Group Affinity – Sommerakademie und Ausstellung über Praktiken der Selbstorganisation und das Phänomen der Affinität innerhalb der kulturellen Produktion.
Sommerakademie 1 – 14 August 2011 Eröffnung 1 August 2011
Ausstellung 15 August – 11 September 2011 Eröffnung 14 August 2011 14 Uhr
The notion of affinity has increasingly gained significance in contemporary social movements that underline self-organised and non-hierarchical models of public assembly. Group Affinity aims to examine and negotiate this form of public-alliance where definitions of social and cultural significance are constructed and interacted with by the people who share and support them – and to extend it as a model for mutual learning, communal living and emerging artistic and cultural production.
In the form of a two-week summer school and a four-week exhibition, Group Affinity offers a diverse curriculum of five participatory faculties run by international collectives in the field of art and design: Chicago Boys, Grand Openings, Cinenova, Andreas Müller & Susanne Pietsch and Slavs and Tatars. Despite the fact, that each collective works with a different method of research and action, the project has given them common ground, whereupon their practices accommodate inter-subjective alliance as a primary condition in their public engagement. As such, the summer school provides a pretext to pursue this common interest within a broad range of experiences and opinions on the notion of how collective agency is formed.
In addition, the summer school can be seen as an educative premonition against the backdrop of today’s neo-liberal influence on European cultural politics and in particular its demands for culture to be measurable and profitable. Group Affinity seeks an alternative. It opts for creating a space for critical inquiries, heterogeneous alliances and the negotiation of differences.
A group of international and local participants, all selected by the faculties from an open call, gathers in Munich for the first two weeks of August. This shared time will be divided into a private and a public part. During the daytime, the participants and faculties concentrate on mutual research and learning processes that will include fieldwork within the social, cultural and historical context of Munich.
On workdays from 8pm onwards, the faculties will host public evening classes with presentations, guest expert-lectures, performances and screenings. These evening classes are an open invitation for the general public to stay informed of the development of the working groups and participate with feedback and expand upon the notion of affinity. All these meetings will be held at the Kunstverein München.
The academy and exhibition will be accompanied by a publication designed and developed by Berlin based designer Manuel Raeder. For Group Affinity, Raeder has especially developed a mobile architectural structure for the space and its furniture, based on his long time research into communal architecture of Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi.
Slavs and Tatars
Mysticism, Languages, Conflictual Geographies
Slavs and Tatars is a faction of polemics and intimacies devoted to an area east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China, known as Eurasia. The collective’s work spans several media, disciplines, and a broad spectrum of cultural registers (high and low) focusing on an oft-forgotten sphere of influence between Slavs, Caucasians and Central Asians. Slavs and Tatars have published Kidnapping Mountains (Book Works, 2009), a celebration of complexity in the Caucasus, Love Me, Love Me Not: Changed Names (onestar press, 2010) and Molla Nasreddin: the magazine that would‘ve, could‘ve, should‘ve (JRP-Ringier, 2011). They are currently preparing solo engagements for the Secession, Vienna, MoMA, NY, and Künstlerhaus Stuttgart.
Andreas Müller and Susanne Pietsch
Participatory Architecture, Urban Planning, Youth Culture
Andreas Müller is a Berlin-based architect and co-founder and publisher of the architecture magazine An Architektur. His research is based on different historical projects and practices in which participation enables architecture. Previously he was a researcher at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht and also part of theCooperative for Display Politics – a collective exploring the possibilities of public mediation, spatial narrations and educational approaches in the medium of exhibition.
Susanne Pietsch is an architect and teacher at department of Architecture of the TU Delft. Pietsch is also Müller’s longterm working partner, sharing beliefs that both the critical analysis of spatial relations and the visualization of their inherent socio-political conceptions offer a possibility of political agency. Recently they have teamed up again and begun a long-term research project on architecture for youngsters such as youth centres, clubs or hostels in relation to early youth movements and political youth organisations, pop cultural or counter cultural youth groups, which produced their own spaces, while investigating the contemporary practice and conditions.
Grand Openings
Dance / Performance, Theatre, Materiality, Anti-spectacle, Improvisation
Grand Openings (since 2005) is a performance collective that consists of five different commitments - the New York based Japanese performance artist Ei Arakawa, the painter / musician / writer Jutta Koether, the gallerist / artist / singer Emily Sundblad, the curator Jay Sanders and the composer Stefan Tcherepnin. Their performances were shown in Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm, Bumbershoot 2008, Seattle, MUMOK, Vienna, Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial 2006, Nigata and Performa05, New York. The components of their performances are recognizable – people, action, ceremony, but the essential quality underlying the group work is difficult to pin down, vacillating between constructed and formless, authentic and absurd. The boundaries of the event do not constrain – they encourage art and life to pass in and out of one another by pure osmosis, which implies suggestions on boundaries of collective actions and communication and possible modes of subversion of those limits within today’s condition of identarian politics.
Cinenova
Everything That Happens Now
Film and Video, Gender, Reproductive Labour, Production and Distribution
Cinenova is a London-based volunteer-run organisation dedicated to preserving and distributing the work of women / feminist film and video makers. Cinenova currently distributes over 500 titles that include experimental film, narrative feature films, artists’ film and video, documentary and educational videos made from the 1920s to the present. The thematics in these titles include oppositional histories, post-colonial struggles, reproductive labour, representation of gender and sexuality and importantly, the relations and alliances between these different struggles.
Cinenova was founded in 1991 following the merger of two feminist film and video distributor, Circles and Cinema of Women, each formed in the early 1980s. Since all funding for the organisation was cut in 2001, Cinenova has been run by volunteers dedicated to the constellation of films, histories and politics that make up Cinenova, believing in the necessity of keeping the collection together and autonomous, rather than dispersed into larger and more general archives. The Cinenova Working Group came together in 2009 with the intention of making Cinenova’s practical situation with regard to its ability to preserve, promote and distribute the work in the collection public and urgent.
For Group Affinity the Cinenova Working Group, in this instance lead by Melissa Castagnetto and Irene Revell, will open these discussions up with the participants and present Cinenova as a site in which to reflect upon the desires and problematics that arise in collective cultural work and the practicalities and labour involved in maintaining such an organisation, its past its possibilities now and how we might project things in the future.
Chicago Boys, While We Were Singing, They Were Dreaming
Chicago Boys, While We Were Singing, They Were Dreaming: a 1970s revival band and neo-liberalism study group, assembled by Kurdish artist and musician Hiwa K whose interests lie in different modes of informal knowledge. The band plays 1970s popular music from Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, England, Bangladesh, Poland, the Netherlands, and Lebanon. The performances of the songs are alternated with associative presentations of archival material related to personal stories and appearances of neo-liberal policies.
The Chicago Boys consists of those who do not necessarily have musical experience but develop it together. From different professional and cultural backgrounds, they gather and learn how to perform, while grappling with questions of free market economy in their study group sessions. These sessions often include YouTube and Skype conversations with other Chicago Boys members and friends as a textbook. The band continues its practice whilst new members from different locations join along the way.
The name Chicago Boys refers to a group of young Chilean economists who, having studied together with economist and ‘grandmaster’ of free-market economic theory Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago, drove a neo-liberal economic policy in Chile under the dictatorial regime of Pinochet in the 1970s. Chicago Boys, While We Were Singing, They Were Dreaming traces back the possible ‘affairs’ (as Hiwa K puts it) between this first implementation of liberal economics and a number of parallel events happening at the time, such as the oil crisis and the US threat to attack Saudi Arabia. In addition, Chicago Boystries to understand the weakening of the left that manifested at the turn of the 1970s into the 1980s in different parts of the globe; a political tendency one can currently witness. All these developments are reflected upon through the lens of cultural dynamics, particularly those in the popular music genre.
Chicago Boys, While We Were Singing, They Were Dreaming is an ongoing, collective and transnational project that attempts to practice an alternative model for exploring the globalization process and its impact on our daily culture.
