Introduction to the Vision Forum nodes 2010-11

Project 1 - Oounpo

Oounpo is the development of If you don’t want god you’d better have a multiverse, an itinerant project which explores the concepts of time, space and the role of subjectivity. The project intends to address art as place where these concepts can be translated into form and become the location for interplay between artists, curators, academics and the public.

Ouunpo is a play upon Oulipo: Ouvroir de littérature potentielle (“workshop of potential literature"), a loose gathering of (mainly) French-speaking writers and mathematicians which seeks to create works using constrained writing techniques. It was founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais, while other notable members include novelists Georges Perec, Italo Calvino and Hervé Le Tellier, poet Oskar Pastior and poet/mathematician Jacques Roubaud. The group defines the term 'littérature potentielle' as: "the seeking of new structures and patterns which may be used by writers in any way they enjoy."
Constraints are used as a means of triggering ideas and inspiration. As well as established techniques, such as lipograms and palindromes, the group devises new techniques, often based on mathematical problems such as the Knight's Tour of the chess-board and permutations. Oounpo works in the same way, though its primary concern is visual art.

For more info about the project:

http://visionforumouunpo.blogspot.com/

http://visionforum-rome.blogspot.com/



Project 2: Speech and What Archive

Speech and What Archive is also a continuation of a Vision Forum project from 2009-10 lead by the artist duo A Constructed World. This year it will function as a moving conversation between participants in different places seeking new ways to represent fragmentation. Rather than identifying with the unified, constituted subject this course seeks to find shared relations through construction and fragmentation. ACW now have productive group of students and researchers and it would be very purposeful to continue with them.
Conversations — in small groups, altogether in workshop meetings, one-on-one, by Skype, by phone, in person — are the media used by participants to make an account of, and represent, ways we may be linked together in a fragmented world. The course will bring together students and collaborators from places including Paris, Angers, Sweden, Barcelona, Jakarta, Melbourne, San Francisco and New York.
Students will decide appropriate ways to represent their participation making art works using video, text, image, performance or any other appropriate media. Outcomes can include events, exhibition, publications and opportunities for collaboration with students from other schools that ACW are attached to as professors and associates. (ACW are currently working with students from Ecole nationale supérieure d’art Nice and are professors at Ecole supérieure des beaux-arts d’Angers.)

For more info about the project:

http://speecharchive.blogspot.com/

http://visionforumparis.blogspot.com/



Project 3: The New Cities Project

In the past year, as a Vision Forum node, myself and my team members initiated a temporary project in the 'new town' of Shenzhen, South China. Inheritance - Shenzhen, is a project space that acts as an experimental hub with the aim of investigating and dealing with the art history of such a young city, to promote and commission new work and to provide a local space for art happenings. We worked in partnership with the British Council, Asia Art Archive, Arthub Asia, PRSFoundation and the Contemporary Art Terminal/He Xiangning Museum and the Shenzhen/Hong Kong Biennial.

The project in Shenzhen is merely the first in a long-term project that I hope to initiate that networks 'New Towns' around the world (both in real life and online) We have identified:
Shenzhen (CN)
Chandigarh (India - an entire city designed by Le Corbusier),
Brasilia (BR)
Milton Keynes (UK)

The New Cities project is entirely experimental - determined by its indeterminacy. There are some places, there are some artists and there are some preconceptions. There surely must be some commonalities? There is certainly a sense of strangeness in each of these places that necessarily comes without an indigenous population. The officials and planners of these cities are forever attempting to make up for something that is missing - but they will never be able to since what is missing is a past. They are attempting some sort of time travel. Which in a sense, is what I hope the project will be. A journey through time and space, with the medium of art as some sort of vessel or even a channel/pathway. There is also a sense of freedom that comes with a city that has no recognisable geographically fixed tradition or peoples and within this I would like to develop the most experimental in-between (infrathin!) context for communication and art making.

For more info:

http://inheritanceprojects.org/

http://visionforummiltonkeynes.blogspot.com/



Project 4: What Cannot be Said

Collaboration between Fei Art Center and Vision Forum


What Cannot Be Said brings together 4 young artists and curators to create a series of interviews that discuss the limits of what can be expressed – in words, in art or in science. It develops themes that are at the core of Vision Forum’s activities such as:

What are the boundaries of human knowledge? What role should art play? How can art be more visionary and give more to its audience? The project also addresses issues as, how do you deal with experiences and phenomena that cannot be expressed or explained.

What Cannot Be Said addresses questions related to censorship, what is the difference between an inner censorship and an exteriorly imposed silence? How can knowledge be safeguarded and passed on without becoming instruments of oppression?

What Cannot Be Said is firmly grounded in the culture of visual art and also approach the boundaries of what art can address, express and how it functions differently from other genres and sciences.

In keeping with the Vision Forum spirit the participants are invited to question academic forms of writing and also invite non-art professionals to be interviewed to ensure an interdisciplinary approach and to safeguard that the dialogue does not become to introverted, but deals with real issues in life.

Wang Dan
Angelo Romano
Liu Xinyi
Susanne Ewerlöf

The project will be published on the Vision Forum and FCAC websites in parallel in English and Chinese.

For more info about the project:

http://visionforumshanghai.blogspot.com/

http://www.feiartcenter.com/en/archive.asp/



Project 5: Vision Forum – London

The set of activities:
- Meeting at a pub for a table soccer tournament, Shoreditch, East London.
- Visiting Houses of people who have produced meta-statements in the course of their lives. i.e. Freud, John Soane, John Latham, Swedenborg, John Hunter, T.S.Eliott...
- Visiting Julian Barbour in his residency at Oxfordshire and have an afternoon of talking on the condition of time as a construct.
- Going for a 10 day meditation retreat to North England


The structure:
The group will be visiting 9 selected houses in the course of 3 months. During the visits, the housekeepers, directors, curators will be asked to introduce us the imagined territories those people have mapped. Let this be the introduction to Freudian acknowledgement of subconscious or the flat time theory of John Latham...
These introductions will be followed by the inner group dialogue while residing in the premises for the course of three hours.
After the visits, the group will travel together to northern England to attend a 10-day meditation. Hence the space of encounter will shift from social to the personal.

For more info about the project:

http://visionforum-londonhouses.blogspot.com/



Project 6: L'entremet de Panama

2011, Panama City.

Jochen Dehn, Mark Geffriaud, Ulrich Gall, Per Hüttner, Ben Kinmont, Géraldine Longueville, Charles Mazé, Raimundas Malasauskas, Jon Phillips, Pratchaya Phinthong, Natasha Rosling, Coline Sunier, Fabien Vallos, Olav Westphalen.

Receptary : writing of cookery
The writing of a recipe probably comes from a culinary experience whose result seemed satisfying enough to keep and compile its elaboration. It recounts the different steps of the making of a dish to guaranty the success of its repetition : anticipation of the ingredients to purchase, direct use of the materials, planning of the result. A recipe is like a game book describing how a practical experience is carried out by suggesting a few narrative ingredients. Its writing was developed by medieval chefs (middle of the 14th century). The main purpose of these treatise was to point out the culinary talents of these masters, bringing their renown to the kings that would then hire their service1. But right before that in fact, the first recipe books, called receptaries, were written by several hands, margins commonly used to complete or precise one step or to add an ingredient. One of the first known receptary, the Viandier de Guillaume Tirel dit Taillevent, is more of a collective compilation of recipes (written between 1373 and 1381) than the work of a single author. The notion of authorship not being primordial at that time, a text would frequently bear the marks of several contributions. In the different manuscripted and printed versions of the Viandier, entire chapters are erased, added and modified. Besides recipes, receptaries would also compile medical cures, descriptions of historical feasts and preparations of entremets. A recipe is a narrative and practical genre in itself, a mix of culinary ingredients, allegorical representations and political propaganda. L'entremet The entremet is an entertainment combining luxury dishes, disguised food and plays, animated or not, served and performed between the courses of fastuous banquet. The interlude brook the highly codified ceremonial of the banquet composed as a representation of power. Without having to leave, the guests would thus take a break and give free will to their comments and activities. The entremet attests to the taste for ornamentation and architecture, notably expressed by the erection of monumental patés and by the arrangement of feathers on the roasted game. The entremet evolved towards artistic representation as described in the last chapter of the Viandier. The entremet of painted and carved images was not so much about edible food than representation of allegorical scenes through paintings, sculptures and live performances, all of which first took place on the table before being progressively removed on specifically designed stages. There were real shows with scenarios, actors and dramatic action. Added to the luxurious ornamentation of the table set, the entremet was a pretext for a monumental, allegorical and fantasmagorical imagery.

An example of an entremet, writing by the chief Chiquart in his book Du fait de cuisine in 1420. He describes a famous banquet organized by Amédée VIII. The text is written in an old french. It describes enormous meals made for example with head wild boar or pork, roasted, painted in green, gold and yellow glaze, spitting out fire. Some towers carried by children angel dressed, where rose water and wine flow across machicolation. Fruits, birds, roasted chicken, big fish cooked into three ways : the head is boiled, the queue is roasted, the middle is fried, and for each part a new sauce : green, orange etc...

For more info about the project:

http://visionforumpanama.blogspot.com/



Project 7: SPACING ONE’S THOUGHTS (provisional title)

Galerie Akinci, Amsterdam – 12-23 November 2010 (tbc)


Spacing one’s thoughts is a series of events organised as part of a collaboration between Yael Davids and Vanessa Desclaux. The point of departure for this project is common interest in questions of the articulation of language, speech and voice in the production of subjectivity and political agency.

The project is grounded in two projects: Learning to Imitate, an ongoing performance project by Yael Davids, and A Stuttering Exhibition, an exhibition in the form of a lecture by Vanessa Desclaux. This new series of events will take place over a period of 10 days at Galerie Akinci and will present these two projects alongside others by artists, writers, theorists and curators invited by Davids and Desclaux. Guest participants will be asked to reconfigure the space of the gallery for the specific purpose of their presentations.

For more info about the project:

http://visionforumamsterdam.blogspot.com/



Project 8: POOL PARTY KABUL

We are intrigued with the Olympic swimming pool on top of Tapa Bibi Mahroo in Kabul. The amenity was built by the occupying Soviet forces in the 1980s, who were probably posted on the hill to watch out for Afghan mujahedin. It has never been officially used as a pool, because there was no way that even the Soviets could get water to travel uphill at such a steep angle. In the mid- 1990s the Taliban pushed blindfolded criminal offenders from the highest springboard to test whether they would survive, if not they were sometimes still not freed but shot. Today kids play in the cement construction, men bet on their fighting hens or dogs in it, and every now and then after heavy rain fall one can cool off in it. This site of shabby majesty has never seen much water or collective happiness. We would like to change that by organizing an international pool party. The project aims at putting a group of local and foreign artists, Kabul children, students and other representatives from the city together to clean and paint the pool and find a way to fill it with water.