Just what is it that makes today’s revolution so different, so appealing?
Occupy Amsterdam, Wendelien van Oldenborgh, Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec
Materialized Relations Seeking for their Agents
by Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec
Sound propagates through air and matter and temporarily inhabits our bodies when we speak. It offers a paradigm for being in the world. In his reflection on Brandon LaBelle’s lecture, Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec would like to share some observations on how in his work the idea of sound returns to us in the shape of traversing objects; and on the way his participatory and performative works create temporary communities of strangers. Is it possible to imagine an analogy between listening, dancing and making and unmaking of community?
Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec (SI/NL) is an artist and musician based in Amsterdam. His artistic practice is a poetic exploration of relationships between transitory and temporal flows like sound and weather phenomena and architectural and social spaces they inhabit. His works encompass interdisciplinary and mixed media installations, sound interventions and electro acoustic music.
Just what is it that makes today’s revolution so different, so appealing?
by Artists in Occupy Amsterdam
On October 15th Amsterdam was added to the list of cities all over the world where the people-powered Occupy Movement, inspired by the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, was taking a stand against social and economic inequality and the undue influence of banks and multinational corporations on government, and the concurrent reduction of possibilities for participation in real democratic processes. Among the tents of the Beursplein camp was a large green army tent, set up by a group of artists concerned with the relation between artistic practice and social change.
This tent quickly became the central point for a group of artists, writers, philosophers, sociologists, musicians, and economists. Together, they organized a daily program of readings, discussions, workshops, meetings and meals. For two months, this fluid collective committed to working, from within the Occupy camp, to investigate how their disparate practices and working methods could be put to the service of imagining and instigating alternatives to the system whereby the most powerful 1% writes the rules of a global economy based on extreme inequality.
Four members of this collective will share some of their ideas and inspiration for joining the Occupy movement and combining their artistic practices with activism.
Artists in Occupy Amsterdam – AIOA is a fluid collective comprising, at any given moment between roughly 15 and 30 artists, philosophers, sociologists, economists, writers, thinkers and producers. Now entering a new phase beyond the boundaries of Beursplein, the group – bound together by their memories of heated discussions and frozen nights on the Beursplein – continues to work together on various projects promoting and manifesting the ideas and ideals of the Occupy Movement.
SCREENING
Supposing I love you. And You Also Love Me, 2011, 14 min
by Wendelien van Oldenborgh
Supposing I love you. And You Also Love Me, brings the voice of the Swiss-Egyptian philosopher and theologian Tariq Ramadan into exchange with a group of five young adults of multicultural origin from Belgium and the Netherlands. Against the backdrop of a ‘de Stijl’ inspired broadcast building designed by Piet Elling the work is set up as a polyphonic mini tragedy. Unrehearsed forms of performance and speech, stemming from private experience, form the building blocks of the “drama”. The adolescents act as a chorus in a playful interchange with Ramadan’s ideas and thoughts, which explore issues such as diversity, fear, conflict, and his own interrupted engagements in the city of Rotterdam.
Wendelien van Oldenborgh is an artist based in Rotterdam whose practice explores social relations through an investigation of gesture in the public sphere. She often uses the format of a public film shoot, collaborating with participants in different scenarios, to co-produce a script and orientate the work towards its final outcome, which can be film, or other forms of projection.
http://www.wilfriedlentz.com/#/Artists/Wendelien_Oldenborgh_van