Events 2005-2007December 7, 2007, 13:30
Research on Research III
Design Practice Re
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Events 2005-2007December 7, 2007, 13:30
Research on Research III
Design Practice Research
Sara de Bondt, Ksenija Berk, Abake, Luna Maurer & Christoph Keller
Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht
Organized and curated by David Bennewith, Katja Gretzinger, Nina Støttrup Larsen and Daniel van der Velden
Moderated by Daniel van der Velden
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December 4, 2007
Vinca Kruk guest critic at the Willem de Kooning Academy
Daniel van der Velden guest critic at the Berlage Institute
November 28, 2007, 16:00
X-currency
The politics of added value in design
Lecture at Studium Generale, Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam
Artists and designers add value to objects. To design means to deal with the material quality of the physical or virtual object and the practical quality of its usage, while adding something to it that is at once immaterial and useless. That is where the value is. The most succesful of designs add a surplus of value to rather nonexceptional materials and functions.
Precisely what is valuable about added value, seems to be out of reach of pragmatic decisions. We all know the ‘X-factor’, the apparently irrational ‘je ne sais quoi’ of talent as it crystallizes in television shows. In practical, this X-factor will often turn out to be an imperfection. The X-factor is an indicator for attention – we will feel bound to keep watching in order to try and understand what it is.
Added value amounts to incorporating what is unconditioned, resistant or rebellious towards the dominant values of a given system, into that system.
Yet, the X-factor also harbours the potential of aesthetic surprise, which is an event with political consequences. It’s all about the political spectrum in which added value gets coined. Does it need to be the typology of private consumption, as is now mostly the case? Or are there other possibilities?
October 21 - November 14, 2007
Nation Brand Paradox
Project with Daniel van der Velden at Yale University.
Tuesday October 30, 2007
Mayhem and Mouffe
Lecture by Daniel van der Velden at Yale University, School of Art, Green Hall, Graphic Design Atrium, 1156 Chapel Street, New Haven
October 21, 2007
Post-design
Lecture by Vinca Kruk and Gon Zifroni at Dutch Design Week, Eindhoven
In anticipation of the forthcoming Metahaven publication White Night Before A Manifesto, this lecture crosses the elements with which so-called creative practices are involved, including (in order of appearance): citizen, surface, value, fiction, identity, cultures, borders, software and the strike.
In a post-design approach to design, there is no longer a distinction between the professional work and the immaterial labour of 'free time'. What is at stake is the withering away of function, parallelled by a perpetual creation of fictitious worlds that are ever more demanding. These new aesthetic worlds on the one hand are surfaces beset with an ungraspable imaginary value; on the other hand these are the 'shadow forces' which channel cultural exchange in the name of economical growth and appear to render existing physical borders obsolete.
October 16 - 18, 2007
Typeface as History
Workshop by Daniel van der Velden at the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe.
Typography is not just a carrier of human knowledge, but also of history. Either consciously or unconsciously, history can be written through, or recorded in the specific forms of a typeface. In this workshop I will ask participants to conceptualize and visualize the elements of a new typeface through which history is either written or recorded (or both). Rather than looking at the mere legibility or formal aspects of type I am asking to look at its relations with society, politics and history – and thus at its potential to become a form of storage or report for these relations. It might bring us to the following question: ‘What would a contemporary Trajan capital look like?’
October 11, 2007
National (Re)presentation
Talk with PoCA (Political Currency of Art Research Group, Goldsmiths, London) at Witte de With, Rotterdam.
Daniel van der Velden and Clair Beke, discussion with Suhail Malik and Andrea Phillips about nation branding.
Part of Citizens and Subjects: Practices and Debates.
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September 29 & 30, 2007
Forum on Quaero
a public think tank on the politics of the search engine
Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht
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2 days of discussion starting Saturday 29 September at 11 a.m.
Florian Cramer, Jodi Dean, Frédéric Martel, Ingmar Weber, Isabelle Stengers, Bureau d’Études, Metahaven, Tsila Hassine, Open Search, Michael Zimmer, Richard Rogers, Florian Schneider, Maurits de Bruijn, Sabine Niederer, André Nusselder
Quaero: isn’t that the search engine that former French president Jacques Chirac declared to be the European challenge to Google? A public alternative to Silicon Valley-born commercial search engines, funded by the French state, in service of the public good, in the true tradition of the grand projet? An information machine capable of reclaiming European language and intellectual heritage in the age of globalization?
No. Quaero is the name of a consortium of technology firms and research labs working together on multimedia and web search projects. It is a state-sponsored effort to stimulate private French technological competitiveness.
According to François Bourdoncle, one of its participating developers, ‘Quaero is definitely not a project to build a web search engine, it is a project to make significant advances on the handling and indexing of multimedia content. It is completely out of the question to build a new, state-owned, state-operated, or even state-funded search engine. Only the R&D around these cutting-edge multimedia indexing technologies are in the scope of the project.’
But still, the issues that the idea of Quaero has raised – since its public launch by the former French president – constitute a formidable challenge. Internet search engines are political projects proper if only because they give and take power; they represent science, technology, (trans)national politics, private enterprise, culture, territoriality and language in ever different combinations. They are also social spaces. Internet search, the indispensable public tool that allows one to survey the ever increasing web, is currently in the hands of only a few global players, to whose private interests its setup corresponds.
Forum on Quaero
On 29 and 30 September 2007, the Jan van Eyck Academie, in collaboration with the Maison Descartes, Institut Français des Pays-Bas, organizes the Forum on Quaero, taking the concept of the search engine as a pubic project as a starting point.
Search engines’ indexation methods inevitably lead to moments of inclusion and exclusion (sometimes by hands-on censorship). Search engines closely monitor their users’ behaviour and offer additional services, retrieving and storing increasing amounts of private information from them. The majority of web search is carried out through only a few, very large corporate search engines which communicate ideas about their role in the world via their brand identities. These may lead to distorted impressions of what the commercial search engine as a institution really entails. This conference aims to bridge the gap between politics, policies and practices in the field of web search. Some questions:
• What are the politics of the structure and image of search engines and their technologies?
• To what extent have search engines like Google, which started from the ideal of access to information, become the modus operandi of political bias? Can we envisage scenarios for the search engine as a public domain institution?
• What kind of hierarchy (if any) should be implemented when deciding what should go into a search engine’s database, and what is left out?
• Can contemporary web practices tackle the conventional static models used to archive and present (institutional) concepts of cultural heritage and democracy?
• Collaborative and participatory methods are increasingly placing the Demos as the force that structures information. Can we work towards a ‘politics of code & categorization’ that allows plural interpretations of data to coexist and enrich each other?
• How can concepts of digital and networked European cultural heritage reflect the political and social issues related to Europe’s changing borders?
The Forum encourages and facilitates audience participation; it is meant as a public think tank, a live sketchbook around new questions for the search engine.
Initiated by Metahaven
Curated by Tsila Hassine, Vinca Kruk, Daniel van der Velden and Gon Zifroni
Partners: Jan van Eyck Academie, Maison Descartes Amsterdam
September 19 & 20, 2007
Designing Politics - The Politics of Design
Daniel van der Velden at the annual hearing of the IFG Ulm.
July 3, 2007
20:00 hrs
Signs
Lecture by Meta Haven at SMART Project Space, Amsterdam
June 14, 2007, 13:30 hrs
Vinca Kruk, Gon Zifroni and others
presentation at
A flag for the region Meuse-Rhine
Euregional Forum
Glaspaleis Heerlen
June 6, 2007
Daniel van der Velden
lecture at
Moving in Free Zones
at B.a.d. Foundation, Rotterdam.
A project by iStrike Foundation.
June 2 - July 7, 2007
A Number of Worlds Resembling Our Own
Group exhibition at SMART Project Space, Amsterdam
with Carlos Garaicoa, Richard Grayson, Pia Roenicke, Anu Pennanen, Vangelis Vlahos and Meta Haven: Design Research.
Saturday March 24, 2007
Meta Haven, The Design of Evil
at Towards a New Visualization of Secrecy?
Representations of Secrecy within Contemporary Terrorism and Counterterrorism
go to web site
at Stedelijk Museum CS Amsterdam
Presentations by Tariq Ali, Trevor Paglen, Naeem Mohaimen, Meta Haven: Design Research, Jordan Crandall, Nicholas Mirzoeff
and others.
Curated and initiated by Tina Clausmeyer
Monday February 19, 2007
Research Design
Thinking visual communication before assignments
Lecture by Daniel van der Velden
at Royal Academy of Arts, The Hague
January 11, 2007
Regimes of Representation:
Art & Politics Beyond the House of People
Symposium, MNAC, Bucharest
The complete conference report will follow soon.
January 11, 2007
Regimes of Representation:
Art & Politics Beyond the House of People
Symposium, MNAC, Bucharest
On January 11, 2007, a conference was organized in the former House of People in Bucharest – more precisely, in Romania’s national museum of contemporay art: MNAC. The title of the conference is Regimes of Representation: Art & Politics Beyond the House of People. The subject of the conference is the very location where the event is being held. The Palatul Parlamentului and its current co-function as a museum, will be the point of departure for a discussion of the relation between post-communist politics, imagination and representation. MNAC is one of various attempts to use contemporary art to transform a former ‘totalitarian’ symbol into one for democracy, but it is unique in simultaneously being the seat of government. The central question for the conference is: can art ever ‘take over the central point of power, being a symbol of openness and democracy’? Can, consequently, imagination influence or take over the meaning of a building that is an essential logo of totalitarian rule? How does Romania’s first national contemporary art institution employ the symbolic to express a constructed national identity, by using (totalitarian) foundation? Can we speak of a reverse ‘Bilbao Effect?’ And how does the institutionalization of contemporary art reflect the imperative to democratize since the fall of communism? With Chantal Mouffe, Nicolas Bourriaud, Jonathan Lahey Dronsfield, Marcus Steinweg, 4space, Ruxandra Balaci and Meta Haven.
Organized by the Jan van Eyck Academie and Meta Haven: Design Research. Generously supported by the Royal Netherlands Embassy in Bucharest.
10.15
Registration
11.15
Welcome – Ruxandra Balaci, artistic director MNAC
11.30
Introduction – Vinca Kruk
11.45
Keynote – Chantal Mouffe
12.45
Lecture – Nicolas Bourriaud
13.30
lunch
14.00
Lecture – Jonathan Lahey Dronsfield
14.45
Lecture – Marcus Steinweg
15.30
Lecture – 4Space (Augustin Ioan & Ciprian Mihali)
16.15
break
16.30
Round table discussion with all speakers – moderated by Daniel van der Velden
17.30
Drinks
Abstracts / Biographies
Agonistic politics and artistic practices
Chantal Mouffe – Keynote lecture
In my presentation I will discuss the different ways to envisage the public space and scrutinize the implications of this discussion for artistic practices. My argument will be that public art is not art located in a place that is public – as opposed to private space. Public art is art that institutes a public space, in the sense of a common action by people. I will for instance address the question of what kind of public progressive art institutions should try to institute: a public space that aims at establishing consensus or a public space of agonistic confrontation?
Taking my bearings from my previous work, I will first show that the task of democratic politics is not to aggregate interests or to attempt at reaching a rational consensus, but to transform antagonism into agonism. Then I will draw the consequences of this approach to understand the relation between art and politics and to grasp the nature of critical artistic practices. What is at stake, I will argue, is the questioning of the dominant hegemony by bringing to the fore all the aspects that the dominant consensus is trying to repress. I will insist on the multiplicity of ways in which this consensus can be undermined and show that artistic practices can contribute in a variety of ways to the fostering of new forms of subjectivities.
Chantal Mouffe is Professor of Political Theory at the Centre for the Study of Democracy at the University of Westminster in London. She has taught and researched at a number of universities in Europe, North America and South America. She is member of the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris. She was editor of Gramsci and Marxist Theory (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1979), Dimensions of Radical Democracy. Pluralism, Citizenship, Community (Verso, London, 1992), Deconstruction and Pragmatism (Routledge, London, 1996) and The Challenge of Carl Schmitt, (Verso, London, 1999). She co-authored with Ernesto Laclau Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (Verso, London, 1985) and was the author of The Return of the Political (Verso, London, 1993), The Democratic Paradox (Verso, London, 2000) and On the Political (Routledge, London, 2005).
Nicolas Bourriaud
Nicolas Bourriaud is a French curator and art critic who coined the term ‘relational aesthetics’, which he outlined in 1995. From 2002 to 2006 he was co-director of the Palais de Tokyo, Paris (with Jérôme Sans). Bourriaud founded the magazine Documents (1992-2000), and served as the Paris correspondent for Flash Art.
Bourriaud published Relational Aesthetics (2002) and Postproduction (2001). He defines as ‘relational’ art which takes as its theoretical horizon ‘the realm of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space’.
Nicolas Bourriaud is a consultative board member for MNAC – Muzeul National de Arta Contemporana, Bucharest.
Art and democracy at the founding of foundation
Jonathan Lahey Dronsfield
The building in which MNAC is housed was constructed to found – according to dictator Nicolae Ceausescu who ordered its construction – a ‘new man’. As such it occurs as foundation, not just the foundation of a national identity, but the foundation of foundation itself. It is this essential feature that mnac has to negotiate. But how exactly can art ‘take over’ such a building ‘as a symbol of openness and democracy’, as is claimed for MNAC by Nicolas Bourriaud in his capacity as a founding member of its advisory board?
What is presupposed by such a claim? Might it not repeat something troubling about the building’s original founding? This paper will draw from what is troubling about Bourriaud’s presuppositions about art, and contrary to his notion of relational aesthetics, the sense in which art’s resistance to politics is necessary for the institution of democracy.
Jonathan Lahey Dronsfield is Reader in Theory & Philosophy of Art at the University of Reading and sits on the executive of the Forum for European Philosophy at the London School of Economics, and on the board of AICA (Association Internationale des Critiques d’Art).
He has published various papers in the area of continental philosophy, on art and on ethics especially. Currently he is writing two books: Art’s Resistance to Ethics and Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art. He was a researcher at the theory department of Jan van Eyck Academie from 2004 until 2006.
The obscurantism of facts
Marcus Steinweg
Neither philosophy nor art are matters of proof or opinion. Philosophy and art posit things, they assert. Assertion is distinguished from proof and opinion since it has to make do without certainty. A philosophy of assertion is a philosophy in uncertainty. It surpasses and transgresses the modalities of conventional thinking such as reflection, argument, grounding, and criticism. It is a matter of the subject touching a truth in uncertainty and giving this instance of contact a form, a language. Truth refers to the limits of the world of facts. Philosophy exists only in that it touches these limits. It is an assertion that denies the validity of the imperatives of the factual. Touching upon truth, philosophy has to resist the certainty of opinion and the obscurantism of facts in equal measure. It is a touching of the untouchable and it makes this touching into a life-form.
My aim is to defend the political relevance of art and philosophy against conventional political art and political philosophy. I intend to show that political art and political philosophy establish their own de-politicization. They are not concerned with a politics of freedom, of the impossible and what is most necessary. The politics I am referring to differ from what is usually called politics. This type of politics does not assert or defend interests. It would be about a resistance against the order of socio-political and ideo-cultural reality. It would articulate itself by absolutely refusing the universe of facts and the opinions circulating in this universe. It would be a politics of truth insofar as it considers proof as what comes into conflict with established certainties. It causes the voice of official truth to stutter and be brought to silence.
I want to show that art only has meaning as art. Philosophy only has meaning as philosophy. It does not serve to reduce art and philosophy to the socio-political field in which they articulate themselves. It does not make sense to define the mission of art and philosophy as political. ‘That is the left-wing illusion of the past few decades,’ Heiner Müller argues ‘of European intellectuals and particularly the literati, that there could be and should be a community of interests between art and politics. Ultimately, art cannot be controlled. Or it can always evade control. And for this reason it has been… almost automatically subversive.’
Marcus Steinweg is a philosopher and writer who lives in Berlin. His publications include Krieg der différance and Autofahren mit Lacan (Koblenz, 2001), Der Ozeanomat. Ereignis und Immanenz (Cologne, 2002), Subjektsingularitäten (Berlin, 2004) and Behauptungsphilosophie (Berlin, 2006).
Steinweg regularly collaborates with the Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn in the latter’s publications and large-scale politically inspired art installations, for which Steinweg often writes texts.
Singular object: the house of the republic resisting interpretations
4Space (Augustin Ioan & Ciprian Mihali)
The significance of the Ultimate Edifice and, setting out from it, the Boulevard of Victorious Socialism – or rather the anti-urban phenomenon that is officially called ‘the new civic center’ – has been interpreted lately: their conception and construction and their use from the communist period before 1989 up to the present. Any attempt to set them in order should start from two premises. Firstly, the respective edifice resists any unique, ‘holistic’ interpretation that could exhaust meanings in matters of production and destination. Secondly, there are important distinctions between the modalities of explaining the building from the threefold vantage of its spaces. These spaces are first of all the exterior space, i.e. the city. Next there’s the exterior space of the building, i.e. its close vicinity, in the crooked language of post-Soviet politics or the huge halo of influence that the monstrous structure exuded. Finally, there’s the outer space. Since verifiable data are lacking, oral studies only account for having established the nearly ‘occult’ nature of the biggest urban operation in the history of Romania. These oral sources include unfinished and unpublished studies such as the one by Gérard Althabe from the ehess in Paris and legends recounted by eye-witnesses or just by former ‘initiated persons’ such as Professor Cornel Dumitrescu, the one-time rector of iaim Bucharest. As said, this colossal project owes its imaginary, mythical dimension to the wave of petites histoires it generated.
The most valuable interpretations, even if partial, are to be found not exactly in the discourse on architecture and urbanism but rather in that of the socio-human sciences, political science, history of mentalities, anthropology of the peri-urban (slum), and, not lastly, in psychoanalysis. The various sensible projects submitted in connection with the Republic House after 1989 vacillate between two extremes: the least extreme proposes to ‘recuperate’ the House in a strictly professional jargon of architectural ‘expertise’.
This has been used not only by architects but also by diverse interpreters of the house and by guides who show mesmerized foreigners around. At the bottom line of the bottom-line commentary on the Republic House (as poet Nichita Stanescu would have put it), we are dealing with quantity, size, forms of design, special structures and so on. At the upper line of the bottom line we can approach ‘the postmodernism’ of the House and of the Boulevard of Victorious Socialism, its ‘Bigness’ (Rem Koolhaas) and other concepts that could prove useful. In discussions about the House, the ‘higher’ aspect (in the strict sense of ab/use, of excessive investment with meaning) is taken as an epiphany. The House is like a heavenly Jerusalemite temple elevated in Bucharest in view of a second coming to take place on the spot.
One interpretation renders the numerous social, economic, political folds of the edifice occult – often deliberately because guiltily so. Others go into an interpretative frenzy before it. Between these extremes flutters a practically endless concatenation of ‘grays’. For instance, the nationalist rhetoric is boosted by the apparently neutral data regarding construction technologies and materials that are, apparently, all exclusively Romanian and, of course, superlative. (At times, the Peles Castle comes into the picture as a corollary. Here, even the wood was imported). There are also the much more decent, professionally speaking, but no less phantasmagoric ideas concerning a pre-established plan of Bucharest setting out from utopian, ideal schemes of the Sforzinda type (Dana Harhoiu). The structuring origin of this would be a sacred geometry made up of a monastic ‘Triangle of the Bermudas’, with parish churches laid concentrically in relation to the St. George Old Church that is considered the navel of the city.
4Space is an interdisciplinary group of philosophers, architects, writers, sociologists and geographers dedicated to the critique and writing of urban policies in Romanian cities. It started as a focus-group with the New Europe College institute of advanced studies in Bucharest in 2004 and has a same-titled weekly column on the internet at www.liternet.ro. The group is in the process of publishing a book with contributions of its members at Idea Press in Cluj (2007).
Introduction & moderation
Meta Haven
Meta Haven: Design Research, based in Amsterdam, was founded in 2005 by Vinca Kruk, Daniel van der Velden, Adriaan Mellegers and Tina Clausmeyer. The team first started to collaborate in 2003 with a visual research into the Principality of Sealand, a tiny nation state located on a former war platform in the North Sea.
This project – centered around the pro-active engagement with a non-commissioning subject of interest, coming to terms with myth and symbolism, territorial identity and its diffusion into information networks – was carried out at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht.
Since, Meta Haven is investigating an array of case studies where the linkage between imagination and politics is key. The History Vs. Future project, focusing on the relationship between identity and history, resulted in a research of the House of People in Bucharest. Among the results of this discursive approach are, apart from a series of visual models and scenarios, the conferences The Museum of Conflict and Regimes of Representation.
At the Jan van Eyck Academie in 2007, Van der Velden and Kruk will carry out a research into the French/German internet search engine project Quaero, in collaboration with researchers Tsila Hassine and Gon Zifroni. This research attempts to merge a critical and imaginative understanding of design with a discussion on internet, politics, public domain, and cultural heritage.
Meanwhile, Meta Haven: Design Research is working on a book, Uncorporate Identity, scheduled for publication in Fall, 2007.
Practicalities / Getting there
Admission: free
Language: English
Location: MNAC
The National Museum of Contemporary Art
Izvor St. 2-4, Wing e4
Bucharest
If you would like to travel to Romania from abroad, please check
www.museumofconflict.eu
Advance reservation for this conference is recommended. For bookings please check www.museumofconflict.eu
or contact Carmen Iovitu at MNAC
carmen.iovitu@mnac.ro
Telephone + 40 (0) 21 318 91 37
For information about the conference, please contact Meta Haven
office@metahaven.net
Telephone +31 (0)62 427 67 97
Telephone +31 (0)64 831 65 43
January 8, 2007
Research on Research II: Design Research
Public symposium at Jan van Eyck Academie.
Two lectures and a discussion about the position of, as well as possible methodologies for, design research, with two of its most regarded practitioners: Fiona Raby (Dunne and Raby, London), and David Reinfurt (ORG, New York). Introduction by Daniel van der Velden.
Wednesday November 15, 2006
Government advisor for design: nonsense or necessity?
Debate at press center Nieuwspoort, The Hague, organized by Premsela, Dutch Design Foundation.
A.o. designer Daniel van der Velden, project developer Rudy Stroink, and GroenLinks politician Herman Meijer discussed the issue of a governmental advisor for design. The debate was introduced and moderated by Gert Staal.
See Premsela Foundation.
October 16 – October 20, 2006
Willem de Kooning Academy, Rotterdam
Lecture and workshop by Vinca Kruk. Part of a project week on design and politics. Other lecturers include Thonik, Hans Aarsman, Rutger van Santen, Coolpolitics, Jan Konings, Martin Pyper and Lies Ros.
Willem de Kooning Academy
September 12, 2006
The Museum of Conflict – Art as Political Strategy in Post-Communist Europe
Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht
Organized by Meta Haven, in collaboration with Jonathan Dronsfield and the Jan van Eyck Academie.
Speakers: Minhea Mircan, Calin Dan, Wouter Davidts, Edi Muka, Florian Waldvogel, BAVO, Meta Haven: Design Research
Respondent: Maria Hlavajova
Moderator: Matthias Pauwels (BAVO)
The conference was organized to discuss the question whether ‘art can ever really take over the location of power, being a “symbol of openness and democracy”’, with special regard to the position of the museum and the artistic event, as well as the presence of artists and the art system.
Meta Haven had proposed a main case study, the famous Casa Poporului (People’s House) in Bucharest. This totalitarian icon designed by Nicolae Ceausescu co-locates, apart from the Romanian parliament, a National Museum for Contemporary Art (MNAC).
Speakers
Moderator Matthias Pauwels (BAVO) started by asking how exactly art – either the art system or artists individually – should operate to cause political effect. Unconvinced by the assumption that every artistic act is itself already political, Matthias asked: ‘what openness?’ and ‘what democracy?’, as to undermine or question the precise pretext of these two terms, addressing the role art is sometimes asked to play as an illustration: ‘While democracy is manipulated by the new alliance between economic pragmatism and religio-nationalist idealism, art is supposed to live out the dream of democracy and openness.’
Meta Haven: Design Research (Vinca Kruk, Daniel van der Velden a.o.) presented a lecture entitled Imagination of Engagement, departing from an analysis of the call for ideas that the Italian magazine Domus and its chief editor, Stefano Boeri, launched around the Ryugyong Hotel in Pyongyang, North Korea. Observations from this case study were then transposed to the Casa Poporului and its in-house museum, linking to the ideas of political philosopher Claude Lefort, who imagined the place of power in a democracy as structurally empty. Meta Haven concluded by suggesting that art’s political potency lies not so much in being ‘given’ power, but in taking it.
Mihnea Mircan, curator at MNAC, spoke about the events and exhibitions that took place in the museum since its opening in 2004. Mihnea curates the exhibition series Under Destruction, where the People’s House and its political references are the central framework. Mihnea emphasized that MNAC is a site specific project, in part one that seeks to come to terms with the meaning of the building for Romanian society. As for the opposition that MNAC has encountered since the beginning, Mihnea responds by asking the question what, then, would be a valid alternative for art to deal with the history of the People’s House.
Artist Calin Dan, based in Amsterdam and Bucharest, spoke about Linna Hall in Talinn, Estonia, describing how after the fall of the Soviet republic, this power structure has become a space for public events, functioning rather as a square than a building. Working from a list of general characteristics of totalitarian architecture, Calin also highlighted important differences in architectural and urban strategy between Linna Hall and Casa Popolurui – the former being built as a landmark coinciding with the Moscow Olympic Games.
Gideon Boie (BAVO) used as his main example the case of W.I.M.B.Y., a multidisciplinary project initiated by Rotterdam-based think tank Crimson, to redevelop and ‘pimp’ the post-war town of Hoogvliet (near Rotterdam), based on grass-roots energies and aesthetics with the help of both signature designers, and local politics. Gideon argued that precisely in the appropriation of semi-underground and even ‘ugly’ artistic strategies by the government, art’s political moment is lost.
Wouter Davidts, architect and architectural theorist, started with the example of the Palais de Justice in Brussels. This building was referred to once as a ‘crazy monument to a civilization and society that no longer believes in neither architecture nor justice, but simply adores progress’. Departing from a quote from Geert Bekaert stating that ‘architecture can be no secret code in a society that calls itself democratic’, Wouter plead for an architecture that, ‘in an era of blatant political and cultural populism’, has a decisive role in the ‘”formation” of the various public institutions – not only the courthouse, but “bourgeois” institutions such as the opera, the library, the theatre and the museum.’
Edi Muka, curator based in Stockholm and Tirana, demonstrated that in Eastern Europe with the gradual drawback of Soros-founded art spaces, often a cultural institution has become a kind of hollow shell that, while equipped with staff and facilities, has to painstakingly apply for funding time and time again in order to be able to carry out any activities whatsoever. He spoke about this in relation to the Pyramid Cultural Centre that was located in the former mausoleum of Tiranian dictator Enver Hoxha, and in relation to the Tirana Biennial.
Florian Waldvogel, curator at Witte de With, Rotterdam, and member of the curatorial team for the cancelled Manifesta 6 in Nicosia, Cyprus, spoke about the events he organized at Kokerei Zollverein, in a former industrial complex in Germany.
Among these were some that engaged in direct political action. Florian demonstrated a ‘hands-on’ attitude towards art and politics. He briefly mentioned, but refused to theorize about the cancellation of Manifesta 6 by the major of Nicosia, where the event’s curators had hoped to involve both sides of the Greek/Turkish city.
Discussion
Matthias Pauwels kicked off the discussion by taking an example mentioned earlier by Mihnea Mircan. In one of the projects he curated, artist Santiago Sierra hired actors who would wander through a corridor in the People’s House in Bucharest, begging for money with visitors. Matthias asked the speakers and audience present to vote ‘for’ a version where the actors would be replaced by real beggars, and art would thus not ‘translate’ or ‘envision’ but directly provide access to the social problems of Bucharest. While an actual voting did not take place, Maria Hlavajova, artistic director of BAK and curator of the Dutch pavilion in the 2007 Venice Biennial, launched a fierce criticism on MNAC, stating that, apart from its location, it misuses the artistic integrity of the exhibiting artists by having them create work about the People’s House. Minhea responded by saying that although, indeed, a number of works were created about the building, it is not an obligation. The situation that Romanian politics do not interfere with MNAC’s programme, subsequently came to lay under fire, as the museum receives no support either, so that in fact, Matthias provocatively suggested, this tolerance could be explained as both as indifference, or even as censorship. It was emphasized again – also by Maria – how much, once an actual institution has been created, the problem then lies in running it.
Daniel van der Velden returned to an initial reason for Meta Haven organizing this conference: that the totalitarian building functions as a ‘symbol’, the meaning of which is strongly connected to the distribution of its image. Following this logic, (an institution like) MNAC would be not just about affecting the physical reality of the People’s House, but also about its symbolic meaning, as experienced by audiences distanciated from it in time and space.
The conference was concluded by a dinner for audience and speakers in the Jan van Eyck’s exhibition space.
A detailed outline of talks presented, as well as a transcription of the discussion, will be made available in the coming months via this web site, as well as via www.museumofconflict.eu
A second conference on the topic is planned for January, 2007, at MNAC in Bucharest.
For inquiries, contact Meta Haven.
September 6, 2006
D.A.R.E. - Dutch Artistic Research Event
Centraal Museum, Utrecht
A collaboration between Casco, MAHKU and Centraal Museum
Speakers including Pauline Terreehorst, Henk Slager, Daniel van der Velden, Martin Beck, Esther Cleven, Emily King, Stephan Dillemuth, Wendelien van Oldenborgh and Dave Hullfish Bailey.
D.A.R.E. symposium
June 15 - October 10, 2006
Work from Mars
Moravian Gallery, Brno, Czech Republic
Group exhibition at Brno Biennale of Graphic Design
Work from Mars
Curated by Radim Pesko and Adam Mahacek
May 18, 2006, London
Meta Haven presentation at London College of Communication (LCC).
May 17, 2006, Leeds
Meta Haven at Leeds Metropolitan University, symposium Unknown Territory with a.o. David Reinfurt/O-R-G, Femke Snelting, Paul Elliman.
Organized by LUST at the Leeds School of Contemporary Art and Graphic Design.
See symposium web site
March 15, 2006, Design Academy Eindhoven
Nieuwe beelden voor Nederland, lectures/discussions involving a.o. Rutger Wolfson, Annelys de Vet, Daniel van der Velden, plus presentations by Design Academy students.
The lecture Symbool X by Daniel van der Velden can be downloaded here (in Dutch).
Download Pdf
This text has been written in response to the project Nieuwe symbolen voor Nederland at de Vleeshal (see Rutger Wolfson, ed., Nieuwe symbolen voor Nederland, Valiz, Amsterdam 2005).
January 17, 2006, Innsbruck
Meta Haven at Künstlerhaus Buchsenhausen with a presentation entitled Uncorporate Identity.
Part of a series of Jan van Eyck Academie presentations.
December 2, 2005, Brussels
Design and contemporary society
Download Pdf
With Daniel van der Velden and Paul Boudens. Lecture series on design. Moderator: Gert Staal. Location: Beursschouwburg, Brussels. Organized by TOR, Belgium.
Daniel van der Velden's lecture on design research, Design Research versus the Content Factory, has been published in Metropolis M under the new title Research & Destroy.
November 16, 2005, Amsterdam
Logo Parc
Wouter Vanstiphout, Friedrich von Borries, Kamiel Klaasse, Gerard Hadders, Roemer van Toorn, Daniel van der Velden and Jouke Kleerebezem.
Kick-off symposium to the new Jan van Eyck research project 'Logo Parc', taking place at Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam. 'Logo Parc' is carried out in association with with Lectoraat Kunst en Publieke Ruimte (Gerrit Rietveld Academy / University of Amsterdam, supported by SKOR and Virtual Museum Zuidas) and Premsela Dutch Design Foundation.
October 28 – November 13, 2005, Leeds
LSx: Leeds Unknown
Exhibition at Leeds Metropolitan University, organized by Thomas Castro and LUST as a kick-off to their research project. Participants: Bas Princen, Mateusz, O-R-G, Meta Haven, Paul Elliman, Will Holder, Floor, Letterror, LUST , RAL2005, Min & Sulki Choi, Lucy Gibson.
October 17, 2005, Maastricht
History vs. Future #3: Two scenarios for a dialogue by Vinca Kruk.
In this presentation, Vinca Kruk presented prototypes for the corporate identity of Nicolae Ceausescu’s Palace of Parliament in Bucharest, Romania. Location: Jan van Eyck Academie.
More details on the project History Vs. Future are following soon.
Research on Research III
Design Practice Research
Sara de Bondt, Ksenija Berk, Abake, Luna Maurer & Christoph Keller
Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht
Organized and curated by David Bennewith, Katja Gretzinger, Nina Støttrup Larsen and Daniel van der Velden
Moderated by Daniel van der Velden
Download PdfDecember 4, 2007
Vinca Kruk guest critic at the Willem de Kooning Academy
Daniel van der Velden guest critic at the Berlage Institute
November 28, 2007, 16:00
X-currency
The politics of added value in design
Lecture at Studium Generale, Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam
Artists and designers add value to objects. To design means to deal with the material quality of the physical or virtual object and the practical quality of its usage, while adding something to it that is at once immaterial and useless. That is where the value is. The most succesful of designs add a surplus of value to rather nonexceptional materials and functions.
Precisely what is valuable about added value, seems to be out of reach of pragmatic decisions. We all know the ‘X-factor’, the apparently irrational ‘je ne sais quoi’ of talent as it crystallizes in television shows. In practical, this X-factor will often turn out to be an imperfection. The X-factor is an indicator for attention – we will feel bound to keep watching in order to try and understand what it is.
Added value amounts to incorporating what is unconditioned, resistant or rebellious towards the dominant values of a given system, into that system.
Yet, the X-factor also harbours the potential of aesthetic surprise, which is an event with political consequences. It’s all about the political spectrum in which added value gets coined. Does it need to be the typology of private consumption, as is now mostly the case? Or are there other possibilities?
October 21 - November 14, 2007
Nation Brand Paradox
Project with Daniel van der Velden at Yale University.
Tuesday October 30, 2007
Mayhem and Mouffe
Lecture by Daniel van der Velden at Yale University, School of Art, Green Hall, Graphic Design Atrium, 1156 Chapel Street, New Haven
October 21, 2007
Post-design
Lecture by Vinca Kruk and Gon Zifroni at Dutch Design Week, Eindhoven
In anticipation of the forthcoming Metahaven publication White Night Before A Manifesto, this lecture crosses the elements with which so-called creative practices are involved, including (in order of appearance): citizen, surface, value, fiction, identity, cultures, borders, software and the strike.
In a post-design approach to design, there is no longer a distinction between the professional work and the immaterial labour of 'free time'. What is at stake is the withering away of function, parallelled by a perpetual creation of fictitious worlds that are ever more demanding. These new aesthetic worlds on the one hand are surfaces beset with an ungraspable imaginary value; on the other hand these are the 'shadow forces' which channel cultural exchange in the name of economical growth and appear to render existing physical borders obsolete.
October 16 - 18, 2007
Typeface as History
Workshop by Daniel van der Velden at the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe.
Typography is not just a carrier of human knowledge, but also of history. Either consciously or unconsciously, history can be written through, or recorded in the specific forms of a typeface. In this workshop I will ask participants to conceptualize and visualize the elements of a new typeface through which history is either written or recorded (or both). Rather than looking at the mere legibility or formal aspects of type I am asking to look at its relations with society, politics and history – and thus at its potential to become a form of storage or report for these relations. It might bring us to the following question: ‘What would a contemporary Trajan capital look like?’
October 11, 2007
National (Re)presentation
Talk with PoCA (Political Currency of Art Research Group, Goldsmiths, London) at Witte de With, Rotterdam.
Daniel van der Velden and Clair Beke, discussion with Suhail Malik and Andrea Phillips about nation branding.
Part of Citizens and Subjects: Practices and Debates.
Download PdfSeptember 29 & 30, 2007
Forum on Quaero
a public think tank on the politics of the search engine
Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht
Download Pdf2 days of discussion starting Saturday 29 September at 11 a.m.
Florian Cramer, Jodi Dean, Frédéric Martel, Ingmar Weber, Isabelle Stengers, Bureau d’Études, Metahaven, Tsila Hassine, Open Search, Michael Zimmer, Richard Rogers, Florian Schneider, Maurits de Bruijn, Sabine Niederer, André Nusselder
Quaero: isn’t that the search engine that former French president Jacques Chirac declared to be the European challenge to Google? A public alternative to Silicon Valley-born commercial search engines, funded by the French state, in service of the public good, in the true tradition of the grand projet? An information machine capable of reclaiming European language and intellectual heritage in the age of globalization?
No. Quaero is the name of a consortium of technology firms and research labs working together on multimedia and web search projects. It is a state-sponsored effort to stimulate private French technological competitiveness.
According to François Bourdoncle, one of its participating developers, ‘Quaero is definitely not a project to build a web search engine, it is a project to make significant advances on the handling and indexing of multimedia content. It is completely out of the question to build a new, state-owned, state-operated, or even state-funded search engine. Only the R&D around these cutting-edge multimedia indexing technologies are in the scope of the project.’
But still, the issues that the idea of Quaero has raised – since its public launch by the former French president – constitute a formidable challenge. Internet search engines are political projects proper if only because they give and take power; they represent science, technology, (trans)national politics, private enterprise, culture, territoriality and language in ever different combinations. They are also social spaces. Internet search, the indispensable public tool that allows one to survey the ever increasing web, is currently in the hands of only a few global players, to whose private interests its setup corresponds.
Forum on Quaero
On 29 and 30 September 2007, the Jan van Eyck Academie, in collaboration with the Maison Descartes, Institut Français des Pays-Bas, organizes the Forum on Quaero, taking the concept of the search engine as a pubic project as a starting point.
Search engines’ indexation methods inevitably lead to moments of inclusion and exclusion (sometimes by hands-on censorship). Search engines closely monitor their users’ behaviour and offer additional services, retrieving and storing increasing amounts of private information from them. The majority of web search is carried out through only a few, very large corporate search engines which communicate ideas about their role in the world via their brand identities. These may lead to distorted impressions of what the commercial search engine as a institution really entails. This conference aims to bridge the gap between politics, policies and practices in the field of web search. Some questions:
• What are the politics of the structure and image of search engines and their technologies?
• To what extent have search engines like Google, which started from the ideal of access to information, become the modus operandi of political bias? Can we envisage scenarios for the search engine as a public domain institution?
• What kind of hierarchy (if any) should be implemented when deciding what should go into a search engine’s database, and what is left out?
• Can contemporary web practices tackle the conventional static models used to archive and present (institutional) concepts of cultural heritage and democracy?
• Collaborative and participatory methods are increasingly placing the Demos as the force that structures information. Can we work towards a ‘politics of code & categorization’ that allows plural interpretations of data to coexist and enrich each other?
• How can concepts of digital and networked European cultural heritage reflect the political and social issues related to Europe’s changing borders?
The Forum encourages and facilitates audience participation; it is meant as a public think tank, a live sketchbook around new questions for the search engine.
Initiated by Metahaven
Curated by Tsila Hassine, Vinca Kruk, Daniel van der Velden and Gon Zifroni
Partners: Jan van Eyck Academie, Maison Descartes Amsterdam
September 19 & 20, 2007
Designing Politics - The Politics of Design
Daniel van der Velden at the annual hearing of the IFG Ulm.
July 3, 2007
20:00 hrs
Signs
Lecture by Meta Haven at SMART Project Space, Amsterdam
June 14, 2007, 13:30 hrs
Vinca Kruk, Gon Zifroni and others
presentation at
A flag for the region Meuse-Rhine
Euregional Forum
Glaspaleis Heerlen
June 6, 2007
Daniel van der Velden
lecture at
Moving in Free Zones
at B.a.d. Foundation, Rotterdam.
A project by iStrike Foundation.
June 2 - July 7, 2007
A Number of Worlds Resembling Our Own
Group exhibition at SMART Project Space, Amsterdam
with Carlos Garaicoa, Richard Grayson, Pia Roenicke, Anu Pennanen, Vangelis Vlahos and Meta Haven: Design Research.
Saturday March 24, 2007
Meta Haven, The Design of Evil
at Towards a New Visualization of Secrecy?
Representations of Secrecy within Contemporary Terrorism and Counterterrorism
go to web site
at Stedelijk Museum CS Amsterdam
Presentations by Tariq Ali, Trevor Paglen, Naeem Mohaimen, Meta Haven: Design Research, Jordan Crandall, Nicholas Mirzoeff
and others.
Curated and initiated by Tina Clausmeyer
Monday February 19, 2007
Research Design
Thinking visual communication before assignments
Lecture by Daniel van der Velden
at Royal Academy of Arts, The Hague
January 11, 2007
Regimes of Representation:
Art & Politics Beyond the House of People
Symposium, MNAC, Bucharest
The complete conference report will follow soon.
January 11, 2007
Regimes of Representation:
Art & Politics Beyond the House of People
Symposium, MNAC, Bucharest
On January 11, 2007, a conference was organized in the former House of People in Bucharest – more precisely, in Romania’s national museum of contemporay art: MNAC. The title of the conference is Regimes of Representation: Art & Politics Beyond the House of People. The subject of the conference is the very location where the event is being held. The Palatul Parlamentului and its current co-function as a museum, will be the point of departure for a discussion of the relation between post-communist politics, imagination and representation. MNAC is one of various attempts to use contemporary art to transform a former ‘totalitarian’ symbol into one for democracy, but it is unique in simultaneously being the seat of government. The central question for the conference is: can art ever ‘take over the central point of power, being a symbol of openness and democracy’? Can, consequently, imagination influence or take over the meaning of a building that is an essential logo of totalitarian rule? How does Romania’s first national contemporary art institution employ the symbolic to express a constructed national identity, by using (totalitarian) foundation? Can we speak of a reverse ‘Bilbao Effect?’ And how does the institutionalization of contemporary art reflect the imperative to democratize since the fall of communism? With Chantal Mouffe, Nicolas Bourriaud, Jonathan Lahey Dronsfield, Marcus Steinweg, 4space, Ruxandra Balaci and Meta Haven.
Organized by the Jan van Eyck Academie and Meta Haven: Design Research. Generously supported by the Royal Netherlands Embassy in Bucharest.
10.15
Registration
11.15
Welcome – Ruxandra Balaci, artistic director MNAC
11.30
Introduction – Vinca Kruk
11.45
Keynote – Chantal Mouffe
12.45
Lecture – Nicolas Bourriaud
13.30
lunch
14.00
Lecture – Jonathan Lahey Dronsfield
14.45
Lecture – Marcus Steinweg
15.30
Lecture – 4Space (Augustin Ioan & Ciprian Mihali)
16.15
break
16.30
Round table discussion with all speakers – moderated by Daniel van der Velden
17.30
Drinks
Abstracts / Biographies
Agonistic politics and artistic practices
Chantal Mouffe – Keynote lecture
In my presentation I will discuss the different ways to envisage the public space and scrutinize the implications of this discussion for artistic practices. My argument will be that public art is not art located in a place that is public – as opposed to private space. Public art is art that institutes a public space, in the sense of a common action by people. I will for instance address the question of what kind of public progressive art institutions should try to institute: a public space that aims at establishing consensus or a public space of agonistic confrontation?
Taking my bearings from my previous work, I will first show that the task of democratic politics is not to aggregate interests or to attempt at reaching a rational consensus, but to transform antagonism into agonism. Then I will draw the consequences of this approach to understand the relation between art and politics and to grasp the nature of critical artistic practices. What is at stake, I will argue, is the questioning of the dominant hegemony by bringing to the fore all the aspects that the dominant consensus is trying to repress. I will insist on the multiplicity of ways in which this consensus can be undermined and show that artistic practices can contribute in a variety of ways to the fostering of new forms of subjectivities.
Chantal Mouffe is Professor of Political Theory at the Centre for the Study of Democracy at the University of Westminster in London. She has taught and researched at a number of universities in Europe, North America and South America. She is member of the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris. She was editor of Gramsci and Marxist Theory (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1979), Dimensions of Radical Democracy. Pluralism, Citizenship, Community (Verso, London, 1992), Deconstruction and Pragmatism (Routledge, London, 1996) and The Challenge of Carl Schmitt, (Verso, London, 1999). She co-authored with Ernesto Laclau Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (Verso, London, 1985) and was the author of The Return of the Political (Verso, London, 1993), The Democratic Paradox (Verso, London, 2000) and On the Political (Routledge, London, 2005).
Nicolas Bourriaud
Nicolas Bourriaud is a French curator and art critic who coined the term ‘relational aesthetics’, which he outlined in 1995. From 2002 to 2006 he was co-director of the Palais de Tokyo, Paris (with Jérôme Sans). Bourriaud founded the magazine Documents (1992-2000), and served as the Paris correspondent for Flash Art.
Bourriaud published Relational Aesthetics (2002) and Postproduction (2001). He defines as ‘relational’ art which takes as its theoretical horizon ‘the realm of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space’.
Nicolas Bourriaud is a consultative board member for MNAC – Muzeul National de Arta Contemporana, Bucharest.
Art and democracy at the founding of foundation
Jonathan Lahey Dronsfield
The building in which MNAC is housed was constructed to found – according to dictator Nicolae Ceausescu who ordered its construction – a ‘new man’. As such it occurs as foundation, not just the foundation of a national identity, but the foundation of foundation itself. It is this essential feature that mnac has to negotiate. But how exactly can art ‘take over’ such a building ‘as a symbol of openness and democracy’, as is claimed for MNAC by Nicolas Bourriaud in his capacity as a founding member of its advisory board?
What is presupposed by such a claim? Might it not repeat something troubling about the building’s original founding? This paper will draw from what is troubling about Bourriaud’s presuppositions about art, and contrary to his notion of relational aesthetics, the sense in which art’s resistance to politics is necessary for the institution of democracy.
Jonathan Lahey Dronsfield is Reader in Theory & Philosophy of Art at the University of Reading and sits on the executive of the Forum for European Philosophy at the London School of Economics, and on the board of AICA (Association Internationale des Critiques d’Art).
He has published various papers in the area of continental philosophy, on art and on ethics especially. Currently he is writing two books: Art’s Resistance to Ethics and Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art. He was a researcher at the theory department of Jan van Eyck Academie from 2004 until 2006.
The obscurantism of facts
Marcus Steinweg
Neither philosophy nor art are matters of proof or opinion. Philosophy and art posit things, they assert. Assertion is distinguished from proof and opinion since it has to make do without certainty. A philosophy of assertion is a philosophy in uncertainty. It surpasses and transgresses the modalities of conventional thinking such as reflection, argument, grounding, and criticism. It is a matter of the subject touching a truth in uncertainty and giving this instance of contact a form, a language. Truth refers to the limits of the world of facts. Philosophy exists only in that it touches these limits. It is an assertion that denies the validity of the imperatives of the factual. Touching upon truth, philosophy has to resist the certainty of opinion and the obscurantism of facts in equal measure. It is a touching of the untouchable and it makes this touching into a life-form.
My aim is to defend the political relevance of art and philosophy against conventional political art and political philosophy. I intend to show that political art and political philosophy establish their own de-politicization. They are not concerned with a politics of freedom, of the impossible and what is most necessary. The politics I am referring to differ from what is usually called politics. This type of politics does not assert or defend interests. It would be about a resistance against the order of socio-political and ideo-cultural reality. It would articulate itself by absolutely refusing the universe of facts and the opinions circulating in this universe. It would be a politics of truth insofar as it considers proof as what comes into conflict with established certainties. It causes the voice of official truth to stutter and be brought to silence.
I want to show that art only has meaning as art. Philosophy only has meaning as philosophy. It does not serve to reduce art and philosophy to the socio-political field in which they articulate themselves. It does not make sense to define the mission of art and philosophy as political. ‘That is the left-wing illusion of the past few decades,’ Heiner Müller argues ‘of European intellectuals and particularly the literati, that there could be and should be a community of interests between art and politics. Ultimately, art cannot be controlled. Or it can always evade control. And for this reason it has been… almost automatically subversive.’
Marcus Steinweg is a philosopher and writer who lives in Berlin. His publications include Krieg der différance and Autofahren mit Lacan (Koblenz, 2001), Der Ozeanomat. Ereignis und Immanenz (Cologne, 2002), Subjektsingularitäten (Berlin, 2004) and Behauptungsphilosophie (Berlin, 2006).
Steinweg regularly collaborates with the Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn in the latter’s publications and large-scale politically inspired art installations, for which Steinweg often writes texts.
Singular object: the house of the republic resisting interpretations
4Space (Augustin Ioan & Ciprian Mihali)
The significance of the Ultimate Edifice and, setting out from it, the Boulevard of Victorious Socialism – or rather the anti-urban phenomenon that is officially called ‘the new civic center’ – has been interpreted lately: their conception and construction and their use from the communist period before 1989 up to the present. Any attempt to set them in order should start from two premises. Firstly, the respective edifice resists any unique, ‘holistic’ interpretation that could exhaust meanings in matters of production and destination. Secondly, there are important distinctions between the modalities of explaining the building from the threefold vantage of its spaces. These spaces are first of all the exterior space, i.e. the city. Next there’s the exterior space of the building, i.e. its close vicinity, in the crooked language of post-Soviet politics or the huge halo of influence that the monstrous structure exuded. Finally, there’s the outer space. Since verifiable data are lacking, oral studies only account for having established the nearly ‘occult’ nature of the biggest urban operation in the history of Romania. These oral sources include unfinished and unpublished studies such as the one by Gérard Althabe from the ehess in Paris and legends recounted by eye-witnesses or just by former ‘initiated persons’ such as Professor Cornel Dumitrescu, the one-time rector of iaim Bucharest. As said, this colossal project owes its imaginary, mythical dimension to the wave of petites histoires it generated.
The most valuable interpretations, even if partial, are to be found not exactly in the discourse on architecture and urbanism but rather in that of the socio-human sciences, political science, history of mentalities, anthropology of the peri-urban (slum), and, not lastly, in psychoanalysis. The various sensible projects submitted in connection with the Republic House after 1989 vacillate between two extremes: the least extreme proposes to ‘recuperate’ the House in a strictly professional jargon of architectural ‘expertise’.
This has been used not only by architects but also by diverse interpreters of the house and by guides who show mesmerized foreigners around. At the bottom line of the bottom-line commentary on the Republic House (as poet Nichita Stanescu would have put it), we are dealing with quantity, size, forms of design, special structures and so on. At the upper line of the bottom line we can approach ‘the postmodernism’ of the House and of the Boulevard of Victorious Socialism, its ‘Bigness’ (Rem Koolhaas) and other concepts that could prove useful. In discussions about the House, the ‘higher’ aspect (in the strict sense of ab/use, of excessive investment with meaning) is taken as an epiphany. The House is like a heavenly Jerusalemite temple elevated in Bucharest in view of a second coming to take place on the spot.
One interpretation renders the numerous social, economic, political folds of the edifice occult – often deliberately because guiltily so. Others go into an interpretative frenzy before it. Between these extremes flutters a practically endless concatenation of ‘grays’. For instance, the nationalist rhetoric is boosted by the apparently neutral data regarding construction technologies and materials that are, apparently, all exclusively Romanian and, of course, superlative. (At times, the Peles Castle comes into the picture as a corollary. Here, even the wood was imported). There are also the much more decent, professionally speaking, but no less phantasmagoric ideas concerning a pre-established plan of Bucharest setting out from utopian, ideal schemes of the Sforzinda type (Dana Harhoiu). The structuring origin of this would be a sacred geometry made up of a monastic ‘Triangle of the Bermudas’, with parish churches laid concentrically in relation to the St. George Old Church that is considered the navel of the city.
4Space is an interdisciplinary group of philosophers, architects, writers, sociologists and geographers dedicated to the critique and writing of urban policies in Romanian cities. It started as a focus-group with the New Europe College institute of advanced studies in Bucharest in 2004 and has a same-titled weekly column on the internet at www.liternet.ro. The group is in the process of publishing a book with contributions of its members at Idea Press in Cluj (2007).
Introduction & moderation
Meta Haven
Meta Haven: Design Research, based in Amsterdam, was founded in 2005 by Vinca Kruk, Daniel van der Velden, Adriaan Mellegers and Tina Clausmeyer. The team first started to collaborate in 2003 with a visual research into the Principality of Sealand, a tiny nation state located on a former war platform in the North Sea.
This project – centered around the pro-active engagement with a non-commissioning subject of interest, coming to terms with myth and symbolism, territorial identity and its diffusion into information networks – was carried out at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht.
Since, Meta Haven is investigating an array of case studies where the linkage between imagination and politics is key. The History Vs. Future project, focusing on the relationship between identity and history, resulted in a research of the House of People in Bucharest. Among the results of this discursive approach are, apart from a series of visual models and scenarios, the conferences The Museum of Conflict and Regimes of Representation.
At the Jan van Eyck Academie in 2007, Van der Velden and Kruk will carry out a research into the French/German internet search engine project Quaero, in collaboration with researchers Tsila Hassine and Gon Zifroni. This research attempts to merge a critical and imaginative understanding of design with a discussion on internet, politics, public domain, and cultural heritage.
Meanwhile, Meta Haven: Design Research is working on a book, Uncorporate Identity, scheduled for publication in Fall, 2007.
Practicalities / Getting there
Admission: free
Language: English
Location: MNAC
The National Museum of Contemporary Art
Izvor St. 2-4, Wing e4
Bucharest
If you would like to travel to Romania from abroad, please check
www.museumofconflict.eu
Advance reservation for this conference is recommended. For bookings please check www.museumofconflict.eu
or contact Carmen Iovitu at MNAC
carmen.iovitu@mnac.ro
Telephone + 40 (0) 21 318 91 37
For information about the conference, please contact Meta Haven
office@metahaven.net
Telephone +31 (0)62 427 67 97
Telephone +31 (0)64 831 65 43
January 8, 2007
Research on Research II: Design Research
Public symposium at Jan van Eyck Academie.
Two lectures and a discussion about the position of, as well as possible methodologies for, design research, with two of its most regarded practitioners: Fiona Raby (Dunne and Raby, London), and David Reinfurt (ORG, New York). Introduction by Daniel van der Velden.
Wednesday November 15, 2006
Government advisor for design: nonsense or necessity?
Debate at press center Nieuwspoort, The Hague, organized by Premsela, Dutch Design Foundation.
A.o. designer Daniel van der Velden, project developer Rudy Stroink, and GroenLinks politician Herman Meijer discussed the issue of a governmental advisor for design. The debate was introduced and moderated by Gert Staal.
See Premsela Foundation.
October 16 – October 20, 2006
Willem de Kooning Academy, Rotterdam
Lecture and workshop by Vinca Kruk. Part of a project week on design and politics. Other lecturers include Thonik, Hans Aarsman, Rutger van Santen, Coolpolitics, Jan Konings, Martin Pyper and Lies Ros.
Willem de Kooning Academy
September 12, 2006
The Museum of Conflict – Art as Political Strategy in Post-Communist Europe
Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht
Organized by Meta Haven, in collaboration with Jonathan Dronsfield and the Jan van Eyck Academie.
Speakers: Minhea Mircan, Calin Dan, Wouter Davidts, Edi Muka, Florian Waldvogel, BAVO, Meta Haven: Design Research
Respondent: Maria Hlavajova
Moderator: Matthias Pauwels (BAVO)
The conference was organized to discuss the question whether ‘art can ever really take over the location of power, being a “symbol of openness and democracy”’, with special regard to the position of the museum and the artistic event, as well as the presence of artists and the art system.
Meta Haven had proposed a main case study, the famous Casa Poporului (People’s House) in Bucharest. This totalitarian icon designed by Nicolae Ceausescu co-locates, apart from the Romanian parliament, a National Museum for Contemporary Art (MNAC).
Speakers
Moderator Matthias Pauwels (BAVO) started by asking how exactly art – either the art system or artists individually – should operate to cause political effect. Unconvinced by the assumption that every artistic act is itself already political, Matthias asked: ‘what openness?’ and ‘what democracy?’, as to undermine or question the precise pretext of these two terms, addressing the role art is sometimes asked to play as an illustration: ‘While democracy is manipulated by the new alliance between economic pragmatism and religio-nationalist idealism, art is supposed to live out the dream of democracy and openness.’
Meta Haven: Design Research (Vinca Kruk, Daniel van der Velden a.o.) presented a lecture entitled Imagination of Engagement, departing from an analysis of the call for ideas that the Italian magazine Domus and its chief editor, Stefano Boeri, launched around the Ryugyong Hotel in Pyongyang, North Korea. Observations from this case study were then transposed to the Casa Poporului and its in-house museum, linking to the ideas of political philosopher Claude Lefort, who imagined the place of power in a democracy as structurally empty. Meta Haven concluded by suggesting that art’s political potency lies not so much in being ‘given’ power, but in taking it.
Mihnea Mircan, curator at MNAC, spoke about the events and exhibitions that took place in the museum since its opening in 2004. Mihnea curates the exhibition series Under Destruction, where the People’s House and its political references are the central framework. Mihnea emphasized that MNAC is a site specific project, in part one that seeks to come to terms with the meaning of the building for Romanian society. As for the opposition that MNAC has encountered since the beginning, Mihnea responds by asking the question what, then, would be a valid alternative for art to deal with the history of the People’s House.
Artist Calin Dan, based in Amsterdam and Bucharest, spoke about Linna Hall in Talinn, Estonia, describing how after the fall of the Soviet republic, this power structure has become a space for public events, functioning rather as a square than a building. Working from a list of general characteristics of totalitarian architecture, Calin also highlighted important differences in architectural and urban strategy between Linna Hall and Casa Popolurui – the former being built as a landmark coinciding with the Moscow Olympic Games.
Gideon Boie (BAVO) used as his main example the case of W.I.M.B.Y., a multidisciplinary project initiated by Rotterdam-based think tank Crimson, to redevelop and ‘pimp’ the post-war town of Hoogvliet (near Rotterdam), based on grass-roots energies and aesthetics with the help of both signature designers, and local politics. Gideon argued that precisely in the appropriation of semi-underground and even ‘ugly’ artistic strategies by the government, art’s political moment is lost.
Wouter Davidts, architect and architectural theorist, started with the example of the Palais de Justice in Brussels. This building was referred to once as a ‘crazy monument to a civilization and society that no longer believes in neither architecture nor justice, but simply adores progress’. Departing from a quote from Geert Bekaert stating that ‘architecture can be no secret code in a society that calls itself democratic’, Wouter plead for an architecture that, ‘in an era of blatant political and cultural populism’, has a decisive role in the ‘”formation” of the various public institutions – not only the courthouse, but “bourgeois” institutions such as the opera, the library, the theatre and the museum.’
Edi Muka, curator based in Stockholm and Tirana, demonstrated that in Eastern Europe with the gradual drawback of Soros-founded art spaces, often a cultural institution has become a kind of hollow shell that, while equipped with staff and facilities, has to painstakingly apply for funding time and time again in order to be able to carry out any activities whatsoever. He spoke about this in relation to the Pyramid Cultural Centre that was located in the former mausoleum of Tiranian dictator Enver Hoxha, and in relation to the Tirana Biennial.
Florian Waldvogel, curator at Witte de With, Rotterdam, and member of the curatorial team for the cancelled Manifesta 6 in Nicosia, Cyprus, spoke about the events he organized at Kokerei Zollverein, in a former industrial complex in Germany.
Among these were some that engaged in direct political action. Florian demonstrated a ‘hands-on’ attitude towards art and politics. He briefly mentioned, but refused to theorize about the cancellation of Manifesta 6 by the major of Nicosia, where the event’s curators had hoped to involve both sides of the Greek/Turkish city.
Discussion
Matthias Pauwels kicked off the discussion by taking an example mentioned earlier by Mihnea Mircan. In one of the projects he curated, artist Santiago Sierra hired actors who would wander through a corridor in the People’s House in Bucharest, begging for money with visitors. Matthias asked the speakers and audience present to vote ‘for’ a version where the actors would be replaced by real beggars, and art would thus not ‘translate’ or ‘envision’ but directly provide access to the social problems of Bucharest. While an actual voting did not take place, Maria Hlavajova, artistic director of BAK and curator of the Dutch pavilion in the 2007 Venice Biennial, launched a fierce criticism on MNAC, stating that, apart from its location, it misuses the artistic integrity of the exhibiting artists by having them create work about the People’s House. Minhea responded by saying that although, indeed, a number of works were created about the building, it is not an obligation. The situation that Romanian politics do not interfere with MNAC’s programme, subsequently came to lay under fire, as the museum receives no support either, so that in fact, Matthias provocatively suggested, this tolerance could be explained as both as indifference, or even as censorship. It was emphasized again – also by Maria – how much, once an actual institution has been created, the problem then lies in running it.
Daniel van der Velden returned to an initial reason for Meta Haven organizing this conference: that the totalitarian building functions as a ‘symbol’, the meaning of which is strongly connected to the distribution of its image. Following this logic, (an institution like) MNAC would be not just about affecting the physical reality of the People’s House, but also about its symbolic meaning, as experienced by audiences distanciated from it in time and space.
The conference was concluded by a dinner for audience and speakers in the Jan van Eyck’s exhibition space.
A detailed outline of talks presented, as well as a transcription of the discussion, will be made available in the coming months via this web site, as well as via www.museumofconflict.eu
A second conference on the topic is planned for January, 2007, at MNAC in Bucharest.
For inquiries, contact Meta Haven.
September 6, 2006
D.A.R.E. - Dutch Artistic Research Event
Centraal Museum, Utrecht
A collaboration between Casco, MAHKU and Centraal Museum
Speakers including Pauline Terreehorst, Henk Slager, Daniel van der Velden, Martin Beck, Esther Cleven, Emily King, Stephan Dillemuth, Wendelien van Oldenborgh and Dave Hullfish Bailey.
D.A.R.E. symposium
June 15 - October 10, 2006
Work from Mars
Moravian Gallery, Brno, Czech Republic
Group exhibition at Brno Biennale of Graphic Design
Work from Mars
Curated by Radim Pesko and Adam Mahacek
May 18, 2006, London
Meta Haven presentation at London College of Communication (LCC).
May 17, 2006, Leeds
Meta Haven at Leeds Metropolitan University, symposium Unknown Territory with a.o. David Reinfurt/O-R-G, Femke Snelting, Paul Elliman.
Organized by LUST at the Leeds School of Contemporary Art and Graphic Design.
See symposium web site
March 15, 2006, Design Academy Eindhoven
Nieuwe beelden voor Nederland, lectures/discussions involving a.o. Rutger Wolfson, Annelys de Vet, Daniel van der Velden, plus presentations by Design Academy students.
The lecture Symbool X by Daniel van der Velden can be downloaded here (in Dutch).
Download PdfThis text has been written in response to the project Nieuwe symbolen voor Nederland at de Vleeshal (see Rutger Wolfson, ed., Nieuwe symbolen voor Nederland, Valiz, Amsterdam 2005).
January 17, 2006, Innsbruck
Meta Haven at Künstlerhaus Buchsenhausen with a presentation entitled Uncorporate Identity.
Part of a series of Jan van Eyck Academie presentations.
December 2, 2005, Brussels
Design and contemporary society
Download PdfWith Daniel van der Velden and Paul Boudens. Lecture series on design. Moderator: Gert Staal. Location: Beursschouwburg, Brussels. Organized by TOR, Belgium.
Daniel van der Velden's lecture on design research, Design Research versus the Content Factory, has been published in Metropolis M under the new title Research & Destroy.
November 16, 2005, Amsterdam
Logo Parc
Wouter Vanstiphout, Friedrich von Borries, Kamiel Klaasse, Gerard Hadders, Roemer van Toorn, Daniel van der Velden and Jouke Kleerebezem.
Kick-off symposium to the new Jan van Eyck research project 'Logo Parc', taking place at Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam. 'Logo Parc' is carried out in association with with Lectoraat Kunst en Publieke Ruimte (Gerrit Rietveld Academy / University of Amsterdam, supported by SKOR and Virtual Museum Zuidas) and Premsela Dutch Design Foundation.
October 28 – November 13, 2005, Leeds
LSx: Leeds Unknown
Exhibition at Leeds Metropolitan University, organized by Thomas Castro and LUST as a kick-off to their research project. Participants: Bas Princen, Mateusz, O-R-G, Meta Haven, Paul Elliman, Will Holder, Floor, Letterror, LUST , RAL2005, Min & Sulki Choi, Lucy Gibson.
October 17, 2005, Maastricht
History vs. Future #3: Two scenarios for a dialogue by Vinca Kruk.
In this presentation, Vinca Kruk presented prototypes for the corporate identity of Nicolae Ceausescu’s Palace of Parliament in Bucharest, Romania. Location: Jan van Eyck Academie.
More details on the project History Vs. Future are following soon.
