aesthetic shifts of everyday life through technology. To make kin with our networked surroundings he probes the subversive chances of computational defects as acts of connectivity The work VPN (Virtual PUB Network) is an eight-node Virtual Private Network installed throughout the exhibition venues during Sandberg Instituut’s graduation event. Visitors are able to access this alternative internet by connecting their devices via Wi-Fi at each location. Resisting the platformization of the educational institute, the work explores autonomous infrastructures as zoned of trust and situated knowledge. In collaboration with Miquel Hervás Gómez and Agustina Woodgate.

SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA YOUNWON SOHN

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/younwon-sohn

INVITATION

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FINE ARTS

Younwon Sohn (Seoul, South Korea, 1990) makes sculptures that friendly and generously receive and entertain guests, visitors or strangers. Most of her works are site-specific installations for which domestic architecture is used to reflect upon daily practices like cleaning, digesting and sharing. For her Invitation, Younwon Sohn used the floor as a starting point. â&#x20AC;&#x153;The floor is not only the surface of the earth, or a technical architectural response to make that surface more useful, it has been used for cultural matters as well. Floors could fall away or out from underneath, but they are usually there.â&#x20AC;? Within Invitation the floor becomes a foldout table that extends the surface into a place for sharing.

SANDBERG INSTITUUT GRADUATION INDEX A–Z

THE PLACE OF BIRTH ADELAIDE TO ZüRICH

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9 BELLY BUTTONS & 18 CHEEKS EDITORIAL BY THOMAS VAN HUUT

Living Life On A Thin Film, Laid Down On A Vast Planet GRADUATES MENTIONED: YOUNWON SOHN ROWENA BUUR ELIZAVETA STRAKHOVA DAVIDE-CHRISTELLE SANVEE

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LIVING LIFE ON A THIN FILM, LAID DOWN ON A VAST PLANET

Unfortunately, it did not rain. During a holiday in Italy this June, my girlfriend and I were able to try out our new tent for the first time. It is a spacious one, with several compartments. You can stand upright in it. But no matter how good the tent was, I was still dreaming of heavy rain shower. The best way to experience the greatness of a home is when the conditions outside are a little less pleasant. That the tent really became our home was also evident from our language. When we decided to head back from day trips, we did not speak about “going back to the campsite”, we spoke about “going home”. The thoughtless language gave away the sense of belonging we felt. The beauty of camping is that it makes you realize that all the places you can call a “home” ultimately consist of a collection of physical objects. While setting up and breaking down our tent – when the steel tent pegs, fibreglass poles and polyester fabric passed through our hands – it became clear that the sense of belonging we normally only feel at home could actually be created by ourselves, on the go. What we felt might actually be the “Ikea effect”, the tendency to appreciate something more if you have constructed it yourself. The furniture multinational it is named after makes billions out of this sentiment, by giving you the illusion that you have made your Billy yourself. The idea that constructing something is a way of acquiring a sense of belonging is a strong one. Everywhere we broke down our tent, we left yellow stains in the grass. A subtle reminder that staying somewhere always leaves a lasting trace.

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THOMAS VAN HUUT FLOOR Someone who did have the luck of a little rain is artist Younwon Sohn (born 1990 in South Korea). In the soft spring sun, the puddles of water glittered beautifully on the large vinyl mat that is her graduation artwork, Floor. The flat sculpture consists of nothing more than a factory-made floor, which for the largest part is laid outside on the grass, with only a small corner inside The Glass House in Amsterdam’s Amstelpark, the location at which a group of graduates of the Department of Fine Arts of the Sandberg Instituut held its graduation show this year. The vinyl with parquet print is the kind of floor you find in houses all over the world: affordable and easy to maintain. By laying this floor – something we generally experience as a stable base – as a thin film on the green grass, with only a small part in the “safe” inner space, her work acquires existential meaning: Sohn presents the floor as a thin skin on which we live, in all its simplicity a striking reminder of the vulnerability of the place we occupy. It is as if she is saying: we live our lives on a thin film, laid down on a vast planet. When Floor was taken away at the end of the graduation show, it probably left the same yellow patch in the grass as our tent did. The fragility of the place we occupy on earth is further emphasized in Sohn’s sculpture Pixel as a Table. This work consists of a traditional hand-made table, a second-hand object that the artist ordered online. She took the table apart and laid the individual pieces on the floor, in the shape of a square or a pixel. A little nod to the former existence of the hand-made table as a “flat” virtual object on the web page of an online marketplace. In conversation about this work, Sohn told me that during her time in Amsterdam she used to sit at a table like this when she

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LIVING LIFE ON A THIN FILM, LAID DOWN ON A VAST PLANET had contact with her friends in Seoul via Skype. During these video chat sessions, she actually felt that she was with her friends. This raised a question for her: what will remain of my time in Amsterdam? Something merely virtual? Something just as virtual as a table in an online marketplace? By presenting the table as a pixel, Sohn has started to zoom out on the places we occupy on earth. Seen from the moon, Multatuli wrote, we are all the same size. As large as a pixel, we can add to that in the age of satellite photographs and Google Maps. WALLS To divide the space where non-binary feminist artist Rowena Buur presented their two video works, the artist asked their brother, a professional bricklayer, to build a small brick wall. The true craftsmanship with which this is done is moving: in an era in which artists outdo each other in conceptuality, a skilfully made brick wall – the solid mortar keeping the bricks neatly in place – can suddenly speak straight to the heart. The story behind the wall makes it even more touching. Eight years ago, Buur broke contact with their father, who had no stable place to live and was struggling with alcohol addiction. Buur made an intimate film about this broken family bond: Zonder hoop heb ik geen dromen (Without hope I have no dreams), which is now part of this graduation exhibition by the Design Department. When Buur lost contact with their father, the relationship with their brother also became troubled. By now asking him to make a brick wall, and involving him in their graduation project, Buur has turned a wall – normally a piece of technology that divides people – into a means of connection.

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THOMAS VAN HUUT The perfectly intertwined bricks remind me of a line of poetry by Judith Herzberg, carved out in a stone that has been incorporated into a wall of the Theatre School on Jodenbreestraat in Amsterdam: “Als ik een mens was en geen steen / dan wenste ik jullie om mij heen.” (“If I were a person and not a stone / then I would want you around me.”) Buur has a great talent for turning things inside out, with great consequences. Their second graduation work, on the other side of the wall, is a video entitled When Did You Become a Heterosexual?. In this film, Buur politely confronts heterosexual people on the street with the normative questions that homosexual people regularly encounter: “When did you find out you were heterosexual?”, “How did your family react to this?” and, to a woman, “Maybe you haven’t found the right woman yet?”. The reaction of one of the interviewees is telling: “This is about being heterosexual, right?” He tries to correct the interviewer: the questions you are asking cannot be about me, you are probably mistaken. “I didn’t have to tell my parents,” he continues. “It was just normal”. With these interviews, Rowena Buur makes the sometimes elusive, but still all-pervasive, social structures as tangible as a brick wall. The artist turns these structures inside out, in the same way as they changed a brick wall from a means of dividing into a means of connecting. ROOF Sometimes the true meaning of something only becomes clear in its absence. That certainly is the case with the work Heterogeneous Waters by Elizaveta Strakhova (born 1993 in Russia), and in fact it goes for the entire presentation of the Studio for Immediate Spaces. In the public space of Van Ostadestraat in Amsterdam, all the graduates of this Sandberg

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LIVING LIFE ON A THIN FILM, LAID DOWN ON A VAST PLANET Department jointly presented a “time piece” over the course of three days. In the presentation, a festival-like exhibition with performances, sculptures, interventions and also more classical video works, boundaries between art and the regular life of the street were not always clear, leading to a striking number of questions and remarks by casual passers-by: “Why are you here?”, “What exactly can you do here?”, “Oh, you’re an artist!”. A successful way of reaching out to a new audience. Most interesting were some of the works that almost unnoticed became part of city life. Strakhova’s Heterogeneous Waters is one such piece, consisting of a large, publicly accessible foot bath placed on a parking space in Van Ostadestraat. The power of the work lies in its surprising self-evidence. As expressed by the young girl who, only after she had stepped out of the foot bath, started to wonder out loud, “But why is this actually here?” Only once her feet were slowly cooling down from the warm water in which she had bathed them did the questions begin to arise: this is nice, but what is it doing here? That is what a place you can call home and a successful work of art have in common: they consist of concrete objects that gain a different meaning in a new context. In some of the best cases, the new structure becomes so self-evident that you forget to question it. Davide-Christelle Sanvee (born 1993 in Togo) however, made a great work by doing exactly the opposite. She has a great strategy to make you question things you might normally take for granted. Everything Around, Including You (2019) is a series of performances that integrate themselves into the daily routine of Van Ostadestraat. To be honest, I am not absolutely

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THOMAS VAN HUUT sure whether I have seen Sanvee’s work at all. But I suspect I have: at one end of the street was a small memorial altar, standing against a tree – a little monument to a dead dog that was so beautiful that it attracted the attention. The flowers were so fresh, the card so well cared for, that I suspected this might in fact be a work of art. (That was later confirmed.) The elusiveness of this intervention, the “suspicion of art” it raised, causes you to look intently for other forms of human interaction in the public space. So just to be sure, I took a photo of a wooden bookcase on the street. This was probably not an intervention by a Sandberg graduate, but a public bookcase that the residents of Van Ostadestraat use to exchange books – an element of street life that can be found all around Amsterdam. By placing slightly strange elements in the street like that monument for a dead dog, Sanvee makes you aware of what was already there before any artist became involved. This is something else that tents and works of art have in common: only when you start to disassemble them, only when you start to dissect them element by element, is their meaning understood. But both homes and artworks are at their best when they also speak to you directly, giving you a sense of belonging that precedes all analysis.

Thomas van Huut is a freelance journalist and critic. He writes about art for daily newspaper NRC Handelsblad and has a monthly column on Brainwash.nl, an online philosophy magazine published by broadcaster Omroep Human and The School of Life. In 2018 he won de Basisprijs in the Essay category of the Prize for Young Art Criticism (Prijs voor de Jonge Kunstkritiek). He studied at the School of Journalism in Utrecht and holds an MA in Philosophy from the University of Amsterdam, awarded in 2016.

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SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA ALEX MURRAY

ULTRA-FACE

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/alex-murray

246

RADICAL CUT-UP

In his multidisciplinary work, Alex Murray (Sydney, Australia, 1987) investigates the crisis of history, techno-existentialism and intelligence. Ultra-Face is a programmed film screening in real-time. It takes off from a 2018 collaboration with GVN908. Through an algorithmic assemblage of live closed-circuit television streams, Ultra-Face poeticizes a visceral, high-frequency history; a decaying Rorschach of our present world.

SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA MAIKE STATZ

CAPILLARY MALFORMATION

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/maike-statz

249

STUDIO FOR IMMEDIATE SPACES

Working across the fields of interior architecture and art, Maike Statz (Sydney, Australia, 1992) draws parallels between interior design and feminist science fiction in order to examine the relationships between space, gender and identity. Capillary Malformation is a sitespecific audio walk that moves between different spaces and times, interweaving fiction and reality. Drawing on feminist science fiction books, architectural theory and lived experiences, the listener is faced with the gendered nature of domestic spaces.

TALLINN, ESTONIA MARIA MUUK

THE DINING TABLE

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/maria-muuk

250

CRITICAL STUDIES

Maria Muuk (Tallinn, Estonia, 1994) is a designer-writer-baker interested in questions around facilitation, communication, community and food. The Dining Table serves as a meeting point where people can eat together, digesting food and complex issues related to cultural change.

TERRASSA, SPAIN MIQUEL HERVÁS GÓMEZ

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/miquel-hervas-gomez

VPN (VIRTUAL PUB NETWORK)

253

DESIGN

Miquel Hervás Gómez’ (Terrassa, Spain, 1985) work VPN (Virtual PUB Network) is an eight-node Virtual Private Network installed throughout the exhibition venues during Sandberg Instituut’s graduation event. Visitors are able to access this alternative internet by connecting their devices via Wi-Fi at each location. Resisting the platformisation of the educational institute, the work explores autonomous infrastructures as zoned of trust and situated knowledge. In collaboration with Sascha Krischock and Agustina Woodgate.

THE PLACE OF BIRTH LÉO RAVY

WHO’S YOUR DADDY?

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/leo-ravy

254

DIRTY ART DEPARTMENT

From live interventions to editorial objects, Léo Ravy’s (The Place of Birth, 1992) work focuses on investigating collaborative models of production and their structural circumstances. who’s your daddy? is a site-specific publication produced through live collaboration with the public. In an exhibition setting, who’s your daddy? becomes a catalogue without method, embodied by an editor questioning the authority of their medium. The closer I get, the further I move away is a video document exploring the influence of institutions on a creative worker.

9 BELLY BUTTONS & 18 CHEEKS EDITORIAL BY SUMAYA KASSIM

The Colonial Contingencies: On The Work, Witches And White Goods GRADUATES MENTIONED: ROWENA BUUR TESSA MEEUS KARINA ZAVIDOVA ALEX WALKER LÃ&#x2030;O RAVY

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THE COLONIAL CONTINGENCIES: ON THE WORK, WITCHES AND WHITE GOODS Responsibility is put on those who are most vulnerable to find the answers. To provide design solutions to problems presented by the faceless power of bureaucratic processes and institutional procedure. To feel. The artist is valuable in their dependency upon those systems; some might say that there is an inverse relationship between powerlessness and the ability to speak. When one is positioned as powerless and dependent, one can speak loudly but not be heard. But perhaps, if one turns to relationality – love and compassion and togetherness – one might find ways to be there for each other in nonextractive ways; in ways not wholly dominated by the market, productivity, the logic of the nation state. So how do we co-exist in non-extractive ways? This question is especially pertinent in the context of art school, which demands that its artists exist in paradox: that they be simultaneously radical and challenging but also deeply subject to the rules of the market and especially that particular, curious subsection of it, the art market. Is the turn to inwardness, to intimacy, as radical as we hope it to be? Or is it part of the contingency plan, on which artists and art are recruited to metabolize radical sentiments and movements? In our current context, how do we refuse? The assertion of alternative knowledge – emotion and ritual and the body – as the centre ran like a red thread through a stark white day. In the secular Western context, art is where the radicalism goes both in theory and in practice. Colonialism always has a contingency plan, amorphous and moving and seemingly endless – artists are part of the plan, but they are trying to find ways out of it. I am ill when I visit the graduation exhibitions and events. I have the flu and I feel like I am falling to pieces, dispersing. My anxiety levels are high. I say the wrong things, I make mistakes. It makes me think about how unlikely it all is, “the

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SUMAYA KASSIM work”, be it art or the artistry of living together. The writer in me makes it a metaphor: I, an Othered body, floating through these white spaces, transient, made sick by the re-emergence and consolidation of conservative values and ethnonationalism and patriarchy and secularism. Art spaces indoctrinate you to think about relationships in terms of value, connections to be extractive. The following observations were inspired mainly by the works I saw at the Main Department Design, and also by the publication I left with. Here, each artist creates counterpoints to the rationalist, hegemonic states of being, exploring belonging and institutional apparatus, otherness and difference. The focus upon personal relationships (Rowena Buur) and those marginalized (Tessa Meeus) is very tender. Karina Zavidova’s work on her status as a non-EU student questions what makes a person valuable; as she wryly notes, “A certain level of naivety about how your school operates definitely helps your studies”. A treadmill acts as a towel rack embossed with the line “Getting fit for Dutch citizenship”. None of the work invites pity, but rather searching questions on the power of vulnerability and institutional complicity. It is usually those who are forced – by the fact of who they are – to live reckoning with self-deception who inspire change and transformation through heartwork, not through objective truths. Those who notice the rituals of citizenship, of normality. Turning to our bodies, to forms of knowledge that have previously been delegitimized by the anthropocentric, is the only way forward (Alex Walker). Walker considers how we (re)construct our relationships after the colonial encounter, as we endure it. His publications (re)centre emotion, exposing our interdependency and the non-linearity of time. Witches, astrology, tarot, love, ritual, the first-person voice – spells that could save us,

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THE COLONIAL CONTINGENCIES: ON THE WORK, WITCHES AND WHITE GOODS but must be written and engaged with slowly (the trickster in us knows better than to give form to what can be stolen and sold). He cites Silvia Federici’s work on witches, who exist in our imagination as figures who resist interpretation even as they are deployed in the name of feminist class struggle. Where does the future-making happen? In the gallery, or in the supermarket? Bijlmermeer offers another kind of counterpoint. There is a palpable change in the air when we arrive. There is “life” here. I am much more comfortable surrounded by migrants and the children of migrants in the vast brutalist modernist estate. This is also where Gloria Wekker comes from, author of White Innocence. We enter the gallery space, a former supermarket. It has been a site of some interest, some conflict. I talk to artist Léo Ravy, who is hoping to transform the space into a town hall of sorts. I ask if the supermarket-gallery is an imposition. He suggests that artists are in similarly precarious positions, and that that is easy to forget. But most people do not make the claims that artists do; they do not hang creative works in fridges. (Galleries are fridges because they are white and cold and they preserve things that are meant to perish.) To look at the future as unfixed is a privilege. Those who have been deemed irrelevant by virtue of race, gender, class, sexuality, health, recognize that the future is our past and that only the present contains radical potentiality – connection and change are slow and take time, relationships that must last decades with people and with places and with the land. If our definitions of freedom have so far been tied to the unfreedoms of others, then what can we do now? How do we operate within and through the systems we have been given?

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SUMAYA KASSIM Who gets to say what about whom? How do we create knowledges that is not about each other but with each other? What does it mean to create a nurturing environment for artists? How does this connect with creating a nurturing environment for those marginalized in society? The elderly, the racialized, the refugee, the migrant, the sick ... To make art is a boundaried way to do things: one need not reveal the self in conversation, be vulnerable where things could get awkward, but in intricate, funded projects of collaboration that are part of a market economy and therefore joyously legible. I think of all the people I see in cafés and bars leaning close and talking. Dutch culture is a lot like English culture, in that art is the place where people can express their emotion, and there is the night too ... When I get back to the guest house, a lecturer is at the kitchen table. Her PhD is on nightlife (I kid you not): its radical potentialities, its power and how those in power are steadily stealing the night from the young, the queer, the homeless, through legislation, gentrification. In that sense, is art a space where people place the human in us so that – outside it – larger structures can take over in narrative making? Is that not why art is valuable, a sign to the bourgeoisie that there is life outside their sequestered enclaves? The value is in the gesture, in the performance, in performativity? Even the first-person voice is now viewed as an industrial complex. Is that not why outsiders remain outside until they are inside and then define who is outside, and then and then and then ... But I do have hope. It is the kind of hope that tricks its way through, a fugitive feeling; it speaks in the first person and refuses to communicate clearly or edited down: a trickster who says, “We can change it all (if we change today)”. I know I am

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THE COLONIAL CONTINGENCIES: ON THE WORK, WITCHES AND WHITE GOODS in the middle of a movement because everyone was talking about Maggie Nelson and Johanna Hevda and decolonizing and radical intimacies. I have to admit, it scares me that everywhere I looked were Audre Lorde and Eartha Kitt and Edouard Glissant. By everywhere I mean the fridge. Throw the names into the washing machine. Both are white goods. “White wash”: radicalism thrown into the washing machine of institutionalstate apparatus coming out clean, in universal sizes, uniform, vanilla and magnolia-scented. By looking at our reality structurally, more people are contending with where our power begins and ends. Most are tired of performance. And there is a change in the air, a spark of rage that demands we dream bigger and do more, for each other and the world. Even as we stand in our complicities – our paperwork, health, racialization, gender, sexuality – we question, and I know that we are at the tipping point. I know it because the world ended some time ago. We are learning to connect again. And it is the artist who can sit with these paradoxes and refigure relationality and interconnectedness, to each other and our world, who can heal us. Because that is what we need right now, not the spectacle of scale or theory or singular genius, but the quiet tenderness of healing. The present, not the future, is the place of birth. Bibliography Federici, Silvia, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (New York: Autonomedia, 2017). Wekker, Gloria, White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).

Sumaya Kassim is a writer and independant researcher. She was a co-curator for the ‘The Past Is Now: Birmingham and Empire’ exhibition at Birmingham Mueum and Art Gallery and chronicled the process in the essay ‘The Museum Will Not Be Decolonised’ (Media Diversified, 2017). She was a 2019 fellow at Tropen Museum, Leiden. She is currently writing her first novel. @SFKassim

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TURKU, FINLAND SAMULI SAARINEN

SMALL STUDIES IN OPACITY

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/samuli-saarinen

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DESIGN

During his studies Samuli Saarinen (Turku, Finland, 1989) has been reading, thinking and writing about the possibility of language beyond ‘communication’ – that is to say, in hope of a language unbound by the economic imperatives of use-value, sense-making and the metaphysics of ‘content’. Small Studies in Opacity comprises a selection of designed objects – knickknacks, trinkets, conversation pieces (if you will), decor (if you must) – that meditate upon (and dance around) the conceptual tensions between opacity-transparency, contamination-purity, shit-value, commodity-fetish, and surface-depth. In collaboration with Alex Walker.

VILNIUS, LITHUANIA MIŠA SKALSKIS

HONEY FOR BLOOD

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/misa-skalskis

266

SHADOW CHANNEL

Miša Skalskis’ (Vilnius, Lithuania, 1994) work Яко человеколюбец and Honey for blood is a diptych of two videos based on biographical stories that got fictionalized. Both films deal with paranoia, loss of agency and alienation. The first video is narrated by a teenager who is stuck on an island with their parents. It is an unpleasant and tedious journey that becomes aggravated by the sun – an evil force, ready to melt off everything solid. The second video is a coming-of-age story of a demented 80-year-old woman from Eastern Europe, as the grandchild is helping to trace and remember the journey across the Puglia region in Italy.

WATFORD, UK TOM BURKE

FROM HERE WE GO EXTREME

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/tom-burke

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MASTER DESIGN OF EXPERIENCES

Having a background in music, Tom Burke (Watford, United Kingdom, 1983) activates new models of collaboration between music, film, theatre and philosophy grounded in community fieldwork. Developed with the community of Penablanca, a village in Chile experiencing rapid desertification, From Here We Go Extreme is a music film, an archive of sound recordings, photography and interviews, and a series of workshops that use the means of the music industry to find collaborative ways of representing climates that aim to move beyond western environmentalism.

YORK, UK MARK PRENDERGAST

EYE FALL

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/mark-prendergast

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SHADOW CHANNEL

Mark Prendergast (York, United Kingdom, 1988) collaborates with contemporary makers to rethink, reformat and produce new visual strategies. His practice is deeply rooted in how moving images are made, with what tools, and how they function. His work EYE FALL, consisting of six HD videos of various lengths, meshes Structural film strategies with the elastic potential of contemporary digital imaging technologies, pointing to their own construction in order to talk about the way the moving image mediates and functions in contemporary society. Mining disparate recordings for slippages in their language, these films tease out and occupy overlooked moments of lyricism.

ZÜRICH, SWITZERLAND EVITA EVA-MARIA BIANCA RIGERT

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/evita-eva-maria-bianca-rigert

TRUE FAKE

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MASTER DESIGN OF EXPERIENCES

Fashion designer Evita Eva-Maria Bianca Rigert (Zürich, Switzerland, 1987) interrogates the industry from within and uncovers its superficial nature of fakery. Within her work True Fake ‘fake’ reveals inherent ideologies and questions what is regarded to be ‘authentic’, ‘original’ or ‘genuine’, therefore a fake uncovers the perceived subjective validity and importance of an object.

ZĂ&#x153;RICH, SWITZERLAND TINA REDEN

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/tina-reden

CONNECTING RECOLLECTIONS

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FINE ARTS

For her work Connecting Recollections, Tina Reden (Zurich, Switzerland, 1991) developed different installations, collaborations and formats to experiment with the act of listening. At Kunstverein Amsterdam, in collaboration with Davide Sanvee and Francisca Khamis, she explored the sharing of and listening to memories. At Glazen Huis she investigated connecting potentials of sculptural and environmental acoustics in the form of sonic meditations in collaboration with Mariah Blue.

GRADUATION 2019 On 14, 15, 16 June 2019, ninety-one graduates from five Main Departments, two Temporary Programmes and one Hosted Programme presented their final works to the public at various locations in Amsterdam (NL). This generation of graduating artists, designers and architects of the Sandberg Instituut are concluded in the publication The Place of Birth. 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. 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

277 http://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/about

GRADUATION 2019 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 The Commoners’ Society and Challenging Jewellery. The two new Temporary Programmes starting in 2019 are Approaching Language and Resolution – MA Moving Image. 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 their 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 is the Master Design of Experiences (2017 – 2019) in collaboration with the University of the Underground. It is part of joint investigations on the implications of ‘external funding’ for art education. Future topics are not yet decided, but might be for instance cultural-diversity discussions, the implications of artificial intelligence or the relation of art to public-urban space.

278 http://sandberg.nl/graduation2019/about

SANDBERG INSTITUUT GRADUATION INDEX A–Z Malena Maria Arcucci Andrea Belosi Adam Bletchly Mariah Blue Lucie De Bréchard John Charles Bricker Lou Buche Mark Buckeridge Tom Burke Rowena Buur Elia Castino Sun Chang Holly Childs Daan Couzijn Alexander Cromer Sara Daniel Mohamad Deeb Marijn Degenaar Rebecca Eskilsson Vita Evangelista Ryan Eykholt Lucie Fortuin Harriet Foyster Juan Arturo García González Kathrin Graf Elisa Grasso Heather Griffin Antoine Guay GVN908 Walter Götsch Juhee Hahm Jason Harvey Miquel Hervás Gómez Silke Xenia Juul Zsofia Kollar Nemo Koning Jeroen Kortekaas Sascha Krischock Selma Köran Leslie Lawrence André Lourenço Francesca Lucchitta Sekai Makoni Wes Mapes Kani Marouf Juliana Maurer Tessa Meeus Annamaria Merkel David Haack Monberg Barnaby Monk Rachele Monti Lana Murdochy Alex Murray Maria Muuk Wyatt Niehaus Elif Özbay Daniel Ordonez Munoz Jean-François Peschot Anna Petrova Joseph Pleass Mark Prendergast Julie Pusztai Léo Ravy Tina Reden Fabian Reichle Ada Reinthal Evita Eva-Maria Bianca Rigert Luke George Hardy Rideout Javier Rodriguez Samuli Saarinen Davide-Christelle Sanvee Fenna Schilling Farida Sedoc Miša Skalskis Tomasz Skibicki Anthony Smyrski Younwon Sohn Maike Statz Elizaveta Strakhova Mathilde Stubmark Emilia Tapprest Filippo Tocchi Andreas Trenker Jack Waghorn Alex Walker Aidan Wall Amy Winstanley Agustina Woodgate Karina Zavidova Valerie van Zuijlen Gediminas Žygus