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Event
Roaming Assembly #22 EURASIAN STEPS ~ Curators: You Mi and Binna Choi
Sunday, 3 June 2018
We are thrilled to announce that in the upcoming months State of Concept and DAI Roaming Academy merge their programs*, beginning with the exhibition “A Case Of Perpetual No” of artist and alumna Yota Ioannidou, co-produced with DAI.
On June 1 & 2 students and tutors of seven so-called COOP study-groups will disperse over Athens and present, at a variety of locations, COOP SUMMIT 2018, the outcome of their year-long inquiry, directly followed by the symposium Roaming Assembly #22: Eurasian Steps, curated by Binna Choi and You Mi, on June 3 at State of Concept.
EURASIAN STEPS which will be the first itinerant movement of Unmapping Eurasia, a long-term trans-cultural project initiated at Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons.
Curators: Binna Choi and You Mi
With:
Pegy Zali (KERNEL)
Xenia Kalpaktsoglou (The Laboratory for the Urban Common)
and students of DAI.
Program
14:30 Welcome by DAI director Gabriëlle Schleijpen
14:40 Binna Choi: Eurasian Commons
15:10 Barcelona rift with the DAI Planetary Campus Factory workshop participants
15:20 You Mi: Silk Roads, Tributary Networks and Old and New Imperialism
16:00 Barcelona rift with the DAI Planetary Campus Factory workshop participant
16.10 break
16:20 Nikolay Smirnov: Left wing Eurasianism: returning of the Universalism “Living in the name of the Commons”
17:00 Barcelona rift with the DAI factory workshop participants
17:10 Pegy Zali in the conversation with Xenia Kalpaktsoglou
18:00 Barcelona rift with the DAI Planetary Campus Factory workshop participan
18.10 break
18:20 Sung Hwan Kim with screening of Summer Days in Keijo – written in 1937 (2007, 17 min)
19:00 Barcelona rift with the DAI Planetary Campus Factory workshop participants
19:10 Unmapping Eurasia (Pathways drawing)
19:30 Drinks
Introduction
Eurasia, in its most simplistic term, is a landmass that embraces a vast space between a western end of Europe and an eastern end of Asia. Taking this notion of Eurasia beyond the tropes of West and East, however, promises an exploratory, open-ended journey into one of the most complex thinkings which questions existing borders and distinctions in all dimensions such as the geographical, cultural, political, and social ones– and in turn calls for new connections and pathways including the cosmic, geologic and spiritual dimensions.
Eurasian Steps in Athens focuses on (de-)constructing the city as a “Eurasian gateway”, from where the Hellenistic culture was spread from Europe to middle Eurasia, as well as serving as a node point for transcultural dialogues in various periods in history. Binna Choi and You Mi, two initiators of Unmapping Eurasia, along with Russian artist/curator Nikolay Smirnov will map out aesthetic, cultural, political, and economic Eurasian projects in the past and present, and then unpack their ambitions, pitfalls, and legacies – from Russia’s right-wing Eurasianism to the lesser known left-wing Eurasianism, from imperial Chinese tributary system and decentralised trade networks to China’s Belt and Road Initiative. The contrapuntal narratives will be provided by the Athens-based collective Kernel Operations (Pegy Zali) in conversation with Athens based curator Xenia Kalpaktsoglou from The Laboratory for the Urban Common which, through its research and artistic projects, probes at the material strata of the current infrastructure and logistical projects. This will resonate with the presentation by New York-based Korean artist Sung Hwan Kim who conjures perspectives on labor, movement and landscape in his current research into the rarely traced history of migration in Asian minor in the United States, that offers itself an allegorical potential for Eurasia, if not challenging its boundary. Ultimately, the Roaming Assembly iteration of Eurasian Steps, with artists, researchers and Dutch Art Institute participants stages an image of a “slower Silk Road” envisioned by the French anarchist geographer Élisée Reclus. They will perform variations, disruptions and contingencies around the narrative of shared histories in Europe and Asia. And with that, an acute sense of ethics or heightened consciousness comes to the fore – resonating the thinking of Reclus: how can the humanity’s collective self-awareness form one body with the planet itself?
Practical information
Roaming Assembly #22: EURASIAN STEPS
Date: June 3, 2018
Time: 14.30 – 19.30h
Followed by a communal dinner by Option Foodlab to which you are warmly invited. If you wish to join, please send an email to Nikos Doulos ( [email protected]) before June 1st. Costs are 10 euro (dinner and glass of wine) which can be paid in cash and on sight to Nikos.
Location: State of Concept, Mpotsari Tousa 19, Athina 117 41, Greece.
About Unmapping Eurasia
Unmapping Eurasia is a long-term trans-cultural project initiated at Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons that approaches Eurasia as a broad yet non abstract field for commoning practice and take an itinerant approach by evolving in several itinerant movements along with other institutional and non-institutional partners on board to be co-initiators, researchers, and cartographers. Each movement involve several stopovers where encounters, studies, discoveries, speculation and imagination over other kinds of movements, institutions, infrastructures, resources, and culture take place in collective forms, becoming pathways that lead to and materialize as artworks, maps and/or texts.
Eurasian Steps is the first itinerant movement of Unmapping Eurasia, that takes a journey from Amsterdam via Athens to Seoul. While the name recalls the Great Steppe of Central Asia, known as the heart of Eurasia, it tries to deconstruct any centralism and assemble different narratives and methods in approaching Eurasia – hence the modest, initial step towards (un-)making Eurasia as a collective body.
Eurasian Steps continues in Seoul on 30 June in a form of “walking exhibition”, departing from the Nam June Paik Memorial House in Seoul. The first movement – Amsterdam – Athens – Seoul – unfolds with support of Dutch Art Institute, Dutch Embassy in Seoul for its NEDxPO 2018 program, and Media City Seoul / Seoul Museum of Art.
Planetary Campus is an innovative conceptual space (without walls) where the MA curriculum “DAI Art Praxis” meets with a wide variety of external parties. A welcoming space where we want to host a fleeting, “affective community”, where we generously share art and research, where complexity can be embraced and intellectual intra-actions are fostered, aiming to endow our praxes, wherever they are operational. As an infrastructure Planetary Campus is the container for several activities initiated by the DAI.
One of them is the Roaming Assembly, a recurring public symposium scheduled to take place once a month, functioning as it were as the DAI-week’s ‘centerfold’ event. This state-of-the-art speculative and hybrid program explores specific themes and topics of contemporary relevance to the thinking of art in the world today.
Although closely interlinked with the DAI’s curriculum, Roaming Assembly editions are not conceived as plain extensions of the regular DAI classes and seminars, but rather envisioned as sovereign happenings, designed to mobilize our bodies, our intelligences.
Initiator and curator-in-chief Planetary Campus: Gabriëlle Schleijpen
Senior coordinator Planetary Campus: Nikos Doulos
Documentation: Silvia Ulloa; see our Video Archive
Communication design: Lauren Alexander/Foundland
If you want to receive our DAI-BULLETIN on a monthly base you are welcome to register here.
Planetary Campus is generously supported by the Innovations Fund of the
