https://rotterdamartwriting.cargo.site rotterdamartwriting Fri, 31 Jul 2020 09:47:06 +0000 https://rotterdamartwriting.cargo.site en https://rotterdamartwriting.cargo.site/Practice-Reflections-1 Fri, 19 Jul 2019 12:14:41 +0000 rotterdamartwriting https://rotterdamartwriting.cargo.site/Practice-Reflections-1 <img width="428" height="71" width_o="428" height_o="71" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/6d9b617b926c924fc2d6ab1a566114aec4c599df16f0d5d4f9a8c1df41720bc3/Screenshot-2019-03-01-at-23.29.55.png" data-mid="57487919" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/428/i/6d9b617b926c924fc2d6ab1a566114aec4c599df16f0d5d4f9a8c1df41720bc3/Screenshot-2019-03-01-at-23.29.55.png" /> &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; ︎ Practice Reflections: Isabelle Sully Administration’s Histrionics Alexandra Phillips Human Correction and The Pros of Deviation Katharina Cameron Every Heart Isabelle Sully Administration’s Histrionics For our third Practice Reflections text, Artist and Editor Isabelle Sully reflects on the gendered nature of ancillary work and the expectation to perform. Led by the maguffin of a fictional TV show plot in which secretarial characters begin to strike, Sully attempts to answer the nagging question at the root of her practice: Why administration?&nbsp; Alexandra Phillips Human Correction and The Pros of Deviation A cultural optimist by nature, Alexandra Phillips’ reflexive sculptural work celebrates the subtleties conjured by our excesses and our ‘human errors’.&nbsp; For the second in our series of Practice Reflections, she prompts us to reflect on the small scale sureties; that open error onto other subtle forces of possibility. Katharina Cameron Every Heart Launching the first of a new series: Practice Reflections. We share German artist Katharina Cameron’s accumulation of thoughts as she opens her solo show at Available and the Rat, a project space in Rotterdam south. Reflecting on her home studio practice Cameron opens up a year of findings, speaking of the distribution images, form, and ornament in a (re-)productive system of connection and alienation. &lt; Back https://rotterdamartwriting.cargo.site/Isabelle-Sully-Administration-s-Histrionics Mon, 09 Dec 2019 15:25:55 +0000 rotterdamartwriting https://rotterdamartwriting.cargo.site/Isabelle-Sully-Administration-s-Histrionics <img width="1920" height="1080" width_o="1920" height_o="1080" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/703ea96201692a543abdcf4b16a8a7065f74b5fea3f2aefa62f310ef0ce49f2b/As-Soon-As-Conditions-Become-Normal-Again_Still.jpeg" data-mid="57120214" border="0" data-scale="100" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/703ea96201692a543abdcf4b16a8a7065f74b5fea3f2aefa62f310ef0ce49f2b/As-Soon-As-Conditions-Become-Normal-Again_Still.jpeg" /> As Soon As Conditions Become Normal Again, 2017, single-channel filmic chapter within the multi-channel film Attending to Agnes, 4 min 58 sec References:1. Andrea Francke and Ross Jardine, ‘Bureaucracy’s Labour: The Administrator as Subject’, Parse Journal, no. 5, 2017, p. 242. Dodie Bellamy, The Buddhist (San Francisco: Publication Studio/Allone Co. Editions,2011), p. 18. 3. As a clear example, and sad coincidence, I am writing this the morning after the conservative Australian government announced a ministry reshuffle, whereby the arts ministry has been cut completely under the guise of ‘efficiency measures’ and in order to ease ‘bureaucratic congestion’. Now, the arts have been removed form federal policy focus and instead merged into a new portfolio titled the Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Communications, a department intended to oversee roads and railways. 4. Julie Ault, In Part: Writings by Julie Ault (New York: Dancing Foxes Press and Galerie Buchholz), p. 57. 5. In a somehow similar sentiment, Microsoft Word recently underlined a sentence of mine in green and instructed me this: Passive Voice (consider revising). Despite being software produced to streamline, systematise and make efficient the workplace, there was something I really liked in it insisting I, quite literally, speak up. A technological tool geared for the passive administrator, insisting on the misuse of its own register of standardisation. 6. A friend of mine has a daughter who only writes back to letters of an administrative nature in messy handwriting, completely flouting the administrative understanding of legibility—especially since such bodies have to accept all forms of correspondence by law. Practice Reflections: Isabelle Sully ~ Administration’s Histrionics In an episode of The West Wing—a television show from the early 2000s that had both the tendency to genuflect to the worst manifestations of American nationalism and the facility to predict, as if a premonition, the rise of Obama or the coming of the Arab Spring—the secretaries of the oval office decide to strike. They do so by collectively typing at their individual desks with only two fingers, proceeding very slowly. This decision to actively underperform comes about when senior White House officials scoff at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which recommends national legislation addressing repetitive strain injuries in the workplace—a legislation that no doubt has larger ramifications for the typists than the men dictating the statutes behind closed doors. This storyline has resonated with me for some time, not only because of my love for the minimal modification the secretaries make—a methodology I attempt to uphold in my own practice as an artist, particularly in relation to institutions—but also because of the way in which their protest upends the insistence that the administrative worker, usually female, be viewed as ‘a piece of infrastructure, invisible until something goes wrong’.1 Here, instead, the collective body of the administration go against the script of compliance handed to them by the directorial powers that be, acting out and staging—with an extreme clarity of address—the issue of visibility within their workplace. As an artist, borrowing this logic of performative intervention makes sense to me. As a woman, perennially outspoken, it&nbsp;compels me. It was something I first attempted in a work titled A friend to the idea (2016), made midway through my studies at the Dutch Art Institute. Specifically responding to the annual convention for the director of the school to introduce a day of student presentations, the work took the form of a scripted address that was woven seamlessly into the introductory address of the director herself, shifting the tone of voice and making a claim to visibility through piggybacking onto her authority. The piece plays on the institutional mutuality of trust and compliance, both literally—through reference to institutional protocol in the script—and on a conceptual level, invoking power relations between myself and the director publicly whilst&nbsp;agreeing to forgo them privately. In some ways it was an exercise in transmission, rendering these relations legible by occupying a position deemed to be commanding. Yet usually, when it comes to administration, the person standing behind the construction of the&nbsp;form, infrastructural, performative or otherwise, remains anonymous. In being deemed inherently ancillary, the administrator’s documents tend to be left authorless; spreadsheets collapse into archetypes and its endless output is rendered unimaginative. Perhaps fittingly, despite being an artist I’ve never really felt like a creative person. I wonder now if it's a fortuitous irony that the very basis for my creative work lies in an analysis of the statistical, the categorical, the downright anti-creative. Maybe it's also a form of self-preservation. Yet, it is precisely in this formation where my practice currently lies; in a desire to turn these structures in on themselves, not necessarily to rewrite protocol as it were (although this too), but to revel in the pleasure of instrumentalising exactly those processes of standardisation in order to facilitate artistic experiment. Dodie Bellamy writes in The Buddhist that her artist friend ‘Colter [Jacobson] talked about his inability to write a project proposal. As soon as the deadline passed he was energized to write two inspired proposals, but he wrote them more like poems than project proposal format.’2I was asked recently, ‘Why administration?’, and perhaps now my answer can be this:&nbsp;Working in a form that feels natural to me, thinking against the ticking and filing of each of us into categories safely understood and accounted for within the winding corridors of bureaucracy’s lair. For administration functions as a direct channel between the sphere of culture and the sphere of the state, as if the universal set in a depressingly banal Venn diagram.3&nbsp;A colleague wrote to me recently that the patriarchy can be chased from the squares but hides in the numbers—and might have to be fought by the numbers too. Administration is therefore in the business of distribution: it is responsible for dispensing public resources. &nbsp;The Administration. Valentina Curandi and I attempted to understand this through practice in a recent collaborative exhibition, where we wrote a policy for the artist-run space that was hosting us. The policy—signed off after numerous meetings with the co-directors of the project space—was premised on inserting claims to autonomy within the necessary requirements to regulate a space geared for a public audience. A major part of this was the establishment of an Occupational Health and Safety Fund, which we were able to provide an annual budget for by redistributing the city funding we received for the project. Going forward, each artist will be allocated a small budget to implement a ‘safety measure’ as loosely, relatively and interpretively as they deem fit.&nbsp; I listen to Julie Ault, who wrote that ‘a budget is priorities made concrete’.4 In a meeting once, when talking about budgets, Matthew Stadler told me that the process of applying for funding was ‘a form of triage that exhausts people.’ That’s the thing about administration: it overworks us, then outworks us.&nbsp; Yet still, somehow, I am enthralled by its ability to rigidly limit the scope of subjectivity, perhaps precisely because of the provocation possible in defying its methods. There is nothing more audacious to me, and therefore impressive, than the mischievous administrator who, when refused the affordance of her own signature, slips an otherwise rejected application through the cracks just before sitting down to lunch.5 There is a defiance possible in administration. Not only through the figure of the administrator, but through the imposition of the frame of administration itself. The mischievous administrator is at once anonymous and unaccountable, working away without a trace. Administration nags us daily: forcing its way into our letterboxes, our inboxes, affecting our mobility through public space, depleting our bank accounts, only to be turned on its head by the wayward administrator, or the obliging citizen who finds material in its wastage.6 There is therefore a difference between the administrator, the administered body and the Administration, but they all circle each other, unable, through the imposition of the latter, to break free of the cycle. I still cannot be completely sure ‘why administration’, though for now maybe even this linguistic play is enough. For within a protocol that insists on alignment, conformity and submission, there surely are many holes that a perennially outspoken feminist can pull at in her insistence to reject the requirement to perform, opting instead to type two-fingered and decidedly act otherwise. ︎Back to Index https://rotterdamartwriting.cargo.site/Alexandra-Phillips-Human-Correction-and-The-Pros-of-Deviation-copy Wed, 18 Dec 2019 22:15:05 +0000 rotterdamartwriting https://rotterdamartwriting.cargo.site/Alexandra-Phillips-Human-Correction-and-The-Pros-of-Deviation-copy <img width="299" height="460" width_o="299" height_o="460" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/3f0268f1b9a09a311f2773d85a4ff3e51a2938e166f83cd8fa6a05612d6cf7e2/Screen-Shot-2019-12-09-at-15.59.01.png" data-mid="56913386" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/299/i/3f0268f1b9a09a311f2773d85a4ff3e51a2938e166f83cd8fa6a05612d6cf7e2/Screen-Shot-2019-12-09-at-15.59.01.png" /> Packing, 2019. [Click here] Video courtesy of the artist&nbsp; Alexandra Phillip’s work is currently on show at:&nbsp;Oostzaanstraat 10 1013 WK Amsterdam 30.11.2019 - 4.01.2020 References:1. Meister, D. (1993). Human Error: Cause, Prediction, and Reduction Edited by John W. Senders and Neville P. Moray, Ergonomics in Design: The Quarterly of Human Factors Applications, 1(1), pp.38-38 Practice Reflections: Alexandra Phillips~ Human Correction and The Pros of Deviation In all of us there lurks a willingness to step outside the protocol. ‘Human error’, is defined as the propensity for people to make certain common mistakes; the making of an error is a natural result of being human [1]. It is deviation from intention, expectation or desirability. The definition goes on to state that logically, human actions can fail to achieve their goal in two different ways: the actions can go as planned but the plan can be inadequate. Or, the plan can be satisfactory but the performance can be deficient. The definition contains a sort of comforting disclaimer: A mere failure is not an error if there had been no plan to accomplish something in particular. But how about when the natural result of being human is the key to accomplish that something in particular? It is a tendency that appears to have all the marks of, ‘wrong-behaviour’ or ‘human error’, but unlike human error, these actions result in a desired outcome. I cannot find an existing term that fits, we could call this force: Human Correction, I suppose? But only if one considers systems of standardisation most commonly associated with commerce to be flawed in some way, which I do. Human Correction can be seen in many scenarios but it is most traceable on a local level, that is to say, in exchanges that happen everyday between the shopkeeper and the customer, the bank teller and the account holder, the taxi driver and the gas station attendant. Although some of the exchanges that take place in the name of human correction have a deviant component similar to that of human error, the difference is that these deviations create a positive outcome for the small group directly involved in the exchange. The complication is that this positive outcome only serves at the local level and often accounts for a small loss at the higher rungs of the exchange such as the corporation or governing body. It is a recalibration technique that we all possess but only make use of occasionally. I want to take this opportunity to provide some examples I have experienced of human correction at work, perhaps these will bring this concept more clearly into view. There used to be a store in Union Square called Shoe Mania. It was big with one floor catering to all your boot, sneaker, dress-shoe needs, and then a basement level where the styles that failed to jump off the shelves are being sold at a discounted rate. I am not sure if Shoe Mania was a chain, but the people who worked there wore blue collared shirts with Shoe Mania printed on the breast, and they all wore a sort of ear piece that allowed them to get the shoes requested by New Yorkers and tourists with blisters. It was not a mom and pop store; rent alone at that location must have cost a fortune. So there I was looking around down in the basement, it was summer, I needed some dress shoes for something so naturally, I wanted discounted ones. The funny thing about Shoe Mania is, that upstairs where the shoes were still full price, there was always an attendant ready to fetch the pair of your dreams, the right size and in all the colors, but in the basement all the boxes were haphazardly stacked with very little rhyme or reason. There was only one attendant in the basement and they were poised more as a lookout than an attendant since there was no special storage place from which to fetch the discounted shoes, and the basement was never as crowded as the floor above.&nbsp; So there I was, looking for my size in some suitable style. I tried on so many things, all too small or too big, too ugly or not ugly enough. After about an hour of failed pairs, I found something that fit all the criteria. The only problem was, I could not find the box that belonged to those shoes and there was no other pair like them and so no way to know their price. I approached the attendant who had been watching the past hour and no doubt knew the time I had invested in finding the perfect shoe. I explained about the shoes with no box. We began to look in the basement together. He informed me that without the box they would be unable to ring me up at the register. We couldn’t find the box. He suggested we find another box, something reasonably priced and without shoes inside, that we could put my perfect pair in and I could bring them upstairs and make my purchase at the register. This suggestion puts us on the path to a human surety. We could find no shoeless box. What happened next is a shining example of human surety in action. Both kneeling, we continued to look. Then, I asked halfway joking, “If there is no box and no way to know how much they cost, could I just... have them?” The attendant looked up, considered my proposition, and agreed under the condition that I wear the shoes out. I thanked him and left Shoe Mania new shoes on, old sandals in my bag. In the face of a gap in the system, we came to an understanding or a solution that simplified the exchange for all parties directly involved. Mr. Mania wouldn’t be impressed, which is why I maintain human surety is best appreciated on a small-scale local level. I have an older friend who takes great pride in the fact that he doesn’t own anything. He lives in a house, drives a car, takes part in all the regular possession-holder activities, but nothing that he drives, lives in etc., is legally held in his name. He has fine credit, is not a criminal or an illegal alien, he explained he simply did not like the notion of having such big ticket items attached to his person. I know about the condition of his credit because some time after denouncing large purchases, he told me that over the years he helped out a few friends when they wanted to attach such big items to their person but could not do so due to financial disarray. He helped by lending them his name to purchase this or that, but only with the condition that he would never have to hear about the purchase again. This is just one example of people doing business amongst each other, getting around the rules of the financial system, it happens all the time, but again, we can’t teach this kind of thing because it comes in so many forms and the whole system would break down if we did. In the scenarios above, an adherence to the regular protocol would have resulted in complete failure. Human correction as a concept encompasses the capacity we have to approach tasks from all sorts of angles and triumph when it seems internalised rules and regulations bar the way. My examples are singular events and relatively insignificant but I am sure with just this light prompt you have found some cases of your own. The force of human correction is omnipresent. In my opinion, it is us at our best. ︎Back to Index https://rotterdamartwriting.cargo.site/Katharina-Cameron-Every-Heart Mon, 01 Jul 2019 12:10:35 +0000 rotterdamartwriting https://rotterdamartwriting.cargo.site/Katharina-Cameron-Every-Heart <img width="2283" height="3425" width_o="2283" height_o="3425" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7702b0f1f3fb77b49d5062d43ca5a55deef0f757799b072642971bb3ae0995fa/katharina_untitled_ornamentation.jpg" data-mid="46075263" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/7702b0f1f3fb77b49d5062d43ca5a55deef0f757799b072642971bb3ae0995fa/katharina_untitled_ornamentation.jpg" /> Trapped in a Tunnel of Experience and Evaluating, 21cm x 29.7cm, 2019. Photo courtesy of the artist. Drama PurKatharina Cameron Available &amp; The RatRotterdam21.06.2019 - 07.07.2019 References:1.&nbsp;Ornament and Crime, Adolf Loos, 1908. An English translation of which can be found in The Architecture of Adolf Loos (pp. 100-103, Arts Council of Great Britain, 1987). 2.&nbsp;The Wonderful World That Almost Was [Exhibition Catalogue], pp. 82-87, Paul Thek, 1995. 3. Twentieth-Century Ornament, Jonathan M. Woodham, 1990. 4. The original ELF logo, AWEST, 1977. Practice Reflections: Katharina Cameron~ Every Heart My year of ornamentation and crime started with thinking about images1.&nbsp; It seemed prevalent, it was fall and I was alone in the house. This was where I worked now, and I started by studying the free advertising leaflets that were being pushed through the mail slot in my front door, building up a relentless pile. Images were in the air, or that’s how it felt to me.&nbsp; My friends who had once had a photography practice started taking pictures again; others started to paint.&nbsp; The people who had always been drawing kept on drawing, but now they showed their drawings more proudly.&nbsp; Are things becoming flat again? I wondered, thinking about the availability of free space on the page and the shrinking availability of other spaces, whilst looking through the leaflets for images I liked.&nbsp; When I found one, I cut it out and put it in a folder.&nbsp; I decided to discard thinking about their meaning until I had so many of them I wouldn’t have to understand them in their singularity, I hoped they would lead the way. I felt a desire to draw too, but after years of working with objects it was scary.&nbsp; Objects brought themselves with them, while my drawings had never surpassed the stage of forms floating on a white page. No landscapes unfolded.&nbsp; Objects I liked to dress, but drawing made me feel naked.&nbsp; It brought things too close to the surface.&nbsp; I looked at other artists who I assumed had spoken this language of image I was interested in.&nbsp; I thought of my education and I prayed to Mike Kelley.&nbsp; Eventually, I started drawing stuffed animals with dicks, I started drawing dicks.&nbsp; My bulbous shapes and swirly lines embarrassed me.&nbsp; I used colored pencil that could be smudged to look fuzzy.&nbsp; I put the pencils away again.&nbsp; I wanted a daddy.&nbsp; I gained weight, my body was rebelling, but I kept on cutting out images and putting them into folders. At a certain point I felt I had two options : 1) Analyse the images I had gathered for their material specificity to identify what’s special about them. 2) Decide that there is in fact nothing special about them. Paul Thek said to Harald Szeemann that we guard our individuality and our inspirations as if they were our own inspirations and our own ideas, whereas they are really group ideas.&nbsp; They are given to us by God and they belong to everyone2.&nbsp; So I accepted that it was God who pushed these images through my mail slot every week, and that my responsibility was to make the choice between throwing them away or starting a relationship with them.&nbsp; I thought about how repetition leads to habit and how obsession leads to repetition.&nbsp; I looked at the pages of the leaflets and wondered who had designed them.&nbsp; I saw no human, but endlessly unfolding grids with little variation, filled like containers. I thought about how you don’t fall for lovers and friends by seeing them once, but again and again and again.&nbsp; Slowly the thought formed that somewhere in the ambivalence of repetition there must be a difference that sometimes kills things and sometimes makes them grow.&nbsp; I wondered how. I thought of the first tools used to produce straight lines and how they must have just been something malleable put under stress, like a strand of hair pulled very tightly.&nbsp; Like a sieve made from horse hair to separate bad from good.&nbsp; In contrast, swirly lines seemed symbolically charged, and I wondered why. I spent time at the library and online, looking at the history and manifestations of shared symbols like the heart, the cross, flowers, parts of bodies, and the ways they have all been overlaid and extended, turned into more rambling forms.&nbsp; I enjoyed reading a coffee table book called: ‘Twentieth-Century Ornament’3.&nbsp; Amongst this, an image from some environmentalist-anarchist PR got stuck in my head; a fat elf holding a big gun, next to an acronym in hand-drawn gothic font4. The more complicated it became, the more I was drawn towards platitudes, towards leaving the house and looking at the streets.&nbsp; I thought, maybe it has to do with activity and passivity, that the difference is held in the hand producing the line.&nbsp; In the end I walked at the feet of high rises and felt tiny looking up, I thought of aspirational super structures and what it takes instead to come up with one’s own structure.&nbsp; I looked at images of Hilma af Klimt’s paintings and drawings and marvelled at her symmetry without precision.&nbsp; I saw an actual show of paintings by Josef Strau.&nbsp; He calls them prototypes and the press text said they’re angels, because that could be the first image a child sees, a guardian above its bed. He made his first ‘baby painting’ and then repeated it; seeing what would be demanded in the process of making the next one, and the next, and so forth.&nbsp; I liked the angels, they were beautiful and it seemed fateful to see them because I’d just got my first tattoo, a winged mouse above the heart. Lying on the bench in the studio while it was being done, knowing that from now on I would live with this image on my chest was scary in a way that’s difficult to describe. I understood something fundamental about images : &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;3) Some images make you feel more like yourself, and some images make you feel less like yourself. And I thought about how Josef had set out to do something brave, by invoking angels, and had ended up making something tasteful.&nbsp; I wondered if something tasteful can ever be brave.&nbsp; A week later, I decided that my first ‘baby painting’ would be a flower, and that just like Josef I would go on to repeat it and with each repetition see what would be demanded.&nbsp; And I did fall in love. ︎Back to Index https://rotterdamartwriting.cargo.site/HOMEPAGE-Index Fri, 01 Mar 2019 21:47:53 +0000 rotterdamartwriting https://rotterdamartwriting.cargo.site/HOMEPAGE-Index <img width="253" height="66" width_o="253" height_o="66" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0e7a58c9bf7747ef2c2bad8676ea3628869aa1953070b81b3028bb25dedd4fb4/Screenshot-2019-03-01-at-22.57.42.png" data-mid="57481448" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/253/i/0e7a58c9bf7747ef2c2bad8676ea3628869aa1953070b81b3028bb25dedd4fb4/Screenshot-2019-03-01-at-22.57.42.png" /><img width="256" height="66" width_o="256" height_o="66" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/bae0a119467b48e9f36926e2d2a33acd2c29da19ee09718fed59d700d62d2642/Screenshot-2019-03-01-at-22.56.44.png" data-mid="57481451" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/256/i/bae0a119467b48e9f36926e2d2a33acd2c29da19ee09718fed59d700d62d2642/Screenshot-2019-03-01-at-22.56.44.png" /> <img width="1920" height="1080" width_o="1920" height_o="1080" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/703ea96201692a543abdcf4b16a8a7065f74b5fea3f2aefa62f310ef0ce49f2b/As-Soon-As-Conditions-Become-Normal-Again_Still.jpeg" data-mid="57481398" border="0" data-scale="92" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/703ea96201692a543abdcf4b16a8a7065f74b5fea3f2aefa62f310ef0ce49f2b/As-Soon-As-Conditions-Become-Normal-Again_Still.jpeg" /> PRACTICE REFLECTIONS ~Administration’s Histrionics Isabelle Sully ~ Human Correction and The Pros of Deviation Alexandra Phillips ~ Every Heart Katharina Cameron <img width="673" height="500" width_o="673" height_o="500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/685820ff85aeb92bc9cc28d7f0effc4fa96713aec64cd3a4b75510b3d61e72b7/Photograph-of-two-girls-smoking-shisha--Qajar-period--Iran--19th-century.-The-Canna-Chronicles--9-Jan.-2018--thecannachronicles.comtagiran..png" data-mid="78724826" border="0" data-scale="82" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/673/i/685820ff85aeb92bc9cc28d7f0effc4fa96713aec64cd3a4b75510b3d61e72b7/Photograph-of-two-girls-smoking-shisha--Qajar-period--Iran--19th-century.-The-Canna-Chronicles--9-Jan.-2018--thecannachronicles.comtagiran..png" />IN-CONVERSATIONGolnar Abbasi &amp; Maike Hemmers ~A Discomfort Inside COLUMNS ~ Djinn Sarong Eric Patel ~ The WeatherKatherine Macbride <img width="3581" height="2011" width_o="3581" height_o="2011" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/07b89be09b0a72f6d157bb464295a5774b28ab942950961f2628af19c82b0500/Bates-SBSW-still.jpeg" data-mid="104459207" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/07b89be09b0a72f6d157bb464295a5774b28ab942950961f2628af19c82b0500/Bates-SBSW-still.jpeg" /> REFLECTIONSLili Huston-Herterich ~ Comforts No Matter How Deeply Buried, That Rhythm Could Not Be Killed ~ Ulufer Çelik Material Circumstance ~ Anastasia Shin ~Zerø-Star Treatment Honey Jones-Hughes ~ Houd Vast Amy Pickles ~ Stirring the SoupAnastasia Shin ~ Being Public Nick Thomas &nbsp; CONTRIBUTORS https://rotterdamartwriting.cargo.site/Header-RAW Fri, 01 Mar 2019 22:44:28 +0000 rotterdamartwriting https://rotterdamartwriting.cargo.site/Header-RAW <img width="253" height="66" width_o="253" height_o="66" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f7955e5d5ac7e377b688b0ff84c3b669449852899267f0d6d7c1e21cdb619f0e/Screenshot-2019-03-01-at-22.57.42.png" data-mid="36619635" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/253/i/f7955e5d5ac7e377b688b0ff84c3b669449852899267f0d6d7c1e21cdb619f0e/Screenshot-2019-03-01-at-22.57.42.png" /><img width="256" height="66" width_o="256" height_o="66" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/bae0a119467b48e9f36926e2d2a33acd2c29da19ee09718fed59d700d62d2642/Screenshot-2019-03-01-at-22.56.44.png" data-mid="36619633" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/256/i/bae0a119467b48e9f36926e2d2a33acd2c29da19ee09718fed59d700d62d2642/Screenshot-2019-03-01-at-22.56.44.png" /> https://rotterdamartwriting.cargo.site/About Fri, 01 Mar 2019 21:47:56 +0000 rotterdamartwriting https://rotterdamartwriting.cargo.site/About ︎&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;<img width="428" height="71" width_o="428" height_o="71" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f99cbe79970bdf4a13d33ced5510bab60b92452e39cb795e8dfdf485aefb85c2/Screenshot-2019-03-01-at-23.29.55.png" data-mid="36619394" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/428/i/f99cbe79970bdf4a13d33ced5510bab60b92452e39cb795e8dfdf485aefb85c2/Screenshot-2019-03-01-at-23.29.55.png" /> Links to all texts published 2018-2020 All ‘Practice Reflections’ All ‘Reflections’ (Reviews) All ‘In Conversation’ All ‘Columns’ Contributors &nbsp; Rotterdam Art Writing ran from 2018 to 2020 and was an artist-led writing forum based in Rotterdam, NL.&nbsp; We published reflections, features and essays by a growing body of contributors.&nbsp; Our aim was to provoke discussion around the Rotterdam art scene; supporting critical, thoughtful, short and long-form commentary, contextualised by wider developments in art and culture.&nbsp; We were interested in a range of practices; tracing the underground, institutional and independent dissemination of work as it happens. Font: Amarante by Karolina Lach Rotterdam Art Writing editors: Anastasia Shin Eric Patel Nick Thomas For proposals for new texts (for: Practice Reflections, Reviews, In-Conversations, Columns) and other enquiries, please contact: shin.anastasia@gmail.com ︎&nbsp; &nbsp; About ︎&nbsp; &nbsp; Twitter︎ ︎&nbsp; &nbsp; Facebook page︎︎︎︎&nbsp; &nbsp; shin.anastasia@gmail.com https://rotterdamartwriting.cargo.site/Contributors Fri, 01 Mar 2019 22:14:41 +0000 rotterdamartwriting https://rotterdamartwriting.cargo.site/Contributors ︎ &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;<img width="307" height="68" width_o="307" height_o="68" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/692f9ebf4a19901db00c82c274ed6bee3039d4cc2e43ac3b04372bbc32c2fa9c/Screenshot-2019-03-01-at-23.15.02.png" data-mid="36617799" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/307/i/692f9ebf4a19901db00c82c274ed6bee3039d4cc2e43ac3b04372bbc32c2fa9c/Screenshot-2019-03-01-at-23.15.02.png" /> Updated with each new issue.&nbsp; Katherine MacBride researches processes, materials, and textures of relations using feminist methodologies. She uses various processes – artistic, academic, and participatory – to address knowledge in its multiple forms. In her practice, embodied experience, materials, and theory are interwoven, reflecting the generative entanglement of epistemology, ontology, and ethics. Anastasia Shin is interested in the aesthetics of coercion, cuteness as a category, nudge theory in supermarkets and the rounded corners of devices that we learn to trust. She works with installation, text and sculpture to explore the habits of human behaviour, language and attention in the context of control societies. Eric Patel uses a variety of media to confront power relations and knowledge systems built by colonialism. As an artist and researcher, his investigations into diaspora, race and belonging, consider the ways technology and anthropology situate human difference. Patel aims to understand what the fears and desires projected onto the other reveal about the self and otherness. Amy Pickles is learning how to dismantle and assemble an artistic subjectivity through the search for queer pedagogical methods. Educational and artistic processes collapse into each other and feed each other to make a research-based performative practice, comprised of sound and video works, workshops, performances and textiles. Nick Thomas is an artist, writer and editor.&nbsp; In his artworks he uses video, performance and objects to explore the relationship between form and politics: current research focuses on the way the figure of the labyrinth is used as a cypher for coexistence. Honey Jones-Hughes focuses on the ways in which contemporary cities produce subjectivity through forces of privatisation, management and gentrification. She explores the implications of artists in these processes and her research takes the form of documentary video, workshops, interviews and community projects. Alexandra Phillips works with the unforeseen potential of materials, objects and information, with what might appear “potential-less,” but later acquires an unintended functionality and appeal. She works in a range of mediums from sculpture, (both autonomous and participatory) to printed matter to sound interventions.&nbsp; Isabelle Sully works across curating, writing, editing and art making. Sully treats administration as material,&nbsp;adopting performative techniques and measurements to understand the effects of standardisation&nbsp;on the relativity of need and expression. She is the co-director of Publication Studio, Rotterdam. Golnar Abbasi engages with a hybrid of practices including research, writing, curating, organising, independent publishing, teaching, making, and spatial intervention. She works with notions of spatiality, coloniality, practices of resistance, and the construction of histories. &nbsp; Maike Hemmers reflects on the affective relation of bodies and inner spaces through drawing, text, and everyday relational art objects. With an interest in feminist architecture, soft resistance and queer directions, her work explores intuitive material relations.&nbsp; Ulufer Çelik explores the potential of narrative and myth-making through moving image, poetry, drawing, sound, and performance. She searches for queer, immigrant, feminist ways of making- and thinking-with the archeological, spiritual, and spatial traces of memory. Lili Huston-Herterich is concerned with how her work emerges in complicated relation to space, history, and other lives, and how to maintain an awareness of these relations. She is conscious of her position as a maker in the context of excess, and uses capitalist culture's flotsam and jetsam to create meaningful work in a radically dependent present. RAW—’21 Links to contributor websites: Katherine MacBride Anastasia ShinEric Patel Amy Pickles Honey Jones-Hughes Katharina CameronAlexandra Phillips Isabelle Sully Maike Hemmers Golnar AbbasiUlufer Çelik Lili Huston-Herterich https://rotterdamartwriting.cargo.site/Footer_Blank Fri, 01 Mar 2019 21:48:32 +0000 rotterdamartwriting https://rotterdamartwriting.cargo.site/Footer_Blank https://rotterdamartwriting.cargo.site/IN-CONVERSATION Fri, 31 Jul 2020 09:47:06 +0000 rotterdamartwriting https://rotterdamartwriting.cargo.site/IN-CONVERSATION In Conversation: Golnar Abbasi and Maike Hemmers A Discomfort Inside Golnar Abbasi and Maike Hemmers A Discomfort InsideGolnar Abbasi and&nbsp;Maike Hemmers’ joint contribution reflects on forms of labor and display within a domestic setting.&nbsp; This extract of their correspondence took place before the Covid-19 Pandemic began but many of their reflections resonate with the current intermittent ‘lockdowns’, and osciallating control measures.&nbsp; In a time of heightened vigilance around proximity, socialising, and protecting or infecting each other, Abbasi and Hemmers’ honest discussion made-public is a collaborative thinking-through (with references) that provides a catalyst for questions on the boundaries and hierarchies of intimacy and the domestic. Their contribution is the first of a new series of ‘In-Conversation’ text pieces where two Rotterdam based artists discuss a subject of mutual interest and share references to which they both have an affinity. [Read more] &lt; Back