The Sign of the Stars

SANDBERG INSTITUUT Graduation 2021

SANDBERG INSTITUUT Exhibitions & Events Main Departments

Temporary Programmes

ARIES TAURUS GEMINI CANCER LEO VIRGO LIBRA SCORPIO SAGITTARIUS CAPRICORN AQUARIUS PISCES

Graduation 2021 Critical Studies Design Dirty Art Department Fine Arts Studio for Immediate Spaces

Approaching Language Resolution

sandberg.nl/graduation2021

INDEX A—Z

8–10 October Hembrugterrein/Het Hem Zaandam (NL)

THE SIGN OF THE STARS SANDBERG INSTITUUT Graduation 2021

SANDBERG INSTITUUT Exhibitions & Events Main Departments

Temporary Programmes

ARIES TAURUS GEMINI CANCER LEO VIRGO LIBRA SCORPIO SAGITTARIUS CAPRICORN AQUARIUS PISCES

Graduation 2021

Critical Studies Design Dirty Art Department Fine Arts Studio for Immediate Spaces

Approaching Language Resolution

8–10 October Hembrugterrein/Het Hem Zaandam (NL)

sandberg.nl/graduation2021

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SANDBERG INSTITUUT Graduation 2021

SANDBERG INSTITUUT Exhibitions & Events Main Departments

Temporary Programmes

ARIES TAURUS GEMINI CANCER LEO VIRGO LIBRA SCORPIO SAGITTARIUS CAPRICORN AQUARIUS PISCES

Graduation 2021 Critical Studies Design Dirty Art Department Fine Arts Studio for Immediate Spaces

Approaching Language Resolution

8–10 October Hembrugterrein/Het HEM Zaandam (NL) sandberg.nl/graduation2021

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THE SIGN OF THE STARS

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FINAL COPY FINAL COPY FINAL

FOR MORE INFORMATION AND IMAGES VISIT: WWW.SANDBERG.NL/GRADUATION2021/FINAL

65 GRADUATES OF THE FIVE MAIN DEPARTMENTS AND TWO TEMPORARY PROGRAMMES PRESENTED THEIR GRADUATION FINAL WORKS TO THE PUBLIC FROM 8 TO 10 OCTOBER 2021 AT HEMBRUGTERREIN (HET HEM / DE DOOD), ZAANDAM (NL). PART DRAFT AND PART FINAL CONTENT, THIS PUBLICATION CONSISTS OF CONTRIBUTIONS BY THE GRADUATES AND EXTERNAL PHOTOGRAPHERS AND EDITORS COMPILED BY PS (PUBLIC SANDBERG).

THIS PUBLICATION CONCLUDES THE 2021 GRADUATION EXHIBITONS & EVENTS OF THE SANDBERG INSTITUUT.

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DRAFT COPY DRAFT COPY DRAFT

THIS PUBLICATION IS A DRAFT AND WILL BE UPDATED WITH THE FINAL GRADUATION WORKS IN NOVEMBER 2021.

VISIT HTTPS://SANDBERG.NL/GRADUATION2021/DRAFT/PUBLICATION TO DOWNLOAD.

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SANDBERG INSTITUUT GRADUATION 2021

THE SIGN OF THE STARS

INTRO

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SANDBERG INSTITUUT GRADUATION 2021

INTRODUCTION

THE SIGN OF THE STARS Aidan Wall and Artun Alaska Arasli

The Sign the Starsme is to thetalk fifth bookastrology, based onand theIworks of Thank youoffor asking about start by Sandberg students.

The works below saying thatInstituut’s whether itgraduating is part of my worldview is not an interare presented two forms: final exhibited as shown esting subject.inWhat is morethe exciting is seeingworks how the zodiac at the Sandberg Instituut Exhibition 2021As at artHet frames our lives inside its Graduation systems of interpretation.

HEM, Zaandam (inour color); and the draftby works that ists, we often aim attention toin-progress critique culture studying students submitted earlierand in the year (inTarot blackcards and white).

The its mechanisms of control behavior. are reimaebbs of artwith education and art practice aretime, unpredictginedand andflows reclarified new decks printed all the and we able, and as challenge such, there are of both diversionary can likewise some thecontinuities aspects of and astrology for an tributaries upgrade. to find in the relationship between a student’s draft work and their final work. One of PS’s (Public Sandberg) goals with these isgraduation publications is totohelp these Capricorn my Sun Sign, and I relate manytoofshare the things evolving practices with the larger commusaid of us, that we work hard, pushSandberg ourselves Instituut to hone our skills, nity and with an outside audience of peers, professionals, and and consistently improve our practice and, ultimately, our craft. all who lie in is between.

Previous include: The Title of the Our symbol the goat; one of titles the stars in the constellation, Work (2017),isThe Name to of the thegoat Author (2018), The who Place of Capricornus, dedicated nymph Amalthea nurBirth and The of the E-Mail (2020). tured(2019) and suckled the Subject infant Zeus until he rose to power to rule over Mount Olympus. Capricorn is a philosophy of “onward,” The yearstoinmove whichcontinuously the participants featured in stopping, this publication meaning forward, never never have studied and produced work have been marred by a global allowing others to come between us and our goals, and this is pandemic, politicalfor upheaval, incredibly helpful artists. and accelerated ecological devastation. The same regimes of oppression that have led us to this point ones Black that once challenged the legitimacy of unconvenYears–ago, Mountain College poet Jonathan Williams tional orme homeopathic approaches to being-in-the-world such showed a letter from the poet Robert Creeley, who signed as the andOnward. astrology – are nowto themselves being themagic, bottom ofoccult, the letter, I remarked Jonathan about increasingly questioned, and their over our Creesocial liking this choice of salutation, and hehegemony told me that he and organizing is being put under ley had a conversation aboutfurther it once.scrutiny.

He was looking for the best way of saying what we must do, which is to be on a continTwo key soaking – bookending the essay sectionabout that uous path forward.texts It was beautiful, the more I thought forms the center of this – offer of hopeful this placement, directly at book the end of a some letter,form encouraging his foresight.

In we one, philosopher reader, saying must not stop! Federico Campagna fares us across the rocky waves between chaos and determinism: the

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SANDBERG INSTITUUT GRADUATION 2021

THE SIGN OF THE STARS

two great oversee concepts destiny, Thank yousea for creatures asking me that to talk about the astrology, andofI start by talent, and fortune. in theofother, the mergoat marvel and saying that whether And it is part my worldview is not an interpoet CAConrad, writes ofseeing how “We [Capricorns] esting subject. What is Capricornedly more exciting is how the zodiac learn toour incorporate ourits deepest feelings – synchronizing frames lives inside systems of interpretation.

As with artthe source of potential power – culture by cultivating trust ists,underwater we often aim our attention to critique by studying in abilities of and allowing strong, forceful fishtail to its our mechanisms control and our behavior.

Tarot cards are reimasteer us inreclarified the direction want our lives totime, go.”and Likewea gined and with we newmost decks printed all the lighthouse’s beacon onsome a stormy evening, suggests can likewise challenge of the aspectsCAConrad of astrology for an that amidst these times of confusion and chaos “We must not upgrade. allow the suspicious doubts of others to interfere with the possibilities our self-actualization, fullytoembracing all we have Capricorn isof my Sun Sign, and I relate many of the things to offer ourthat lives thehard, world.” said of us, weand work push ourselves to hone our skills, and consistently improve our practice and, ultimately, our craft.

The symbol Sign ofisthe reflect oninthis graduaOur theStars goat;aims one to of the stars theyear’s constellation, tion works through this lens that is resistant to agreed-upon Capricornus, is dedicated to the goat nymph Amalthea who nurdefinitions and assumptions.

Perhaps byrose turning awaytofrom tured and suckled the infant Zeus until he to power rule the andCapricorn norms that instilled of by “onward,” industrial overcategorizations Mount Olympus. is were a philosophy production, centralized bureaucracy, andnever the fixed hierarchies meaning to move continuously forward, stopping, never that betrayed our communities and our world, we can find a way allowing others to come between us and our goals, and this is out of the airless space that writer and cultural theorist Mark incredibly helpful for artists.

Fisher called the “collapse of ritual and symbolic elaboration.”

Years ago, Black Mountain College poet Jonathan Williams The Signme ofathe Stars is part of anRobert ongoing series who of publicashowed letter from the poet Creeley, signed tions

by PS of (Public Sandberg) developed in collaboration with the bottom the letter, Onward.

I remarked to Jonathan about graphic designers Polite Society. liking this choice ofOur salutation, and he told me that he and Creeley had a conversation about it once. He was looking for the Contact you are in contributing best way ps@sandberg.nl of saying what weifmust do, interested which is to be on a continan editorial to next year’s uous path forward.

It waspublication. beautiful, the more I thought about this placement, directly at the end of a letter, encouraging his reader, saying we must not stop!

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THE SIGN OF THE STARS

SANDBERG INSTITUUT GRADUATION 2021

THE SIGN OF THE STARS

INDEX

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SANDBERG INSTITUUT GRADUATION 2021

INDEX

The Sign of the Stars

ARIES

31 32 35 36 39 40

TAURUS

43 44 47 48 51 52

GEMINI

55 56 59 60 63 64 67 68

CANCER

71 72 75 76 79 80 83

LEO

84 87 88 91 142 145 146

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SANDBERG INSTITUUT GRADUATION 2021

THE SIGN OF THE STARS

149 150 153 VIRGO

154 Thank you for asking me to talk about astrology, and I start157 by 158

saying that whether it is part of my worldview is not an interesting subject. What is more exciting is seeing how the zodiac LIBRA 161 frames our lives inside its systems of interpretation. As art162 ists, we often aim our attention to critique culture by studying 165 166 its mechanisms of control and behavior. Tarot cards are reimagined and reclarified with new decks printed all the time, and169 we 170 can likewise challenge some of the aspects of astrology for an 173 upgrade.

SCORPIO

174

Capricorn is my Sun Sign, and I relate to many of the things 177 said of us, that we work hard, push ourselves to hone our skills, 178 and consistently improve our practice and, ultimately, our craft.

181 Our symbol is the goat; one of the stars in the constellation, SAGITTARIUS 182 Capricornus, is dedicated to the goat nymph Amalthea who nur185 tured and suckled the infant Zeus until he rose to power to rule 186 over Mount Olympus. Capricorn is a philosophy of “onward,” 189 meaning to move continuously forward, never stopping, never allowing others to come between us and our goals, and this190 is CAPRICORN incredibly helpful for artists.

193 194

Years ago, Black Mountain College poet Jonathan Williams AQUARIUS 197 showed me a letter from the poet Robert Creeley, who signed 198 the bottom of the letter, Onward. I remarked to Jonathan about 201 liking this choice of salutation, and he told me that he and Creeley had a conversation about it once. He was looking for 202 the best way of saying what we must do, which is to be on a continPISCES 205 uous path forward. It was beautiful, the more I thought about 206 this placement, directly at the end of a letter, encouraging209 his reader, saying we must not stop!

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SANDBERG INSTITUUT GRADUATION 2021

INDEX

The Place of Birth (A – Z)

Aarau Almere Amstelveen Amsterdam Antibes Arnhem Augsburg Bergen op Zoom Berlin Bern Bikfaya Bogotá Brussels Buenos Aires Cannes Chisineu-Cris Cordoba Corvallis Curaçao Cyprus Enschede Estonia Guadalajara Haarlem Hannover Johannesburg Kleve Krakow Lagos Les Yvelines Lima London Luzern Maastricht Madrid Mexico City Munich Oedt

https://www.sandberg.nl/graduation2021/

158 75 36 149 76 71 40 44 88 190 162 35/63/145 47 185 59 87 157 182 177 178 150 56 32 198 48 193 68 142 39 153 64 72 51 60 197 79 43 173

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SANDBERG INSTITUUT GRADUATION 2021

Oranjestad Paris Pescia Prien am Chimsee Rennes Reykjavík Riga Rotterdam San Clemente Santiago Seoul Shanghai Southampton Sykkylven São Paulo Tehran Thessaloniki Tianmen United Kingdom Uppsala Völklingen Warsaw Wonju Zurich

THE SIGN OF THE STARS

84 186/209 154 80 170 83 202 161 169 206 165 91 52 205 166 189 55 67 31 146 194 181 174 201 The Name of the Author (A – Z)

Al Primrose Alice Slyngstad Allison Henriquez Anna Bierler Anna-Bella Papp Benjamin Schoonenberg Calli Uzza Layton Catalina Reyes Cesar Majorana Christian Herren Constanza Castagnet Daphné Keraudren Diego Virgen

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31 205 84 43 87 161 182 206 44 190 185 47 32

SANDBERG INSTITUUT GRADUATION 2021

INDEX

Eleni Papadimitrou Eloy Cruz del Prado Eva Bosveld George Mazari ghenwa abou fayad Hannah Rose Whittle Helena Keskküla Jae Pil Eun Jan Vahl Jeanine van Berkel Jeanne Vrastor Jeroen Exterkate Jihye Lee Johan Delétang Jun Zhang Kaspar Dejong Lila Bullen-Smith Lucie Sahner Maja Chiara Faber Manola Buonincontri Manon Bachelier Margaux Koch Goei Maria Paris Maria van der Togt Marian Rosa van Bodegraven Mariana Jurado Rico Mariel Williams Marisa Esther Torres Rodriguez Marvin Ogger Mateo Vega Mathias Vincent Megan Hadfield Michelle Mildenberg Mylou Oord Negiste Yesside Johnson Noé Cottencin Pernilla Manjula Philip Raphael Jacobs Romy Day Winkel Sabrina Schlosser

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55 197 71 88 162 72 56 174 48 177 59 75 165 76 91 60 193 194 142 154 209 51 35 198 166 63 169 79 80 64 186 52 145 36 39 170 146 173 149 40

SANDBERG INSTITUUT GRADUATION 2021

THE SIGN OF THE STARS

Sigrún Sveinsdóttir Sina Egger Stelios Ilchuk Tao Yang Teun F. Grondman Toni Brell Valentine Langeard Vida Kasaei Violeta Paez Armando Zane Zeivate Zgjim Elshani Zuza Banasinska

83 201 178 67 150 68 153 189 157 202 158 181

The Title of the Work (A – Z)

A Measure of Distance A Play for Public A Real Trip from AMS to KBL (First Class to Third World) A Score for Silence A hundred seconds longer and it’s over.

Looking for real? For real. New imagined memoir.

Cállate, que menudo polvo echaron tus padres para tenerte. There is no love, but I call them lovers. Caretaker. Heart-shaped piggy bank.

Absence, twice removed Access All Areas All you can fit! allah project mashrou allah in the name of god Always remember the little things, especially when they sparkle An Outline of Things, Sound Cartography Begegnungszone Care Unit Carnal fluorescence (fridge rendering N°2) and As deep as I can (snail moves reiteration) Claveles del Aire (Air Carnations) Colleen waits for the bus Death Play Did I imagine the landscape, or did the landscape imagine me?

EmoTECH CRYSIS 1.0

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35 189 88 177

197 157 40 186 162 84 201 173 146 59 206 194 75 68 158

SANDBERG INSTITUUT GRADUATION 2021

INDEX

Exorcise Face_frame.read( ) For the gesture support Furtive Kaskantina Goodie Bags Hard Copy Soft Copy – impermeable domains Head tilt Hlaupa Land of Sleep Liquid Lips Little Brazilians MATTER WITHIN MATTER WITHIN MATTER / A Triptych to Saint Bride Meditaxion Moss doesn’t grow …

On the night of March 4th Plans for New Works Pod Prop Nr. 1 Propositions for post-disciplinarity QC-2020 Reality and Fiction Respiration Screaming in a similar key Shuffering and Shmiling Si puedo y es facíl, estoy cansada Sketches for center, ring, mall Softer Marks Still Drive THAT MUSIC WHICH I CAN'T BE THE ONLY ONE TO HEAR The Domestication of Volcanoes (Chapter 1: Fertility) The Gravity Inside The Interior Architecture of Negotiations. Conversations on Hidden Layers of Transformation Work.

The Real Time The house that shadows built The syntax of smell Tree Pitch Untitled

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52 71 169 153 205 198 31 83 154 185 166 72 32 56 67 87 60 202 161 36 170 91 142 39 63 64 43 178 209 145 76 55 150 181 44 182 51/165

SANDBERG INSTITUUT GRADUATION 2021

THE SIGN OF THE STARS

Use at your own risk Whose academy? tools of relation ] bracket

47 193 149 Essays

Aidan Wall and Artun Alaska Arasli THE SIGN OF THE STARS

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CAConrad ASTROLOGY OF ONWARD & THE ONWARD POET-SALUTATION FOR THE 2021 GRADUATING CLASS OF SANDBERG INSTITUUT

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Isabelle Sully PAPERCLIP, OR ANOTHER DEVICE FIT FOR COLLATION

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Rosie Haward THINGS GOT BRIGHTER

103

Fiep van Bodegom THE LANDSCAPE AS PROTAGONIST

107

Artun Alaska Arasli MOST OF MY THOUGHTS BEGIN MID-THOUGHT

111

Maurits de Bruijn MEMORIES LIGHT THE CORNERS OF MY MIND LIKE A PHONE RECEIVING TEXT MESSAGES FROM AN EX-LOVER

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Artun Alaska Arasli, with footnotes by Aidan Wall CALL AND RESPONSE

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Katayoun Arian THE TYRANNY OF FORMATS

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Federico Campagna DESTINY, TALENT, FORTUNE

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SANDBERG INSTITUUT GRADUATION 2021

INDEX

Main Departments

CRITICAL STUDIES

214

DESIGN

215

DIRTY ART DEPARTMENT

216

FINE ARTS

217

STUDIO FOR IMMEDIATE SPACES

218

Temporary Programmes

APPROACHING LANGUAGE

220

RESOLUTION

221

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AL PRIMROSE United Kingdom 1993

ARIES Main Department Critical Studies

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/draft/al-primrose

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UN TI TLED

AL PRIMROSE United Kingdom 1993

ARIES Main Department Critical Studies

HEAD TILT

Head Tilt by Al Primrose (United Kingdom, 1993) invites visitors to submit to a red box their answers to the question “How do dogs live in your political dreams?” Visitors can participate either anonymously or not. The work is accompanied by a publication.

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/final/al-primrose

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DIEGO VIRGEN Guadalajara, Mexico 1989

ARIES Main Department Studio for Immediate Spaces

MEDITAXION Having a background as a professional cook, researcher Diego Virgen (Guadalajara, México, 1989) is interested in production, procurement, consumption, and the dematerialisation and speculation that revolves around food. By exploring architectural and artistic methods, Virgen addresses spatial and social narratives of food. For his installation Meditaxion, Virgen invited Antonio Cingolani, a retired Zen monk who attempted to provided an interactive experience around the unexpected shapes of marshmallow that Virgen produces. Virgen speculates that this meditative experience enables people

to manipulate their brainwaves and achieve cosmic consciousness – or at least enter a deep state of quiescence.

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/final/diego-virgen

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DIEGO VIRGEN Guadalajara, Mexico 1989

ARIES Main Department Studio for Immediate Spaces

BE YOND COM IN FORT DUS TRI AL

This work examines the traditional misconceptions of Interior Architecture. While “comfort” has been a constant in architectural praxis, it has also been a common denominator within the agro-industries and our everyday practices as consumers and individuals. Beyond Industrial Comfort synthesizes these realities through marshmallow, a highly industrialised food that caters to our most absurd and unnecessary, yet sweet and fluffy pleasures.

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/draft/diego-virgen

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MARIA PARIS Bogotá, Colombia 1992

A MEA SURE OF DIS TANCE https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/draft/maria-paris

ARIES Temporary Programme Approaching Language A Measure of Distance is a composition of a space that reflects on what is untranslatable, what falls in-between.

Reflecting on the emotional and political charge of language, the installation evokes acts of displacement as areas of meaning. By allowing space for slip-ups and inevitable misunderstandings, elements and space become translated surfaces.

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MARIA PARIS Bogotá, Colombia 1992

ARIES Temporary Programme Approaching Language

A MEASURE OF DISTANCE Within her work, Maria Paris (Bogotá, Colombia, 1992) raises questions on how poetics can be a radical political tool. Concepts of absence and removal are entangled in various forms, reflecting on the emotional and political nature of places and language. A Measure of Distance reflects what is untranslatable, what gets lost in between. Reflecting on the emotional and political charge of language, the installation evokes acts of displacement as areas of meaning. By allowing space for slip-ups and inevitable misunderstandings, elements and space become translated surfaces.

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/final/maria-paris

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MYLOU OORD Amstelveen, The Netherlands 1987

ARIES Temporary Programme Resolution

QC-2020 Mylou Oord’s (Amstelveen, the Netherlands, 1987) QC-2020 is a film about the start of Queer Choir Amsterdam. Together with artists Shreya de Souza and Sarah Naqvi, Oord founded Queer Choir Amsterdam. It came about in the midst of a pandemic as a need for community.

Singing in a choir helps one extend themselves, and get in sync and in tune with others. The process helps in creating a sense of engagement with other people, and establishes a rhythmical harmony between them.

The film, which is far from being a documentary about the choir, explores their personal experiments of

active resistance while creating an imaginary universe free of societal binaries and limitations.

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/final/mylou-oord

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MYLOU OORD Amstelveen, The Netherlands 1987

UN TI TLED WORK IN PRO GRESS https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/draft/mylou-oord

ARIES Temporary Programme Resolution This work draws from the experience as founding member of the Queer Choir Amsterdam, together with Shreya de Souza and Sarah Naqvi. The film, which is far from being a documentary about the choir, explores the personal experiment of active resistance while creating an imaginary universe, free of societal binaries and limitations.

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NEGISTE YESSIDE JOHNSON Lagos, Nigeria 1988

ARIES Main Department Dirty Art Department

SHUF FER SHMIL ING ING AND Shuffering and Shmiling is a project which brings forward questions into the social, financial, and mental precarity faced by undocumented migrants in limen.

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/draft/negiste-yesside-johnson

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NEGISTE YESSIDE JOHNSON Lagos, Nigeria 1988

ARIES Main Department Dirty Art Department SHUFFERING AND SHMILING Negiste Yesside Johnson (Lagos, Nigeria, 1988) works with the subjects of undocumented migration, financial and social precarity, and class inequity, making visible these issues that result from colonialism. Drawing from personal and shared experience that forces a certain desolation of the self, Johnson brings together found and discarded objects as signs and symbols of the logistics of capitalism, in an effort to expose western-centric privilege. Shuffering and Shmiling is a project which highlights the social, financial, and mental precarity faced by undocumented migrants in limen.

Through a collision of languages,

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/final/negiste-yesside-johnson

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a community of the borderless is built from the mutual experiences of diaspora, generating a nuanced form of activism that manifests as a subtle confrontation.

SABRINA SCHLOSSER Augsburg, Germany 1988

ARIES Main Department Studio for Immediate Spaces

ACCESS ALL AREAS

Access All Areas by Sabrina Schlosser (1988, Augsburg, Germany) is a performance in which the expectation of an event is counteracted by the amplification of the self-consciousness of anticipation. In a location annexed to the exhibition space, the audience is lead by performers to a waiting room only to be caught in an act of observing both themselves, and the next round of queuing audience members, waiting.

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/final/sabrina-schlosser

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SABRINA SCHLOSSER Augsburg, Germany 1988

ARIES Main Department Studio for Immediate Spaces

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/draft/sabrina-schlosser

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UN TI TLED

ANNA BIERLER Munich, Germany 1989

STONE TELL ING

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/draft/anna-bierler

TAURUS Main Department Design For a long time, stone has served as a symbol for nature stilled into mere resource, to be mined and put to use. Stone is supposed to exist quietly in the background of the greenscreen landscape, as dead matter. Stone Telling is a coming together for conversation, reading, writing and performances, exploring what stones hold and how stuff supposedly lingering in the background can help us understand the world around us. Thinking with Ursula Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction and the notion of the bag as “a thing that holds another thing,” we’ll be wondering how we can ground ourselves on unsolid grounds. How do we build in collaboration with stones, how do stones relate to words and what can we learn from the geologic?

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ANNA BIERLER Munich, Germany 1989

TAURUS Main Department Design

SOFTER MARKS Anna Bierler (Munich, Germany, 1989) is interested in approaching different notions of interconnectedness, and exploring the possibilities of grounding ourselves on unsolid grounds. Looking through ecological frameworks as means of collaboration and coexistence while tending to affective spaces, Bierler often works collectively in creating shared rituals, narrations, and experiences. The installation, Softer Marks, explores softness and deceleration in an attempt to attune our human bodies to the multitude of lithic bodies around us – amplifying the stories that stones tell. Softer Marks exists in

layers of sediment, a support structure opening the ground for conversation, gathering, relating, sharing, a testing site to practice leaving softer marks.

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/final/anna-bierler

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CESAR MAJORANA Bergen op Zoom, The Netherlands 1996

TAURUS Temporary Programme Resolution

THE SYNTAX OF SMELL Cesar Majorana (Bergen op Zoom, the Netherlands, 1996) is interested in the interplay of our offline and online worlds, and the future of capitalism. For The syntax of smell, Majorana organized scent listening sessions, based on a smell laboratory he has been building for the past two years. Within his laboratory, he treats scent as a cinematic medium and unfolds stories using smell. Visitors are invited to Majorana’s laboratory for a tailored monko session, where you will engage with scent together and unfold the most minuscule details of scent construction.

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/final/cesar-majorana

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CESAR MAJORANA Bergen op Zoom, The Netherlands 1996

THE SYN TAX OF SCENT https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/draft/cesar-majorana

TAURUS Temporary Programme Resolution Our daily life has increasingly been scented by Unilever, Proctor and Gamble and the likes. In the meanwhile a pandemic has given millions of people anosmia – a complete lack of smell, some of them forever unable to experience their world through odour. This work wants to immortalise their lost scented memories. Stories about anosmia and sensing, told in word and smell.

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DAPHNÉ KERAUDREN Brussels, Belgium 1995

USE AT YOUR OWN RISK https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/draft/daphne-keraudren

TAURUS Main Department Studio for Immediate Spaces Use at your own risk is my graduation show project for the Studio for Immediate Spaces. Use at your own risk is a series of five metal object/tools/sculptures that I designed and made for the public space of Amsterdam. They enable a new experience and a new perspective on the city and its use, questioning a large number of legal and urban planning issues. Each object – attached or hung from Amsterdam’s existing infrastructure – is a negotiation between the self and the other, between the public and the private, the outside and the inside, art and design.

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DAPHNÉ KERAUDREN Brussels, Belgium 1995

TAURUS Main Department Studio for Immediate Spaces

USE AT YOUR OWN RISK Daphné Keraudren’s (Brussels, Belgium, 1995) Use at your own risk is a series of metal objects, tools, and sculptures, designed and made for the public space of Amsterdam. They enable a new experience and perspective on the city and its use, questioning a large number of legal and urban planning issues. Each object – attached or hung from Amsterdam’s existing infrastructure – is a negotiation between the self and the other, the public and the private, the outside and the inside, and art and design.

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/final/daphne-keraudren

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JAN VAHL Hannover, Germany 1989

TAURUS Main Department Dirty Art Department

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/final/jan-vahl

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JAN VAHL Hannover, Germany 1989

WAL HERTZ

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/draft/jan-vahl

TAURUS Main Department Dirty Art Department Walhertz shows a biosemiotic mixture of cultural practices, to which a speculative future contract between the whale society and the human species has led. On the human side, a form of language has developed that is based on the format of the wave packet (soliton) from the original communication of the whales and interweaves this with relics and causal connections of the digital age. People communicate through so-called ‘crafts’, which – similar to the wave packet of whales – find an equivalent (data density) as a data volume that embodies the potential for discussion and cooperation in the question of how much time can be produced in cooperation. The encryption of this temporary zone works in a similar way to a cryptographic key exchange, in which both or more “trades” become a key pair with the same amount of data (with regard to the individual intention) and thus create the basis for a secure interaction in the midst of the constant public.

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MARGAUX KOCH GOEI Luzern, Switzerland 1993

UN TI TLED

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/draft/margaux-koch-goei

TAURUS Main Department Dirty Art Department From beneath the floor, a shrill vibration resounds, disrupting your rhythm and luring you forward. But you are on top. You stand above them. You lay on top of them. The weight of your body mutes and suppresses, while resisting unstable ground.

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MARGAUX KOCH GOEI Luzern, Switzerland 1993

TAURUS Main Department Dirty Art Department

UNTITLED Visitors are invited to stand in the center of Margaux Koch Goei’s (Luzern, Switzerland, 1993) installation.

When standing in the middle, you’re surrounded by fragments of mirrors, mirroring you, your surroundings, and each other. A sound work can be heard from behind the mirrors.

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/final/margaux-koch-goei

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MEGAN HADFIELD Southampton, UK 1994

TAURUS Temporary Programme Approaching Language

EXORCISE The practice of Megan Hadfield (Southampton, United Kingdom, 1994) deals with mystical constructions of text as a material which might manifest or embody dirt, desire, and deviant literary characters. Drawing from oral traditions to invoke unspoken dialectics in contemporary platforms, she conjures poetic phenomena to be encountered and reanimated in the form of installation, audio, and printed matter. With Exorcise, Hadfield speculates about the history of the structure she shows, emphasizing the possibility of merging temporalities.

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/final/megan-hadfield

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MEGAN HADFIELD Southampton, UK 1994

EX OR CISE

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/draft/megan-hadfield

TAURUS Temporary Programme Approaching Language The circular removal of topsoil, dug at even depths along the parameter, completes the separation between burial mound and outer world. The grave was then cut, leaving enough space for its contents. An additional platform was gouged into the earthen sides, allowing the kneeling mourners to arrange the body and lay down gifts. The surface of this formation was then fixed with a clay membrane and hazel poles were inserted to construct a dome roof. The entire rounded structure could then be sealed with earth and marked with a timber post or probe. A series of rituals were performed and feasts organised to announce its completion and celebrate the converging of two temporalities. This is an exorcise, an invocation, the possession of a barrow built in five stages.

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ELENI PAPADIMITRIOU Thessaloniki, Greece 1977

AN NEX TO THE CON TRACT https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/draft/eleni-papadimitriou

GEMINI Main Department Studio for Immediate Spaces A negotiation about the use of Maison Descartes as a temporary exhibition space for the graduation show of the Studio for Immediate Spaces. Contractual elements are displayed as a diagram, a text, and a USB flash drive. Each element is merged with the walls of the space and serves as legal documentation of the negotiation process, housing the contractual in the architecture of the space. Annex to the Contract explores how negotiations and agreements silently include stories of circumstance, coincidence, life-choices, rituals, scenography, attitude, and emotions. Here, the contract is extended to acknowledge affective, relational and performative elements culminating to treating a wall as more than an architectural element – as a depository, a public registry and a legal document.

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ELENI PAPADIMITRIOU Thessaloniki, Greece 1977

GEMINI Main Department Studio for Immediate Spaces

THE INTERIOR ARCHITECTURE OF NEGOTIATIONS. CONVERSATIONS ON HIDDEN LAYERS OF TRANSFORMATION WORK. Eleni Papadimitriou (Thessaloniki, Greece, 1977) explores the five essential ingredients of negotiations – wonder, rituals, trust, conflict, liminality – and approaches them through different disciplines to gain an understanding of how they could transform the way we work together when making architecture. The Interior Architecture of Negotiations. Conversations on Hidden Layers of Transformation Work. consists of white flags that hang from the ceiling, each carrying fragments of

conversations Papadimitriou had with experts in the field of architecture and community building.

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/final/eleni-papadimitriou

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HELENA KESKKÜLA Estonia 1992

GEMINI Main Department Fine Arts

MOSS DOESN’T GROW ...

Helena Keskküla’s (Estonia, 1992) Moss Doesn’t Grow … is a video of a performance about a not-so-mythological woman’s journey to become a stone carver. It is performed by Keskküla and three children – Lumi, Mila, and Alide – whom she tutors in art and music during the weekends.

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/final/helena-keskkuela

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HELENA KESKKÜLA Estonia 1992

GEMINI Main Department Fine Arts

MOSS DOESN’T GROW...

Moss Doesn’t Grow ... is a performance about a not-somythological woman’s journey to become a stone carver. It is performed by Helena and three kids – Lumi, Mila, and Alide – whom she tutors in art and music during the weekends. When the performance is not happening, visitors are invited to take a look at Keskküla’s series of aquatint prints of the same topic.

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/draft/helena-keskkuela

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JEANNE VRASTOR Cannes, France 1993

GEMINI Main Department Dirty Art Department

CAR NAL AS FLU DEEP O AS RES I CENCE AND CAN

Carnal Fluorescence (fridge rendering n°2) Refrigerator door, 6 min video loop, 2021 Sound, video and sculptural installation where a hybrid object recalling a fridge door with a strong corporeal identity is being displayed along with with a video.

I Deep As I Can (snail moves reiteration) Silicon, PVA foam, steel cable, 5 min video loop, 2021 As Deep As I Can (Snail Reiteration) is an installation where several soft modules have come together, forming lines and loops.

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/draft/jeanne-vrastor

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JEANNE VRASTOR Cannes, France 1993

GEMINI Main Department Dirty Art Department

CARNAL FLUORESCENCE (FRIDGE RENDERING NO2) AS DEEP AS I CAN (SNAIL MOVE REITERATION) Within the work, Jeanne Vrastor (Cannes, France, 1993) challenges the dichotomies between object and subject, and highlights the mutual entanglement of matter and language. The presentation consists of a video which is part of a sculptural installation where a hybrid object recalling a fridge door with a strong corporeal identity is displayed.

Through a glitching and hybridization of representation and social norms, Vrastor proposes a multiplicity of

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/final/jeanne-vrastor

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relations and meanings that allow objects to act as sensorial portals into an awareness of the body.

KASPAR DEJONG Maastricht, The Netherlands 1995

GEMINI Main Department Fine Arts

POD Kaspar Dejong’s (Maastricht, the Netherlands, 1995) installation, Pod, consists of several paintings and a floor piece. The graffiti-like traces on the paintings, in combination with the asphalt fragments, evoke a desolate urban setting and draw attention to the overlooked materiality of quotidian encounters.

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/final/kaspar-dejong

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KASPAR DEJONG Maastricht, The Netherlands 1995

POD

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/draft/kaspar-dejong

GEMINI Main Department Fine Arts Paintings and a growing floor installation.

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MARIANA JURADO RICO Bogotá, Colombia 1991

SI PUE DO Y ES FAC IL,

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/draft/mariana-jurado-rico

GEMINI Main Department Dirty Art Department Si Puedo Y Es Facil, Estoy Cansada is a stockroom of negation, filled from floor to ceiling with printed matter. Through a repetitive gesture, the nuances of the word “NO” are deconstructed and resignified, becoming a vehicle to understand the many ways in which social beings cope with failure and disappointment.

ES TOY CAN SA DA 64

MARIANA JURADO RICO Bogotá, Colombia 1991

GEMINI Main Department Dirty Art Department

SI PUEDO Y ES FACÍL, ESTOY CANSADA Deriving from her interest to connect people, Mariana Jurado Rico (Bogotá, Colombia, 1991) works with printing, publishing, radio, and video work, involving elements of humor, failure, impatience, and contradiction as tools for resistance.

Si puedo y es facil, estoy cansada is an installation that mimics a stockroom, filled with printed matter from floor to ceiling, which is all about negation. Through a repetitive gesture, the nuances of the word “NO” are deconstructed and resignified, becoming a vehicle to understand the many ways in which

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/final/mariana-jurado-rico

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social beings cope with failure and disappointment.

MATEO VEGA Lima, Peru 1994

GEMINI Temporary Programme Resolution

SKETCHES FOR CENTER, RING, MALL With an interest in poetic mechanisms of memory and projection, Mateo Vega (Lima, Peru, 1994) explores notions of “lost futures.”

Sketches For Center, Ring, Mall is a work-in-progress iteration of an ongoing film project. It is a multivocal triptych through peripheral sites of urban infrastructure: a data center, a ring road, and a run-down mall. In combining text, site-specific music, 16 mm footage, and 3D-rendered images, an exploration of the urban past and future is constructed which is a poetic materialism of decay, renewal, and failed promises. It is an attempt https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/final/mateo-vega

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at critical remembering and radical projecting.

MATEO VEGA Lima, Peru 1994

GEMINI Temporary Programme Resolution Work-in-progress iteration of an ongoing short film project.

A multi-vocal triptych through peripheral sites of urban infrastructure: a ring road, a data center, and a run-down mall.

In combining text, site-specific music, 16mm and 3D images, the construction of the urban past and future is explored.

A poetic materialism of decay, renewal, and failed promises.

An attempt at critical remembering and radical projecting.

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/draft/mateo-vega

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TAO YANG Tianmen, China 1994

ON THE NIGHT OF MARCH 4TH https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/draft/tao-yang

GEMINI Main Department Fine Arts The shooting started last autumn when he got the first analog camera from a friend. In walking, talking, dinner, hiking, he caught a lot of moments around him, day and night, about the happening of Dutch life. As time goes on, life doesn’t seem to have much difference, no matter if trees are bare or lush with leaves, they are always so much higher than pedestrians.

Perhaps, you went to the places too where he has been, watched the same views and admired with the same words, even, a people who lived 50 years ago already experienced once.

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TAO YANG Tianmen, China 1994

GEMINI Main Department Fine Arts

ON THE NIGHT OF MARCH 4TH

On the night of March 4th is a photographic installation by Tao Yang (Tianmen, China, 1994). Photographs are printed on textiles which hang from the ceiling, creating an intimate, domestic setting for the narrative Yang presents. His works are like diaries about people, trees, cities, landscapes, and other things he has seen many, many times. By portraying them, Yang investigates how one can communicate and interact with the things that are surrounding them. This interest was further fueled when Yang got his first analog camera from a friend, allowing him to make intimate

registrations of things, people, and views he has seen many times, and that might have been described with the same words over and over again.

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/final/tao-yang

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TONI BRELL Kleve, Germany 1985

GEMINI Main Department Design

DID I IMAGINE THE LANDSCAPE, OR DID THE LANDSCAPE IMAGINE ME? Toni Brell (Kleve, Germany, 1985) uses narrative as a vessel for self-reflection, building relationships, and speculating about queer futures and imaginaries. Did I imagine the landscape, or did the landscape imagine me? is an immersive installation consisting of panels with elements of landscapes on them. Visitors are invited to sit within this landscape and to listen to an audio work, encouraging them to reflect on the landscape as something in conversation with past, present, and future.

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/final/antonia-brell

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TONI BRELL Kleve, Germany 1985

THE OP EN ING https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/draft/antonia-brell

GEMINI Main Department Design The Opening and The Plottery are two iteration of a process that consists of workshops, writing, performance, print, and publishing. While The Opening is an online platform that explores narratives of transformation, The Plottery operates in space. It proposes narrative as a vessel to speculate about our past, present, and future. While a plot usually refers to the chronological sequence of events that make up a story, with unhinged storytelling, the plot doesn’t have to be consistent. Instead it dangles in the air like an unhinged door, allowing for accident and disarray.

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EVA BOSVELD Arnhem, The Netherlands 1995

UN TI TLED

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/draft/eva-bosveld

CANCER Temporary Programme Resolution Facial recognition techniques are developing faster than our laws, and companies are scrambling to get their hands on it. Facial recognition can be incredibly helpful and fun, as well as scary and dangerous, and I don’t know how to feel about it. Why does it make me feel uncomfortable? This project is a collection of found footage and technical experiments, that approach the topic of facial recognition from different perspectives.

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EVA BOSVELD Arnhem, The Netherlands 1995

CANCER Temporary Programme Resolution

FACE_FRAME.READ( ) With an interest in online cultures, Eva Bosveld (Arnhem, the Netherlands, 1995) experiments with materials she finds online. Her video installation Face_frame.read() is a compilation of individual experiences and deconstructed facial recognition algorithms that loop endlessly, cycling through a collection of faces – faces that were unaware, demanded not to be seen, or were spotted in the crowd and entered into the system; faces that unlock phones, doors, and borders; faces that can’t afford to be recognized; and faces that don’t get to be seen at all.

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/final/eva-bosveld

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HANNAH ROSE WHITTLE London, UK 1990

CANCER Main Department Studio for Immediate Spaces

MATTER WITHIN MATTER WITHIN MATTER / A TRIPTYCH TO SAINT BRIDE With her project Matter Within Matter Within Matter / A Triptych to Saint Bride, Hannah Rose Whittle (London, United Kingdom) highlights material agency and knowledge by tracing the entangled lines of clay, water, and flesh. Through an embodied collaboration with matter via text, sound, and sourced river clay, it seeks to create spaces of encounter, offering a shift in perspective to our material bodies. Inviting the viewer “to sit, breathe, read, walk, listen, with and as matter – body to body to body.”

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/final/hannah-rose-whittle

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HANNAH ROSE WHITTLE London, UK 1990

CANCER Main Department Studio for Immediate Spaces

MAT TER WITH IN IN MAT MAT TER TER WITH

Unfolding in three chapters, this work explores our relationship with inhabiting a city that is built on and with clay.

Encompassed by original tiled architecture, handmade tiles from Amstel river clay create a host structure. They support a reader of companion texts, including excerpts from geological papers, feminist theory, literature and poetry, activated by collective reading sessions. An audio walk leading to the river enters into a space of collaborative sound through hydrophone, contact mic, field and voice recordings. Inviting the viewer to sit, breathe, read, walk, listen, with and as matter – body to body to body.

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/draft/hannah-rose-whittle

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JEROEN EXTERKATE Almere, The Netherlands 1994

UN TI TLED

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/draft/jeroen-exterkate

CANCER Temporary Programme Resolution “... either they are taking a break themselves, breathing vigorously or simulating boredom by kicking dirt around. Are these the only moments, in their short-lived game lives, where they can really be themselves? Be in control? Go home and have an off-day?” What happens to a videogame character when they are not being controlled by the player is one of many questions I raised in my thesis Escaping Life: Simulated Realities and Autonomous Animation Behaviour in Video Games. My graduation work flirts with videogame genres, mechanics and visual styles in order to explore the inbetween state of these characters.

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JEROEN EXTERKATE Almere, The Netherlands 1994

CANCER Temporary Programme Resolution

DEATH PLAY Jeroen Exterkate (Almere, the Netherlands, 1994) delves into open source and freely accessible tools and software packages: ranging from cloud-based artificial intelligence services to video game engines.

Death Play flirts with video game genres, mechanics, and visual styles in order to explore the liminal state of digitized characters.

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/final/jeroen-exterkate

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JOHAN DELÉTANG Antibes, France 1983

CANCER Temporary Programme Resolution

THE GRAVITY INSIDE With an interest in consciousness, Johan Delétang (Antibes, France, 1983) creates images whereby the interconnected play of light and shadow, bodily gestures, the deconstruction of cinematic language, and the use of material dissonance act as a direct catalyst to probe the surface of individual identities. Through the story of a break-up, The Gravity Inside explores themes centered around friendship, love, and anxiety.

Employing cinema’s ability to monumentalize emotions and the details of everyday life, it makes use of time and repetition as formal components.

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/final/johan-deletang

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JOHAN DELÉTANG Antibes, France 1983

SPIN NING LINES

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/draft/johan-deletang

CANCER Temporary Programme Resolution Spinning Lines is a narrative film, which makes use of the cinematic as a tool to inquire into the materiality and poetry of “details.” That is, it employs cinema’s capacities for repetition and dilatation of speed (i.e., expansion of duration), in order to monumentalise moments in our everyday life.

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MARISA ESTHER TORRES RODRIGUEZ Mexico City, Mexico 1988

CANCER Main Department Design

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/draft/marisa-esther-torres-rodriguez

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UN TI TLED

MARISA ESTHER TORRES RODRIGUEZ Mexico City, Mexico 1988

CANCER Main Department Design

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/final/marisa-esther-torres-rodriguez

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MARVIN OGGER Prien am Chiemsee, Germany 1989

CANCER Main Department Dirty Art Department

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/final/marvin-ogger

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MARVIN OGGER Prien am Chiemsee, Germany 1989

CANCER Main Department Dirty Art Department

CLOUD GÄNGER

Cloudgänger is a growing community of artists committed to actuality. Using their audio-visual archive as a point of departure to correlate individual practices and create a collaborative network. Beyond the digital platform, Cloudgänger strives to realise mutual concerts, exhibitions and places of pleasure.

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/draft/marvin-ogger

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SIGRÚN SVEINSDÓTTIR Reykjavík, Iceland 1993

ARIA MEANS AIR IN ITAL IAN https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/draft/sigrun-sveinsdottir

CANCER Temporary Programme Resolution Aria Means Air in Italian (working title) reflects on human time in relation to the neoliberal self. Four characters have a dialogue with their surroundings and each other through a classical songs composed by Sigrún Gyða. They do that while running on a running field. Final filming of the work will take place in August 2021.

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SIGRÚN SVEINSDÓTTIR Reykjavík, Iceland 1993

CANCER Temporary Programme Resolution

HLAUPA Within her work, Sigrún Gyda Sveinsdóttir (Reykjavík, Iceland, 1993) uses music, installations, and video performances as tools for community research into popular culture and nature. In both the performance and video that together make the work Hlaupa, five modern trolls tell the story of a stone that used to be alive, and speak of how they cope with the the feeling of being observed.

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/final/sigrun-sveinsdottir

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ALLISON HENRIQUEZ Oranjestad, Aruba 1992

LEO Temporary Programme Resolution

ALWAYS REMEMBER THE LITTLE THINGS, ESPECIALLY WHEN THEY SPARKLE Allison Henriquez’s (Aruba, 1992) Always Remember The Little Things, especially when they sparkle is a sound and video installation that explores the unusual debris of mental activity one finds while daydreaming.

In this case, sounds suggest a scenario that readily replaces daydreaming with fantasizing – a place where poppy-laced visions invite intimate scrutiny and clouding, instead of clarity and perception.

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/final/allison-henriquez

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ALLISON HENRIQUEZ Oranjestad, Aruba 1992

LEO Temporary Programme Resolution

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/draft/allison-henriquez

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UN TI TLED

ANNA-BELLA PAPP Chisineu-Cris, Romania 1988

SNOW

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/draft/anna-bella-papp

LEO Temporary Programme Approaching Language Snow is an attempt to recreate what is not in the photo, the ice and snow around my friend, Ana, who was the warmest spot in an otherwise frozen landscape.

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ANNA-BELLA PAPP Chisineu-Cris, Romania 1988

LEO Temporary Programme Approaching Language

PLANS FOR NEW WORKS Anna-Bella Papp's (Chisineu-Cris, Romania, 1988) video Plans For New Works is a preview of works before they come into existence and a record of moments in which new works are being imagined.

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/final/anna-bella-papp

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GEORGE MAZARI Berlin, Germany 1992

LEO Main Department Studio for Immediate Spaces

A REAL TRIP FROM AMS TO KBL (FIRST CLASS TO THIRD WORLD)

A Real Trip from AMS to KBL (First Class to Third World) by George Mazari (Berlin, Germany, 1992) is an installation that recreates a real-time simulated flight from Amsterdam to Kabul – a flight that no airline is flying.

During the journey in the sky which is over six hours long, visitors experience transition and transformation of landscape, topography, and weather as they are a passenger. A privately enclosed seat as well as in-flight entertainment ensure safe and joyful travel onboard. An automated pilot within Microsoft Flight Simulator https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/final/george-kaneschkah-mazari

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carries you on your journey. This game software uses Microsoft’s Azure cloud system to create a digital recreation of the Earth; Azure also provides their services for the US government and their military. The result is a constantly-generated live landscape and a form of flight that only exists online.

GEORGE MAZARI Berlin, Germany 1992

A REAL TRIP FROM AMS TO KBL https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/draft/george-kaneschkah-mazari

LEO Main Department Studio for Immediate Spaces A Real Trip from AMS to KBL is a real-time simulated flight from Amsterdam to Kabul. A flight, no airline is flying. During the over six hours long journey in the sky, you will experience transition and transformation of landscape, topography and weather through the eyes of a passenger. An AI controlled pilot using Microsoft’s Flight Simulator will fly you from Occident to Orient. The simulation video game uses satellite images of the earth and photogrammetry data of cities and populates them with objects, such as trees and buildings, using Microsoft’s Azure cloud system to create a digital clone of the earth. Azure is providing their services for the US government, military and their partners exclusively. The result is a constantly generated live landscape and a flight that only exists online.

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JUN ZHANG Shanghai, China 1990

LEO Main Department Studio for Immediate Spaces

SPEC U LA TION FOR ING A GAR DRIFT DEN

On the research of the shell lime industry in the Netherlands, Speculation for a Drifting Garden explores the shell lime industry under the context of decolonizing nature and the post-Anthropocene era. It aims to reconnect humans with the planet, combining the technologies accumulated by the civilization over the past millennia with climate and environmental changes, time, and non-human species. The project proposes speculation of a biodiversity hotspot that can promote the symbiosis of various species altogether with the birth of new ones.

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/draft/jun-zhang

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JUN ZHANG Shanghai, China 1990

LEO Main Department Studio for Immediate Spaces

RESPIRATION Based on the research of the Dutch lime shell industry, Jun Zhang’s (Shanghai, China, 1990) Respiration is a grand scenario made by fiction, exhaling devices, sound, and light installations, amongst others. Inside the exhaling devices, creatures composed of lime skin and biomaterial are living. The work speculates a future species whose life requires the intervention of human respiration.

Here, the carbon dioxide exhaled by humans would make the lime continue to strengthen, meanwhile the humidity and microorganisms in the human breath would activate the cells inside the lime shell skin. This speculation

is rooted in questions of whether the carbon dioxide emissions that cause global warming and climate change today might become the basis for the birth of new species. Respiration takes the human body as a medium, and the planet’s atmosphere as a trigger, to speculate a new life form in a future climate environment.

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/final/jun-zhang

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SANDBERG INSTITUUT GRADUATION 2021

THE SIGN OF THE STARS

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SANDBERG INSTITUUT GRADUATION 2021

THE SIGN OF THE STARS

ASTROLOGY OF ONWARD & THE ONWARD POET-SALUTATION FOR THE 2021 GRADUATING CLASS OF SANDBERG INSTITUUT

by CAConrad

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ASTROLOGY OF ONWARD

CACONRAD

Thank you for asking me to talk about astrology, and I’ll start by saying that whether or not it is part of my worldview is not an interesting subject. What is more exciting is seeing how the zodiac frames our lives inside its systems of interpretation. As artists, we often aim our attention to critique culture by studying its mechanisms of control and behavior. Tarot cards are reimagined and reclarified with new decks printed all the time, and we can likewise challenge some of the aspects of astrology for an upgrade.

Capricorn is my Sun sign, and I relate to many of the things said of us: that we work hard, push ourselves to hone our skills, and consistently improve our practice and, ultimately, our craft. Our symbol is the goat; one of the stars in the constellation, Capricornus, is dedicated to the goat nymph Amalthea, who nurtured and suckled the infant Zeus until he rose to power to rule over Mount Olympus. Capricorn is a philosophy of “onward,” meaning to move continuously forward, never stopping, never allowing others to come between us and our goals, and this is incredibly helpful for artists.

Years ago, Black Mountain College poet Jonathan Williams showed me a letter from the poet Robert Creeley, who signed the bottom of the letter, “Onward.”

I remarked to Jonathan about liking this choice of salutation, and he told me that he and Creeley had a conversation about it once. He was looking for the best way of saying what we must do – which is to be on a continuous path forward. It was beautiful, the more I thought about this placement, directly at the end of a letter, encouraging his reader, saying we must not stop!

Over the last four decades, I have known hundreds of poets, painters, sculptors, dancers, and musicians, and nearly all of them stopped doing their creative work. When I began writing poetry in 1975, I had no idea that my first book would not be published until 2006, nor did I imagine wanting to stop writing because it would take more than 30 years of hard work to reach that point. Onward we go! The uses of astrology often ask about the compatibility of lovers who have other zodiac signs, but what if we choose to see how our astrological traits can be of value to others? Can we think of this belief system as a place to build community? What if for Capricorns, instead of accepting the competitiveness our horoscopes constantly accuse us of embracing, we channeled this awareness toward change? Know your strengths, and in my case, this means reminding my friends how much their art means to me, and not allowing them to become former artists who stop making what they love.

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& THE ONWARD POET-SALUTATION

CACONRAD

We also do not have to quietly settle for definitions and prescriptions from astrologers. Capricorn is a goat with a fishtai – a mergoat. Astrologers often say our goat upper-body strength helps us climb to the summits we desire, no matter how far away. They also say our fishtail is our weakness, making us unstable in water’s subconscious depths. I disagree, having enjoyed balancing within myself these reputed conflicting halves. Much like the Great Sphinx of Egypt, it is not that the human head needs to tame the lion body, but rather, it needs to become harmonious and at one with the muscular, wild, fierce lion; this is precisely the same with Capricorn. We learn to incorporate our deepest feelings – synchronizing with the underwater source of potential power – by cultivating trust in our abilities and allowing our strong, forceful fishtail to steer us in the direction we most want our lives to go. Whenever we Capricorns prove astrologers wrong and make our two halves work together, we are unstoppable! We must not allow the suspicious doubts of others to interfere with the possibilities of our self-actualization, fully embracing all we have to offer our lives and the world.

Try this: replace “lover” in your horoscope with “community.” Replace “should” with “could,” and place “art” whenever they tell us about the things we need to do. Evaluate your zodiac sign for yourself, questioning everything until you have your personalized appreciation of the stars. Your life and what you want to create are quite possibly beyond the understanding of certain astrologers, so accept that you have a larger lens on the matter and find it yourself. You are now graduating from the Sandberg Instituut, and it is up to you to love what you learned enough to continue making the things you came to Earth to do.

Congratulations, and may you help the world around you thrive along with you!

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SANDBERG INSTITUUT GRADUATION 2021

THE SIGN OF THE STARS

PAPERCLIP, OR ANOTHER DEVICE FIT FOR COLLATION

by Isabelle Sully

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PAPERCLIP, OR ANOTHER DEVICE FIT FOR COLLATION

ISABELLE SULLY

Let’s start with a pressing image: a pile of governmental envelopes, unopened.

Reassuringly, I’m told that’s the point; these envelopes were never meant to arrive at the intended receiver. Instead, their accumulation occurred because they were intentionally rerouted – a reshaping of the narrative through an act of defiance.1 The story goes like this: A ticket inspector pulls aside a ticketless man on a local Melbourne tram. He tells him what we all already know: there is no such thing as a free ride on public transport.2 As a first attempt at escape, the man conjures an excuse from thin air: he had no change, but he’s happy to buy a ticket directly from the inspector now if that’s possible, he offers, knowing full well that it’s not.

The inspector shakes his head. According to him, a crime of unethical proportions has been committed here, a different crime altogether to the daylight robbery of the price of the ticket in the first place. Out of the corner of his eye the man then spots a discarded ticket on the ground, it having appeared from thin air as if miraculously written into the code of the saga like a lifeline.3 Nonetheless, the inspector shakes his head for a second time while reaching to retrieve his infringement book from his pocket.

1. In Mylou Oord’s film QC-2020 (2021), the Amsterdam Queer Choir gathers in the grand halls of De Oude Kerk, Amsterdam. This medieval church was once a site of Catholic worship, but now functions both as the home of a Protestant congregation and as a contemporary art space – an instance of multiple identities co-existing in architecture. While rehearsing within the walls of the church – an institution that has historically proven itself to be an oppressor of queer life – the choir resists, pondering the existence of a gay god through song, among other instances of queer expression.

2. To question the systems that privatize access to education, such as paywalls and tuition fees, Maria van der Togt presented an open-source publishing studio with which viewers could print and bind material that had been collected, centralized, and therefore made freely-available on a public server. In rescuing material from the clutches of corporatization, the work, titled Hard Copy Soft Copy – Impermeable Domains (2021) upheld the true definition “public” through the simple gesture of providing resources without any expectation of return.

3. In Jeroen Exterkate’s film Death Play (2021), the viewer follows a videogame character aimlessly traversing his digital environment, engaging with the landscape on his own terms rather than through the controlling orders of a player. In pushing the story beyond what is only seen on the screen, it becomes possible to imagine this character having a life of his own, happy to relax and explore when the console is switched off. The result is a film that ponders what it means to disrupt the fabric of expectation – a videogame character is not meant to have a life of his own, a tram ticket is not mean to appear out of thin air to assist a wanting passenger, a citizen is not meant to give a fake address to an officer and yet, undetected by controlling factors, they do.

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PAPERCLIP, OR ANOTHER DEVICE FIT FOR COLLATION

ISABELLE SULLY

I remember these inspectors well, completely distrusting by nature, absolutely not in the business of taking one at their word. Unwilling to shatter this founding tenet of the inspector’s belief system, the man offers up a fake name and address. After taking your details, as a precautionary measure the inspectors would then ask you for the name and number of someone you lived with, before calling them on the spot. A two-step verbal verification procedure, the result: your existence confirmed by a network of human geography.

The man had this contingency covered too. He had briefed his actual housemate – therefore not a liar in his entirety – who was on permanent standby, primed and ready in the event of a call of this nature. In welcoming the task, said housemate said he saw the likelihood of its occurrence as his own opportunity to laugh in the face of authority. To them this was a foolproof system and a negation of any risk.4 And, as they predicted, the phone rang, the housemate answered, and the letter was sent into the void.

The man is someone I know to be real, but for the sake of this text he has become a character, a protagonist invented as a device.5 He goes by the name Dean Hamm, and through the piling up of letters Dean is put to work as an administrative loophole – a way in which to gather together otherwise disparate iterations of time.6 The irony is that each infringement, each letter sent, probably affirms the identity of Dean, for it is through the repetition of inscription that figures become known.7

4. Use at your own risk (2021) is a series of furniture-like objects made by Daphné Keraudren that can be attached to window sills or hung from railings, allowing the user to take a seat on the outside of a building or suspended from a bridge, legs dangling over a canal. Despite the warning present in the title, the works seem resolutely safe thanks to the inclusion of a series of photographs documenting their use. Smiling, secure faces beam back at the camera, assuring us that the privatization of public space is undone through these objects that reclaim its use in small ways, negating the risk of exclusion present the way it's organized and policed.

5. Noé Cottencin’s film Reality and Fiction (2021) works with the device of characterization to montage together a stable of actors, both real and imagined. Completely disparate in composition, this cast list includes a shaggy monster pacing atop a building, a wolf, two skateboarders in the midst of a filming session, a dancer going through the motions in what looks like a rehearsal space, and a slogan-painting protestor. Interspersed with footage of an industrial plant rendered fluro-orange in early evening light, these elements come together on screen as a chorus of eco-activism and resistance.

6. Not unlike the heterogeneous nature of the work presented at this Sandberg Graduation Exhibition.

7. In Jeanine van Berkel’s presentation, titled A Score for Silence (2021), over 100 small clay sculptures litter the floor. On closer inspection it becomes clear that the pieces all largely take the same form – that of clay molded by the inside of a clenched hand. Because of their accumulation, the pieces imply a procedural action, one that is perhaps given to the axiom “practice makes perfect,” or rather, that it is through repetition that memory becomes inscribed. Written in the first person, an accompanying script for a reading recounts van Berkel’s reckoning with the impermanence of memory when it comes to the lineage of cultural identity. Here, each piece of clay figures as a kind of haunting, a determined, revisited act geared toward remembering.

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Over the course of a number of years 399 Station Street, North Carlton, was a holding zone for Dean Hamm’s accrued debt. It still remains so to this day. In many ways, his identity became a community-held secret, with each new generation of house dwellers never reporting the wrong address, themselves acquainted with the dread of the governmental envelop, themselves aware of the contradiction at the heart of public transport, themselves driven by these feelings when disregarding an envelope’s arrival in an act of transformative support.8 It would be a stretch to call it an insurrection, but there is a rallying call at the heart of Dean Hamm, who exists not in actuality but at least a little bit in all of us. I laughed when I first heard his story, thinking of the ink on the paper, the saliva on the stamp, the fingerprints bonded to the envelope – these material traces of something utilitarian handled.9 But in the end, I also think of his nerve, rewriting the established contract between the people versus the state with a force of the former's hand, in turn recentering the humans caught in the midst of it all. Dean Hamm confirms the existence of the loophole and, therefore, other possible ways.

8. Suspended from the structural support provided by the building’s industrial beams and hovering over our heads as if a message from above, Eleni Papadimitriou’s installation of black text on white flags reflects on the collaborative practice of transformative work. Titled The Interior Architecture of Negotiations. Conversations on Hidden Layers of Transformative Work (2021), each flag – a tool, or, a peace offering, given its material composition – carries an excerpt from a series of conversations on negotiation as a method. Bearing quotes refigured as slogans, such as “It’s better to start with a no,” and “You need three yes to be sure,” the piece stands as a kind of public service announcement, at once airing the dirty laundry accrued through the difficult work of collaboration, while normalizing the productive conflict present in these processes – the ones which ultimately hail instances of transformation.

9. When encountering Sina Egger’s presentation An Outline of Things, Sound Cartography (2021), you are first faced with a collection of plywood and chipboard, stored leaning against the wall in varying shapes and sizes, as if off-cuts from the local timber yard. On closer inspection the pieces of seemingly ordinary construction material have each been labelled with individual descriptors, like “the lush board.” Through attributing personality traits to these materials and then attaching a sonic narration and an accompanying piece of writing, Egger maps the emotive traces present in these chosen materials, despite them being practical and everyday enough to appear otherwise detached.

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Yet still, behind all of us there lies a paper trail, plotting the narrative arches of our lives in bureaucratic poesies, ordering information so that a wanting enforcer or a dedicated viewer can follow along as they connect the dots. Birth certificates, infringement notices, exhibition wayfinding – it all piles up somewhere, neatly collated in a paperclipped bunch as if to portray a sense of continuity. But regardless of the packaging, even when grouped together each instance of publication betrays its singularity.10 Just like Dean Hamm, it can’t be pinned down. We look closely enough and we see this for ourselves. We can imagine a site the size of a munitions factory and yet still, even when grouped within it, organized and categorized, subjectivities abound.

10. Mariel Willams’ work for the gesture support (2021) sits separately from the rest of the graduation presentations, trading in the cavernous industrial sheds of Het HEM for a perfectly positioned parked car on the nearby F20 ferry. While the car remains stationary, a text, rendered in vinyl lettering affixed to the car windows, is set in motion through the use of the automated up-and-down window function. This instance of publication relies on the infrastructural support of the car, the encounter with the ferry-goer, and even a collaboration with the weather – just some of the many contingencies that align in different, idiosyncratic rhythms throughout the day.

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THE SIGN OF THE STARS

THINGS GOT BRIGHTER

by Rosie Haward

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ROSIE HAWARD

My mouth is fizzing with sugar as I stand near the entrance, and as I bring my hand up to rub my eyes I notice it is cold and smells a bit like honey. There’s an anticipatory bubbling in my stomach and I think of a sentence I read the morning before that spoke of art as a place to get “the real and irregular news of how others around [us] think and feel.” 1 I want this real and irregular news; yes, I do. Not many people have arrived yet so I hover awkwardly in the cavernous room. I have expectations but I’m not very interested in them. I shift from one foot to another. The space is not as cold as I remember it and I’m wearing a heavy coat that is now draped over my arm. I think of it as impeding my ability to look at things. I need my arms free.

(To skip to the end – when my stomach was growling and the textures of new thoughts had settled in – I tried to find a way to cohere what I had seen, but all I knew was that I had found a tangible pleasure in my proximity to these works. I was thrilled by the way a red light fell on a curtain hem and the way minute cracks in a screen flickered rhythmically. Many of the objects I saw asked how and why we have come to be, how and why we continue, and how we shape and are shaped by others. In their materials I found offerings – to situate me, to replicate me, to shed light on my dreams and fantasies, and to remind me of how I am tethered to what surrounds me).

I see things that are green. In an animation of a girl’s bedroom a pair of transparent jade-colored curtains drift in a breeze that comes through the wide open window. The window invites in the fragments that rise up in dreams.

Two dogs sit on the bed of a sleeping girl. One joins her in sleep and the other looks at her expectantly as her chest heaves up and down, reassuringly regular.

I think that I’m maybe in a child’s fever dream, and the voice that trips like a rewound tape is on the cusp of being understandable to me. The drooping ribbons that adorn the curlicued bench I sit on seem sad, discarded on the way to somewhere lighter. This bench only has room for two and I’m alert to the dampness of the cushions. As I watch the pinky light my memory of the day outside is dulled. There’s a fragile distinction to be found where daydream and fantasy touch, but I’m not sure how I will know it.2 Another green I see is lurid and hard but proves itself to be malleable. A green, plastic toy, maybe a robot (but I’m no expert), lies melted in some tiny lamplight, stuck forever to a cracked screen. Its other versions – on another screen and another – shift forms. One dances sweetly, lifting its heavy limbs in a slow act of disappearance, one arm gone, then a leg, then another, until nothing is left for it to move. The iterations of its bare bones are spread across the space; I see various states of disintegration. The toy-body shudders in corners as I look on and think how hot it could be under that light.3

1. Eileen Myles cited in: Maggie Nelson, On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint (New York: Penguin Random House, 2021), p. 23.

2. Allison Henriquez, Always Remember The Little Things, Especially When They Sparkle, 2021 3. Teun F. Grondman, The Real Time, 2021

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I also think about things that are blue. There’s the sky, except I don’t see it, I just imagine it: “Blue is what’s left behind, is archival, long term.” 4 This blue, the imagined blue of the sky when you’re in a building that has no windows to let it in, is offered as a literary space. It becomes the mornings and evenings that it shapes. This space is drawn out of the sparseness of white text on two pieces of white paper – a tease I think. The invisible sky becomes the centrifugal force, whipping the words into formations. I’m moved from the universality of the sky and its blues to the specificity of encounter – on Google maps, in a bed, in sleep. Here, previously untouchable things emerge, their possibilities and impossibilities. These anecdotes are tender and elusive, but also singular, keeping memories a short distance away – just by my feet actually – as if not to forget them.

I move between spaces now, and so do see the sky. Its blue is cool, but the air is warmer than the air inside. I am disoriented by the arrangement of buildings, even though I have been here many times before. I walk quickly, gulping the air, swilling it around my mouth. When I get back to where I started I look again, this time in the opposite direction.

This curtain is a silky, grey-blue, dropping from the ceiling in a circle around me. It contains things twinned – screens in a face-off, cables tied in twos.

Sometimes I can see legs and feet in a pixelated blur, but only barely, and the feet of visitors seem detached from their bodies as they pace around me. I think about wheeling my head back and forth between the two screens, wanting to look at both simultaneously. I wonder if there is a delay, a belated relation, or if they are in perfect sync. The voice just keeps going: sing-song, sweet, and funny, a karaoke of the everyday matched by subtitles with pat phrases and watchful observations. My favorite: “I might be like jam all over you.” 5 I sit on a bench topped with clay tiles. They are very hard and the voice that fills my ears is very soft. The voice tells me about the life of a ceramic water bottle from the late 1700s and how it is buried inside the voice’s body. I look at the bottle made of clay in front of me – its lumpy texture a product of the Amstel – and think about the push and pull of the hands that made it. I am lulled by the repetitious sounds of the river, and a call to consider the matter that surrounds me. The white book that sits on the bench – full of thoughts of water and its attendant bodies – acknowledges our unrelenting times, and I am offered space from which to think of how it might be otherwise.6 I also sit on a bed that curves gently like a spine. It is dreamily functional, allowing the domestic and the medical to become disconcerting companions.

A huge empty notebook and a few display tables also meet the concave edge

4. Manola Buonincontri, Land of Sleep, 2021 5. Alice Slyngstad, Goodie Bags, 2021 6. Hannah Rose Whittle, Matter within Matter within Matter / A Triptych to Saint Bride, 2021

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of the white, patchwork doctor’s curtain that provides edges to the space.

Kitsch ceramic figurines are hidden under the bed like would-be talismans against the dense instructions for Dexcom that are printed on the bed’s pastel duvet. Objects seem familiar but altered – a demonstration video of a glucose monitor slick with nail varnish is held by hands with fingernails on its knuckles, and there’s a bath that is almost a bath but also a chair. I am coaxed into feeling at ease around the discomfort, but can’t forget the tightness of vacuumpacked rocks.7 I move again from one space to another, this time without leaving the room.

The ceilings are still high and I am still disoriented, unsure of where my attention is, worried that it’s disintegrating bit by bit. While stepping through a black curtain – whose brim is two feet from the ground – I wonder if I am supposed to crawl under it. The room itself has the same curtain fabric attached to the walls, and it too doesn’t reach the ground.

It’s a set: The black pelvis bone in front of me is heart-shaped – I imagine stepping into it and nestling my shoulders under the uniform-like shoulder pads. There is a single arm too, strangely small, and the whole skeletal figure casts dark shadows across the already dark room. I am drawn to a small gleaming egg in a nest, and the nest sits in a child’s car seat. Delicate sculptures of feet, both animal and imagined, circle the nest as if offering examples for growth: this or that? Together the objects provide a wardrobe of potential models for a life that hasn’t yet arrived, a blank eye strapped to a bike helmet looks over the lot of it, surveying the remnants of these in-progress evolutionary processes.8 I look at a tent, holding its “11 propositions for post-disciplinary,” and then I look to the right. I see squashed flies projected on the wall, slide after slide of them. I joke to myself that these are the bodies of the institution we’ve departed from, slack and lackluster right beneath my eyes. The tent – which is also a Wendy house, a place to play – makes me feel small and awkward, convincing me to sit on the floor as I watch myself from above on a screen that matches my smallness. When I am outside of it I have to crane my head to read the listed propositions off the plastic sheeting, and they slide down it as if they are searching for some ground. In this place that suggests disciplines can no longer discipline I wonder about the life after the proposal, when permission might be irrelevant and, hopefully, disobedience rife.9

7. Pernilla Manjula Philip, The Care Unit, 2021 8. Stelios Ilchuk, Title of Work, 2021 9. Benjamin Schoonenberg, Propositions for Post-Disciplinarity, 2021

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THE LANDSCAPE AS PROTAGONIST Fiep van Bodegom

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Let’s say we’re walking through a landscape, or multiple landscapes. First, we encounter white banners, almost transparent, slowly waving in the wind of passersby. They hold black and white landscapes; bare branches, delicate and black against a loden winter sky; a house, alone on a lawn near the water; friends hanging out of the window, looking outward; a meadow with fluorescing dandelions; footprints in the sand; smoking out of the window; life lived communally inside and outside, pretty and pleasant. They are already in the past, slightly melancholic and grey, and yet captured and kept and not over yet – not quite over. Friendship and communality are spilling over into the present and the future, just like beauty, landscapes, and presents – or so we can hope.1 “Did I Imagine the landscape, or did the landscape imagine me?” the voice asks. We’re sitting in a square construction made of wooden beams, with the smell of paint and ink around us. The frame is covered with prints of overlapping ferns and trees in faded, psychedelic colors. Not a real forest, but immersive and closing in nonetheless, horizonless. “My father didn’t like trees.

He liked being able to see into the distance,” the narrator tells us. “He loved broad horizons, the ocean, the sun and the sky.” But now he is being remembered in the landscape of his child’s choosing: a small clearing in the woods.

He did reach for them and they, in the end, reached back in time, back to the landscape of their childhood, to the pond in the garden, before puberty – to the time of being the perfect child, or at least trying to be.2 Walking on, we arrive at a space where landscape and life are one. Is it lime?

Chalk? These matte white square tiles and blocks, are they pedestals? For what? For alchemy, for new life? For distilling, and filtering, and showing what we breathe in and out? Rhythmic and sluggish – in and out – a person is sitting in layers of white gauze and with a transparent plastic mask. It’s hard to see through the mask because of its bulbous surface, as if it was something organically grown and burned, but still plastic. A tube connected to the mask is catching, forcing, and guiding their breath through the plastic fiber into conical flasks in transparent spirals, distilling and deconstructing their breath, separating what makes us an inseparable part of this world: carbon. Inseparable for now anyway, biologically and culturally. Will this amalgamation of pollution produce new life? 3 Nevertheless, there are still people in this landscape. A woman sings “Erbarme dich, mein Gott,” high and sad and serious. The display cabinet has fallen, the pictures have been wiped out, the subsurface has melted and become

1. Tao Yang, On The Night of March 4th, 2021 2. Toni Brell, Did I Imagine The Landscape, Or Did The Landscape Imagine Me, 2021 3. Jun Zhang, Respiration, 2021

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flexible – a deeply artificial landscape. Now that it’s abandoned, the corner of the living room has become part of the landscape. Somebody had enough of it. Plastic circles, rectangles, and squares are folding in on what was once depicted on them, becoming too blurry to see. Maybe there was no picture to begin with, but only ambience, a space without borders. Where are the letters and faces, if there were once even letters and faces? 4 The landscape closes in on itself, into a witch circle of hanging mirror shards in the middle of a room, a monad. Someone once explained the term monad to me as “a disco ball with the mirrors on the inside.” Shrill voices haunt the mirrors that reflect insularly. These inside voices, women’s voices, are tinny and unpleasant. From certain angles, these reflecting mirrors show endless tunnels with ragged edges, stretching out claustrophobic and oppressive, like head-voices that spiral out of control. Women talking to themselves, in their heads and in the mirror: there is no difference. Is this a tunnel to escape from the hellscape of the self, or to become trapped in it? “We are self-centered,” one bodiless voice says, followed by derisive and shrill laughter. “You look so good looking at art.” 5 The landscape opens up again. Could “post-industrial” be considered as the material flip-side of a virtual landscape? Or is there a flip-side? Is the virtual not simply a plane of existence in which the material is willfully forgotten? This reminds me of the early Internet, these mirroring office behemoths beside ditches bordered by reed collars. “Some fevers never break.” There is a reflection of neon in the water, on office windows, feverish and empty. Endless cables make consumption possible. When did this world become so ugly? Or perhaps not ugly, no, that’s not the point – it’s just a landscape of new materials. Like a city built by ants, this is a city built by humans. Concrete, metal, and buildings in shiny rectangular cladding: rings, malls, highways, and overpasses.

Haunted concrete is so much more than just a backdrop for our lives. How do these material surfaces dissolve so easily into the backgrounds of our lives, unseen? Even the feverish forgetfulness is never fully able to repress discontent and discomfort.6 “Time for a journey.” In the middle of the desert stands the biggest blue screen in the world, with a concrete basin in front of it, for the seascape scenes.

“Well let’s return to our story. From a supposed English girl, she becomes a Russian or Polish countess.” A hooded woman walks through the landscape, or rather, is superimposed upon it. There is no separation between the

4. Raphael Jacobs, Begegnungszone, 2021 5. Margaux Koch Goei, Untitled, 2021 6. Mateo Vega, Sketches for Center, Ring, Mall, 2021

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character and the background. And yet, who is she? Why is she there? “The vampire, she’s from elsewhere.” There is the sound of shoveling, rhythmic digging, and then the sounds of the earth falling somewhere else. Gold miners?

Later on we see them with their sieves at a riverbank of pebbles. Ducks fly overhead in a V-formation. The moon shines. A wrapped building is passed by in this silent car journey; the car’s headlights cut through a delicately frosted landscape; the branches on the roadside are prickly and carefully packed under a thin layer of ice. We arrive at the iconic white Hollywood letters on the Californian hillside: another façade, another story, embedded in the landscape.7 We walk further and find lizard heads at our feet. Or are they snakeheads without bodies? The scales on each head are sharply delineated, even though they’re protruding from amorphous and shiny ceramic that is scattered around the monstrous Medusa – “a body” without limbs or a face, but instead with multiple snakeheads and pearls. Are these pearls the eggs of the dismembered snakes? Or are they the treasure they guard? There are also pieces of crumpled resin on this field, so disadvantageous, porous, and organic against the impenetrable ceramic. Are they the skin these object-creatures have shed?

It’s not the mythological Medusa, but another creature from her monstrous lineage, Echidna. Another, more modern, creature is standing shyly in the corner, with a turquoise spine arched backwards. It is all on its own – a colorful, yet glum and lonely creature in the landscape.8 We’ve walked and walked, but what did we experience? We all end up as captives in a lab. But where are the objects of the experiment? The small rooms have concrete floors and a camera to surveil the captives (us). The furniture of this place is a peculiar medicinal shade of green. It is the exact opposite of blood red, considering the operation has yet to happen. But the green is not in cloth, it is in clay. It is soft to the eyes, hard to the touch. The furniture – plastic-grey storage crates – is shattered in an ominous and deserted courtyard. Where have the captives, the objects of the study gone? Whose hinds are being stretched in the backroom? 9 Walking through repurposed industrial buildings, over the uneven concrete ground, under the bare rusting roof beams, along the very straight canal, one starts to wonder if there exist landscapes anywhere that are not manufactured – landscapes that are not polluted or interpreted through human eyes.

The relentless exposure to artificiality makes us try to imagine, again and again, what “natural” could be: how it would feel and sound and smell.

7. Zuza Banasinska , The House That Shadows Built, 2021 8. Violeta Paez Armado, Absence, Twice Removed, 2021 9. Mathias Vincent, All You Can Fit, 2021

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THE SIGN OF THE STARS

MOST OF MY THOUGHTS BEGIN MID-THOUGHT Artun Alaska Arasli

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ARTUN ALASKA ARASLI

… after all, objects don’t hang in the air like disembodied postscripts; they situate themselves in relation to their surroundings, like works that exist in relation to a spectator.

This surrounding, it’s mutable. Lights change, as does the temperature, and my level of attention with the temperature. It is a train ride across swampland, I conclude, made up of different stations (like most train rides). I wade through it, like I would a river in a landscape that develops before my eyes.

My wet clothes – wet from the rain and the humid mid-autumn air of an old munitions’ hall – slow me down.

Naturally, I always ask what comes first: my thoughts presuppose my expectations and what I’m looking at in front of me, which in turn seem to always predict my thoughts. A voice tells me that the water levels are rising.1 Well if you put it like that, I too want to be above the wastelands with the hybrid machines apparatuses and the people that traverse it. Tools and actions for developing alter-mundialism surely require a manual, and I find one left on the sill of a window looking nowhere. It’s the beginning of a journey full of force: an entire district is transformed, adapted to a new ecology.

All actions bear the potential to become rituals, as evidenced in a soil circle on the floor.2 There are trees without leaves, and people chest-beating, wailing.

In the middle of the circle is the sun. Our days move in spirals, despite everything. This is what the mourned see, or might see, when the eyes and the rest of the nervous system have lost power. Every now and then, the crying rises in the perfumed air, it bequeaths the perspective of the cliffs from which it echoes. It is no small flame, this voice; it touches me and my vision becomes a conflagration, leaving behind a grove of trees, a wooden town, and moving on.

I walk away from the fire; a breeze scatters the ashes and turns them into debris, or maybe snow. In the white abyss, a thought emerges: I wonder what would stare if I stared back.3 My cousin once told the eight-year-old me that if I slept on my back, a demon with a hole in its palm would come and suffocate me … Yikes. The image roped itself around my prepubescent thoughts.

My head nowadays dreams of things that curl up like slugs, or coil like snakes, hanging, dangling, and disturbing me. There is a public artwork, not far away from my weekly walk, that depicts mermen, horses, and the various lords of Atlantis. Sometimes a child is playing in it, making snow angels, not in snow,

1. Valentine Hhevâh Langeard, Furtive Kaskantina, 2021 2. Zgjim Elshani, EmoTECH CRYSIS 1.0, 2021 3. Lucie Sahner, Colleen Waits for the Bus. 2021

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but rather in a shallow puddle of water. They don’t know that laying on your back is dangerous, or difficult. What else is a mattress but a container of dreams? And, again: what would stare back if I could rip a mattress open and look inside? A dream space exists solely for all that cannot be activated by reality. A sleep demon squatting on someone’s chest does not always do so with ill-intent, I guess. This one feels like a weighted blanket.

All things considered, exorcism seems an apt activity.

Someone’s Chanel No. 5 anchors me, the scent separates my surroundings from my daydreaming. My phone rings, and I jolt. I have a brief argument in my mother tongue. In accordance with the tiny amount of anger which has been granted to me, I stand thoughtfully in front of a platform: in it are beetles, signs, hands, and cups.

A video on a screen, embedded in a platform marked with dents, shows me a small hill in a wooded area.4 I drift away in the voice’s languid mix of old and modern English, until the vista changes as the camera pulls back to reveal a more complete landscape. It’s as if a hand wasn’t just there, just then, whittling, cutting into a branch. How can there be less and more trees at the same time? The more I look at this still landscape – put into motion only by the subtly moving grass – the more I see the different shades of green appear and disappear, as if the meadow were breathing. There is another image now of metallic purple beetles wrestling. I choose a beetle for my eyes to follow, but after a few rolls I’m unable to tell them apart: I lose my beetle.

An urn is being shaped on a wheel. Hands press it down to a mound, not unlike the hill in the woodland on the screen. I know how clay can move back and forth between a vessel and a lump, perhaps you do too. The turn of the wheel, and the hands that shape it, makes it do so. Why wouldn’t the landscape too, go back and forth? Why shouldn’t an archaic form of speech emanate a similar sense, as it stitches itself to the one I know? Nature knows no time, I suddenly think. Things fall apart, and regenerate, and what’s short-lived is eternal simultaneously, living on in essence.

Another thought arrives, this time of a fable of trees and of the bark that would willingly depart from them – not just fall off like some sheaves that someone left next to the tree, but go further away and look back at the now-naked tree to see what it has left behind.5 People know how to puzzle the pieces of a trunk

4. Megan Hadfield, Exorcise, 2021 5. Calli Uzza Layton, Tree Pitch, 2021

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apart to make planks, which then they put together and make plates, or, for instance, to construct a box (even if the box won’t contain anything else than the action of crate-making itself). But there is always an unwillingness to swear allegiance to the unity of a tree: through that unwillingness, things fall apart.

By undressing itself, the bark finds another immediate meaning, a last-minute ennoblement, a becoming-armor, away from the trunk it has left behind.

And without trees, there is again an endless, barren field.

There is a word for what I’m thinking of: schneeblind. Regarding squinting, I also think of the otherwise solid sunglasses with the slit carved into them.

Looking at this golden floor makes my cheeks go pink, and my fingertips start aching.6 My aunt once personally promised to open a plane window mid-flight, grab a piece of a cloud, and bring it back. I opened the freezer in the morning, and there it was: a cloud. Later I would find out that it was just a snowball.

Now my fingertips hurt even more at the thought of the air temperature outside of a plane. Around that age, I dreamt often of walking on snow. Lost in thought and equally blinded by the golden background, I cannot tell if what I’m seeing are figs or garlic, sprinkled on the modular floor. I get an idea for a way to take all that I’m seeing in: I just need to break it up into little pieces.

Each part of the modular floor becomes an access point in which I can see only what’s contained within it. In its entirety I cannot, but if I can work my way into all the little sections, perhaps I can digest it all.

When I see the soot on the windows of the semi-open room, I think of chambers where they make and test controlled fires, or what remains of them.7 I walk into the room reluctantly, sensing well that what I’m entering is the opposite of what I’m exiting: the snow. And there it is, a container for static buzz, for the crackling of blazing fire. There’s a burning voice and a container for language to break down after the Walkman has chewed the tape and spat it out. It feels like standing in front of a metallic wall, with shards protruding in a stuttering repetition – not that I ever did that. I wait patiently for it to speak again, as if my presence prompts it to do so. I cannot help but wonder what it would say when nobody’s around: perhaps something so nullifying it only manages to exhale in order stain the windows through which this fire is observed. It speaks, or tries to, like a mouth badly burned from hot food.

I see a coalescence of people and I queue unannounced, which is something I never do. A young person is peeling an orange, clearly in charge of who enters and exits what I will soon discover to be a makeshift room, annexed to

6. Maria Paris, A Measure Of Distance, 2021 7. Constanza Castagnet, Liquid Lips, 2021 8. Sabrina Schlosser, Access All Areas, 2021

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the factory, that is walled with curtains.8 After a brief wait, I enter the room and breathe a different air. For one, it isn’t as damp, but obviously it is also laced with anticipation. He told us – me and a bunch of others – that we would be escorted to another location, but this wasn’t true. The makeshift room is a vista of evaporated thoughts, a stable of vanished horses. We stand around in silence. There’s a person who has managed to not give up their cellphone when asked by the young man, and they are constantly at it, texting and vaping, blowing clouds of glycerin smoke into the however-many-cubic air. The other-other person we’re with is pretty nervous; they keep looking out of the curtain with the anticipation of someone about to go on a stage for the very first time. I realize: we are the performers, and what we do in this space defines us. I try to not align myself too strictly with the trajectory of things, in order not to lose the hope that the work might still envelope me in a blanket of simplicity. I sense that this anticipation thereof may be the work, but how do I really know that the people vaping or being nervous aren’t a part of it?

Later, someone tells me that it is desirable that an audience shouldn’t know what the ingredients of a performance might be. When the young man tells us we can finally leave, I find myself yeah-yeah-yeahing with the arrogance of having known that I was never going to leave that room, but it’s just a coverup for me not being able to figure out who exactly I shared this experience with.

In an ever-changing environment (of expectations), the motion itself is the only current; it is a staggering and emotional back and forth.9 Here I see it again: the piercing stare of the thing looking back. Now the question seems to be what the stone would say if it could see what’s left of it, say, after it’s sculpted? I always thought of the discarded parts of that process as a sort of sacrifice. Two parts of one thing, one showing the object, and the other, the effort. The stone is telling me a story about how it came to be, through the voice of its obtainer: it is also a story of how the personal weaves into the labor – so much so that the obtaining of an object, or the first encounter with a new material, becomes entwined with the beginning of a relationship of sorts.

There’s a platform on the floor, indented like the Voyager Golden Record. At first, I think it’s a vessel, ready for space. Suddenly I think, maybe it’s already there: it has satellites spread out like constellations, capsized cones, and silver wrapping paper, here and there pinned down by a yellow sphere.10 These little balls, that look like gum, are spread around the space, as if a gumball machine has shattered and spilled its guts out into the exhibition. I wait for a moment of slapstick to occur: someone’s inevitably going to step on them, roll, and fall.

9. Helena Keskküla, Moss Doesn’t Grow ..., 2021 10. Jihye Lee, Untitled, 2021 11. Sigrún Sveinsdóttir, Hlaupa, 2021

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Eventually I see a kid step on one; it squishes at first and then fills back to its near-original form half-heartedly.

Enveloped in thoughts, I approach the front of a building where a few people are chatting, drinking beers, and smoking cigarettes. I hear the arietta rising from behind a curtain that operates as a door.11 Soon enough a number of trolls in running gear spill out into the late evening, their breath illuminated by a spotlight at the end of the pathway. It’s like a dance ritual, with thumping bass to aid it, leaving its place to something seemingly more serene. It soon becomes a feat of endurance; the trolls running back and forth between the audience and an arbitrary, invisible line are trying to keep up their song despite their deep breath. Amongst an audience of many, I fixate on the blinking lights on their high-visibility vests. My breath also short, from internally and inexplicably trying to synchronize with theirs. When the performance ends, an applause breaks; from their own unity as a jogging choir, I realize that they make another audience, and a community out of us too.

Making my way back, I finally find the question that I didn’t know I’ve always carried with me: how do dogs live in your political dreams? 12 Look, I’m not a forceful person, but I do want to bash this ballot box, steal the answers in it, and from them amalgamate a communal vision of how dogs could indeed live in all our political dreams. I imagine how in one they might defend territories against their wills, and in another they might expand their work as emotional support animals. I find myself sitting too long in the small chair, dreaming of others’ answers instead of formulating my own.

I’m at the last station. A voice now is not asking but telling, how it is going to be.13 “It will be like sleeping under a lover’s coat under a tree. Like returning with a gift … It will be like a word mispronounced out of kindness.” In short: it will be ineffable; it will be the staggering potential of the impossible. The prospect of a virtual or stretched-out existence summons ideas of how language has the power to imbue objects with time and magic. I think about this funnily condescending tweet: “We get it poets; things are like other things.”

But, aren’t they? Isn’t everything just finding its neat place in a network of semblances?

12. Al Primrose, Head Tilt, 2021 13. Anna-Bella Papp, Plans For New Works, 2021

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MEMORIES LIGHT THE CORNERS OF MY MIND LIKE A PHONE RECEIVING TEXT MESSAGES FROM AN EX-LOVER Maurits de Bruijn

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There is a long tradition of artworks that involve food. Hell, pretty much all of the painterly painters from art history placed some kind of food product in their still life paintings: bread, fish, asparagus. Oh, asparagus, maybe they’re even better to be observed in a hyper-detailed, nearrealistic artistic impression than to be eaten: that buttery color, not white, not quite yellow either, but forever in between; that tender flesh; that phallic intensity; and the smell of your urine the next morning that reminds you of the dishes and the drinks that followed.

I haven’t seen such works at the Sandberg Instituut Graduation Show of 2021. I did, however, witness the most glorious marshmallows ever: huge, fluffy, starchy pillows produced by a man who happily walked around his set-up. 1 He told me I could sit on the marshmallows if I wanted to. I was wearing a black coat, so I declined kindly, but my boyfriend did exactly what the yoga-pillow-sized candies demanded. He sat opposite the monk who was leading a group meditation, and nested himself in the installation. I imagined how my boyfriend tried to meditate, as I’d imagined so many times before while we lay next to each other in bed with my Headspace app speaking to us from the loudspeaker of my outdated iPhone. As he does at home, my boyfriend got up quite quickly; what mesmerized me was that the marshmallow pillow was unchanged when he stood up – no tears, no cracks, no nothing. The only things that were affected were his socks, his black Levi’s, and his sweater: all painted white by the leftover starch that traverses the installation the way that sand moves around a sandbox, never quite staying inside the perimeters it is assigned to.

Another material that is made to shapeshift, to bend, and break new ground, are the words of an artist who printed them on paper, glued that paper onto pillars, and melted them into jewellery that connected to metal wires, forming the kind of necklace that hip hop culture, and then later Carrie Bradshaw, popularized in the nineties.2 “Endings,” I read on the endless necklace. The words seem to be physical manifestations of song lyrics that get stuck inside your mind. These words that get stuck in your head usually remain as just one useless element, a line you misunderstood or misinterpreted. It’s exactly those types of words that shine in this installation, and shine they do, quite literally, chained together, possibly against their will.

The human capability to memorize words is notoriously bad, as opposed to the accuracy of our memory of smell. In the middle of a darkened space a man was seated at a table, wearing a white suit that reminded me of the

1. Diego Virgen, Meditaxion, 2021 2. Manon Bachelier, That Music Which I Can’t Be The Only One To Hear, 2021

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people who clean up chemical waste after a nuclear disaster; or the type of suit that people in The X-Files who show up in after something ominous and extra-terrestrial has happened wear; or a group that tests and then gets rid of a neon green puddle.3 You know which suit I’m talking about. He greeted me, and I greeted him and the two other men who were seated at the same table. They all seemed familiar. I grabbed a chair and joined them. The man in the X-Files suit handed out samples of scents so that the other men and I could smell them, and place them in the world of our memory or imagination. Just like in food or sex, our preferences in scent (or of what we seem to find pleasant to smell) reveal who we are.

They are part of the more truthful and undeniable parts of us. These preferences are faster and stronger than our conscious mind that somehow always wants to be measured and cool.

I am, for instance, a person who likes marshmallows. I’m also a person who does not like the smell of cat anus – the rectum of a civet cat, to be exact.

Perfume makers have a long history of adding the scents of animal genitals to perfumes, actually, because, guess what: us humans like the smell of genitals, even if we won’t admit it. The scents we prefer, the ones we detest, and the smells that trigger our memory in specific, unexpected ways, belong to our uncontrollable, honest core. Just like our arsenal of memories, the libraries we form, they lead us to express emotions and thoughts inadvertently. They take us to places we might not always want to go, and all we can do is tag along.

A few of the scents I smelled at the table reminded me of my maternal grandparents. I could not help but envision their house, their couch, the Christian artworks on their walls, the way my grandmother could flip a pancake. That home is now to me a collection of smells triggered easily, and to be honest, quite often lately (guess I should take that up with my therapist).

The complexities that families tend to carry and bury is precisely the theme of the video work that was presented beside the table of scents.

The earnestness of this memoir-like video immediately absorbed me into its multidimensional family tale, revolving around a Chilean home that was bought with the money saved by the mother, who paid for the house thanks to a grant enabling her to study in the US. The film talks about the necessity of a home, a place in this world to call your own, one that holds your family’s memories, jokes, and disasters – a terrace where plants can grow.

3. Cesar Majorana, The Syntax Of Smell, 2021

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The movie, Clavel del Aire,4 is named after the air plant tillandsia that the filmmaker’s mom shows and talks about proudly. Tillandsia’s roots cling onto other plants, meaning they are not deeply rooted in soil but rather in each other. It doesn’t take much effort to recognize what these particular rootless plants can metaphorically entail – it’s poignant, nonetheless.

In a way, the title of the video broadens the scope of the film. This is not just a story about its maker, about Chile, or even about houses, it is also a story of an eternally confused generation, scattered around the globe sometimes because of misfortune, and other times out of privilege. Not all our returns are involuntary or subconscious in the way that memories take us back. At times, these returns are deliberate, confusing, painful.

Sometimes we return home to create a video piece, a book, a dissertation or a song out of the remains of a family life once lived; to make sense of our childhood, to tell its tale.

When I was young, “a child” you could say, I used to play tennis. Tennis is superior to other sports, mainly because of its aesthetics. One of my tennis fascinations was the umpire’s chair that loomed over the court.

That exact chair stood right next to a room I was supposed to go into but didn’t.5 It took me a while before I gave myself permission to climb the chair, maybe because I was never allowed to climb it as a kid. When I did climb the chair, however (or naturally), I immediately regretted it, confronted with my fear of heights that even the smallest of steps can trigger. But I pushed through, maybe because this was an artwork and they always make me feel safe, no matter what. I guess art makes me feel safe, because it is, no matter how you turn it, thought of by a person or occasionally, people. There is thought and care put into a work: a painting, a marshmallow pillow, into that umpire chair, much more thought and care than is put into other objects and environments we encounter. On the seat of the chair there was a pillow that read: “is this a power game if i feel satisfied watching you from above is this how i seduce you.”

In my mind, I answered, “Yes, isn’t art always a power game between its creator(s) and visitor(s)?”

The room I didn’t go into initially turned out to be a little cinema, where I sat down.6 Lebanon, a car driving through the city. Two people talking, sharing their grievances, their hardships. I took my phone out and started copying some of the subtitles in my Notes app. There is a poetry to these words, even though they are the outcomes of minds in distress.

“We are all dying together.”

“If there is no electricity in my city I am my own electricity!”

4. Catalina Reyes, Claveles del Aire (Air Carnations), 2021 5. Zane Zeivate, Prop Nr. 1, 2021 6. ghenwa abou fayad, allah project mashrou allah in the name of god, 2021

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“Come to Lebanon. It is a party, there are missiles and knife stabbings on a daily basis.”

These wry, dark texts remind me of the graffiti I saw in Ramallah, where I was in 2018 with my boyfriend, and where I cannot seem to stop writing about. That one visit entailed so much, meant so much: to undo a place of its weight by simply going there; to go there and remove the loaded layers of news stories of war and trauma; to see a city for what it is; to talk to a cab driver who complains about the stress inflicted on him and his family; to see a complete lack of older buildings and structures; to witness the most casual gunmen in the streets.

The work blends the humdrum of the everyday with the pain endured by many, caused by the stress of living in a country in financial meltdown – 78% of the population has fallen into poverty – leading to a humanitarian catastrophe that knows no equal, and that is difficult to imagine for us, the privileged. Or can we imagine it? Is it possible to travel to Lebanon through this video? Is that what art does: create empathy? And is it empathy we need, in this godforsaken world?

Almost hidden in the corner, stands something that looks like a roofless sensory deprivation tank filled with salt water. As I come closer, I see someone’s pants. I try to walk around the capsule without getting noticed and I recognize the inside of an airplane.7 A first-class seat, a bed even?

A large screen playing a Sylvester Stallone movie, a smaller screen showing the whereabouts of the plane, a few perfect airplane windows. The passenger doesn’t seem to leave too quickly, they are simply too comfortable. They probably enjoy being deprived of their senses. It’s fitting, I decide, to be on the outside of this experience. It’s as if I’m in coach, or maybe I’m the steward passing by. “A real trip from AMS to KBL,” reads the accompanying sign. Kabul is not a commercial flight destination you can just pick from a website. The flight simulated in the booth, in fact, does not exist: it is a fiction.

I move toward the bigger space where I see the large and fluffy marshmallows that made my heart melt earlier, and they manage to melt my soul once again. Or maybe it’s my memory of seeing those huge candies for the first time that causes the melting. Once I gather myself, once I solidify, I step into an auditorium. The woman in the front of the space addresses her audience. Her clothes are non-descript and business-like; her words are measured, dry. She talks about spam emails and what it takes to use the language that does not get detected by email programs.8 She talks

7. George Mazari, A Real Trip From AMS to KBL (First Class To Third World), 2021 8. Marian Rosa van Bodegraven, Little Brazilians, 2021

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about sex and the way our words are constantly being monitored. On the screen next to her, the faces of Brazilian politicians appear; next to these faces: screenshots of sexist, homophobic, racist statements they have or may have not made. At this point, nothing should surprise us. The statement, the spam emails are fictional, just like that trip to Kabul.

The woman tells me that what’s clear is that these politicians get away with everything, that their freedom of speech will always be bigger than ours. They are the ones in power, after all.

I think of the first widely spread deep fake video of our eternally leaving, but never quite leaving, prime minister Rutte. In this video, he talks about the impact of the climate crisis on the living conditions in the Netherlands: he does so in an honest and candid way, for the very first time. It takes a fake prime minister to tell the truth, it seems. This is what the speech I listen to in the auditorium and the deep fake video tell me. Also, whoever speaks seems to be much more important than what it is they say. Would it matter if Bolsonaro was more vulgar, more horrific, more racist, and more homophobic? Would it endanger his position of power? I don’t think.

The problem seems to be that those in power get there mostly because they remind people of those who came before. They are slightly-newbut-not-too-new editions of their predecessors. They are successful because we recognize them, because they are recognized. And it is exactly this magical charm that makes them untouchable, no matter how grave their errors, their familiar presence calms the nerves of the public.

Another type of travel forms the main story behind an animated film I watch.9 Its colors are bright and soft, the narrator speaks gently. There’s a road trip, and the chance encounters that usually frame a journey like that. To grow up is to leave. The film depicts both the mental and the physical journey that is needed in order to leave the nest, and to create something that feels honest and truly yours.

All these works made me reminisce, or forced my thoughts toward the concept of memories, whether collective or private, completely justified or uncalled for. Connecting an artwork to a memory might not be much more than swallowing the work wholly, like some eager, arrogant, nostalgic motherfucker, but it might also be all we’ve got when we find ourselves confronted with art. I, for one, wouldn’t know what else is there.

9. Michelle Mildenberg,The Domestication Of Volcanoes (Chapter 1: Fertility), 2021

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THE SIGN OF THE STARS

CALL AND RESPONSE Artun Alaska Arasli, with footnotes by Aidan Wall

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An obstacle course has expanded into the pieces of tarmac, just lifted off from the ground, like leftovers from the Avengers’ battle for some undefined American city.1 Not unlikely then, the paintings on the wall are (and perhaps unwillingly) look like the outcome of a paintball battle, denoting De Stijl graffiti, a place of both the city and art historical references, outlining – or better yet, updating – expressionist painting on large, grey walls.2 These soft stone pillows on the ground are inevitably, in my mind, spaces for recuperation, recollecting, and sharing, suggesting ways for us to gather.3 You will see eventually, throughout this text perhaps, that the notion of a network – be it a city, or nature, or people – eventually extends, at least in my imagination, toward togetherness. This might sound funny, but I think a lot about the information we gather from stones.

In my own private childhood collection of them, I named each stone after a pet I wasn’t going to have. I would write the name of the animal on the stone, and in some comical way it would be the pet I couldn’t after all keep, and would lose over time. That’s how my friendship to objects has started.4 On its face, pareidolia – how humans tend to recognize faces on inanimate objects – has found an eerie meaning.5 It seems like a stretch, but think about it: face recognition can never mean the same thing again. I watched Face/Off (1997) one too many times to not see the irony. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not making light of it here, but my desperation over the advancement of surveillance just keeps me at bay from even attempting to say something meaningful about it. I think, ultimately, and not without an optimistic stretch of the imagination, that against the hands of surveillance capitalism we should all be moving closer to community building.6 Jeanne Vrastor: The animism doesn’t end there, though. The notion of the stones and their faces could be expanded onto other household objects.7 Just how a still image of a person, through contact points of identifiable gestures on a face, has become more than the mere distillation of the person in the photograph, turned into a deep fake of movable, mutable parts. Everything is susceptible to a certain kind of animism, here emulated through the household object. It is a fridge that throws up ice cubes out of its mouth like the Nyan Cat does with the rainbow.

And the plastic curtains that keep warm air at bay has itself rolled into

1. Kaspar Dejong, Pod, 2021 2. There is a simple beauty in the flatness of everyday surfaces, and particularly in those that, having paved over something, become themselves paved with other opportunistic materials – gum, tape, paint, and piss, sedimenting a fun chaos down onto the homogenizing greyness of urban life. These stains tell stories. The works here summon flatness as a weapon, formally recalling the school desks that many people chose as their first site of resistance …

I picture a great deceased architect bellowing from their coffin: “Do a kickflip!”

3. Anna Bierler, Softer Marks, 2021 4. The relationship between materiality and togetherness has not been more starkly obvious than in these webcamly times of pining – many contradictions are conjured in this moment of reaching out at what you cannot touch.

Here, in Bierler’s work, touch and speech coalesce into a language of storytelling and coming-together that is at once soft, heavy, and soggy, and as such, is assembled from material contradictions. Across the marshlands of her installation, a world is build, and it a world where you could imagine that a kilogram of stone does weigh the same as a kilogram of feathers, whereas in reality we know that cannot be.

5. Eva Bosveld, FACE_FRAME.READ( ), 2021

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itself – now a portal, a tunnel, through which the work both is and is like a column holding up the space.8 The same self-reliance that we attribute to objects under the guise of animism is clearly something that we may reproduce as either a community or a set of strangers all looking (sometimes in futility) in the same direction.9 A body of performers, in three acts, gather. A sentence in many parts are constructed as they do, but end up being dispersed regardless, as they form and re-form like a network of semblances would, all the while trying to keep water in their center. From uncomfortable and precarious positions perched on sculptures, toward a sculpted chaos in the form of gestures, they try to shape that which has no shape in their midst.10 And like the performed coda, the map is also but a tool of relations.11 The making of it is about sketching a territory by delineating, instead of exacting as many might think. Sometimes a map is a territory of broad strokes – showing the in-betweenness of two points but not exactly how they are.12

6. It’s drastically important for people to develop what James Bridle calls “systems literacy”: a way to understand the utterly complex and intricately interlocking systems of technology and infrastructure that undergird contemporary life. It’s similarly important for anyone who works in tech to understand that, without exception, their work is at risk of being assimilated for use in military pursuits and deathmaking. I’ve personally traded privacy for comfort … At some point, deep fake technology will become effective enough that I will be able to hear my father say that he’s proud of me. Until that point, I will drown in the mire of surveillance, voraciously bouncing beachballs back to the “unplugged” (or so they say).

7. Jeanne Vrastor, Carnal Fluorescence (Fridge Rendering No 2), As Deep As I Can (Snail Reiteration), 2021 8. I’ve never spoken with a fridge, for fear of what they might say. Vrastor’s work, like her video’s subject, makes ice. The idea of states in flux flows through the installation, with each sculptural element appearing as if in communication, shapeshifting when the viewers’ backs are turned, plotting together. The milky sculpture sits like an ideal body – how the ice machine might see themself at their best, the form they could be if they got but a moment’s rest from their frosty task. “I’m sorry fridge, but you’re bound to cold.”

9. Eloy Cruz Del Prado, A hundred seconds longer and it's over … , 2021 10. Wetness leaks from each corner in this concatenation of atoms. I can’t help but think of the hospitality workers who have swept rain from their bosses’ terraces: yes, you’re responsible for rain now, and no, we won’t hire another person for the weekends. The word “Caretaker” echoes out from the work’s title and sticks me: what assemblages of people have been there when I’ve spilled out across the floor? Which community of strangers and friends have pushed me back into myself?

11. Lila Bullen-Smith and Naira Nigrelli, Tools of Relation, 2021 12. Where bureaucracy draws its power from is also its greatest hindrance: illegibility and confusion. If one can imagine an institution like Sandberg Instituut or Gerrit Rietveld Academie as an archipelago of various islands and land-masses, what’s most alarming is that each of these islands often speaks their own language. There are moments where boats pass other shores, but a sense of distance and confusion sadly underpins institutions such as these. The work that Nigrelli and Bullen-Smith have done here, assembling an open source map of institutional processes and initiatives, is greatly important, and also something that ideally should already be. But surely, to mix metaphors, some institutions are like centipedes, and others are like ant colonies, and regardless, magnifying glasses are needed to look at them – especially those that might focus the sun into a burning point and spark change.

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THE SIGN OF THE STARS

THE TYRANNY OF FORMATS Katayoun Arian

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Consider the parallels between uncovering an artist’s practice and reading an astrological chart. Although at first seemingly far-fetched, both undertakings are rooted in interpretation, personal encounters, and relational thinking. Holding space for the reimagination and reenchantment of the world around us in creative and interesting ways, both art and astrology have been central in the origination and development of various cultures. Let us remember that archaeologists have found records of the practice of astrology in the ruins of many ancient cultures. By the same token, apart from their shared imaginative and interpretative qualities, astrology and art fall short of resemblances in poignant ways too. At the risk of simplification, today, practices of astrology, to some extent, can be understood as calculable, navigable, and predictable, while art is more likely to be viewed as a free space of boundless expression and interpretation. After all, art enlivens aesthetic and sensorial experiences often driven by conceptual ideas, while reasonably, engagements with astrology are governed by default templates, i.e., the zodiac wheel, planetary and celestial bodies, and the numerical nodes and aspects between them.

Instead of writing off the analogy entirely, however, I like to propose that the engagement with both practices could be useful as a starting point for thinking through my encounter with five artist’s works. Today, in spite of regimes of unacceptability and recurrences in supremacist ideologies, astrology exceeds the consumerist face of horoscopes as a pop-culture phenomenon and continues to offer tools and insights of the human experience to various people and communities worldwide, as does art.

For the purpose of this writing, its analogy should be viewed mostly as an exercise and a tentative rumination on their shared potential and limitations of that which is imaginative and inherent in both art and astrology as subcultural practices.

Since the constitution of modernity as a global, hegemonic rule, alternative imaginaries have played an important role in shifting historical, spatial, and temporal orientations, toward different, radical futurities. As our current moment is marked by an acceleration of political anxieties, imagining a way forward, that is, away from the cruel machinations of capitalism and supremacist ideologies, warrants a reconsideration of the potential of that which is imaginative. Yet, as a driver of critical imagination, the sphere of the arts in the Netherlands is facing considerable challenges.

Recall that art institutions currently encounter many trials and tribulations as they are expected to respond to the demands of economic and societal utility in order to gain legitimacy. Inevitably, mediating tensions, by way of messy processes, has become a large part of the day to day operations

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in art institutions. Having arrived at a critical juncture, these developments largely follow from a surge in subcultural imagination and activism to confront historically and institutionally embedded supremacist ideologies inherent in neoliberal, global capitalism. Take for instance art schools, which have now become educational spaces of dissent, where a considerable amount of the student body, alongside developing their artistic work, spends a great deal of their time rallying and organizing reform, prompted by exorbitant fees, and conservative ideologies, rules, and regulations imposed unidirectionally by boards and managers. And while debate about the critical role of art institutions has ensued publicly, sometimes in rather radical ways, an impasse around institutional logics remains in full effect.

Similar concerns and questions about mechanisms of deadlock seem to appear in the discussion of contemporary, radical astrology. In Postcolonial Astrology: Reading Planets through Capital, Power, and Labor (2021), queer activist and astrologer Alice Sparkly Kat writes: “There are problems within astrology: where does one’s gender identity fit into the gendered binaries of Venus and Mars? How can we define our abundance away from cultural capitals when the Sun collapses power and wealth into the solitary figure of the sovereign? What kind of Saturn, or government, should we be creating when we feel disillusioned by the prospect of government? Why is the concern of citizenship so related to genealogy? And the most crucial question: why do we keep taking these Greco-Roman ideas and archetypes and applying them to everyone as if they’re really universal and overarching?” 1 In other words, the instituted language of astrology smacks of idealism and ideology, one that is deeply intertwined with the history of western cosmology, racial capitalism, and patriarchy. To reposition Hellenistic astrology’s universalized and hegemonic status as we know it – and to make room for indigenous and migrant cosmologies, amongst other things – according to Sparkly Kat is to make specific, and to scrutinize and reshape the meanings that its language has conjured up through histories of colonization. Now that, of course, cannot be a sheer theoretical endeavor. It is also a heavy weight that is carried in practice, collectively. Sparkly Kat entails that in communities of astrology, it is only through communal means and subcultural circulation that one shrinks dominant perspectives and humbles them. They write: “It works not because there is anything magical about the language itself but because the act of not believing readily, of believing where belief has been earned, of listening waywardly, and of owning the magic of illusion

1. Alice Sparkly Kat, Postcolonial Astrology: Reading Planets through Capital, Power, and Labor (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books 2021), p.10.

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making collectively is magic. Astrology is not magic. The community that recreates it in the contemporary era is.”2 What I find helpful about Sparkly Kat’s observation, is that it omits the idea of a clean slate. We can belong in subculture; it is here where we can heal from the dominance of culture without needing to promptly do away with the meanings it has gathered historically. Indeed, a similar movement toward challenging tired scripts by way of recharting personal and collective subjectivity, seems to be a sign of the times in the sphere of contemporary art.

In Mariana Jurado Rico’s work entitled Si Puedo Y Es Fácil, Soy Cansada (2021), a Spanish speaking friend of the artist, in a speedy monologue on video, mentions templates in art practice – including biographies and artist statements – to be a source of structural and bureaucratic limitation, which she later refers to as “the tyranny of formats.” Bearing in mind that the word “NO” is a recurring feature in Jurado Rico’s spatial intervention consisting of large banners, the work seems to ludically invite the viewer to become part of a conversation around the refusal of repetitions, loops, tired scripts, and templates. Inherent in the work is the idea of circulation and refusal as communal and subcultural acts, offering carefully considered and playful artistic strategies. Posters, prints, and banner designs, and two wordy video messages are presented as a gesture of subcultural circulation through both non-monetary and monetary exchange. Here, exchange and reciprocity between the artist, their friends, and the viewers, are, ideally, an acknowledgement of the failure of hegemonic cultural norms. The rehearsal of the word “NO” along with short statements in Spanish on several sizable banners distributed across the space, are a constant reminder of the possibility of dissent. One, that on a closer inspection, calls attention to our predicament – namely, that of willful complicity. In a video performance, the artist, standing in front of the camera, declares their observations about us – the viewer – while their image moves in and out of focus against the backdrop of a green screen. The continuous blurring of their own image recalls Hito Steyerl’s thoughts on the class position of images: a position of ease and privilege is one of being in focus, while being out of focus lowers one’s value as a subject.3 In blurring their own image as the narrator of a stirring, political, and disciplinary speech, Jurado Rico plays with the disavowal of their own image as an authority figure, leaving us primarily with the resonation of their words.

But what if words fall between the cracks? What is the class position of the missing word? What is a sentence when left incomplete? In ] bracket

2. Sparkly Kat, Postcolonial Astrology, p.13.

3. Hito Steyerl, The Wretched of the Screen (Sternberg Press, 2012), p.33.

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(2021), Romy Day Winkel explores the weight of punctuation and the placeholding of missing words in the antique poetry of Sappho, as preserved on papyrus fragments. In her translations of these fragments, poet and translator Anne Carson has indicated Sappho’s lost or erased words with empty brackets. Day Winkel contemplates on placeholding poetically, comparing it to the act of tip-toeing away from a stalker.

Driven by feelings of anxiety and out of fear of being stalked, in her video work, we see two feet tip-toeing. Standing on one’s feet, and carrying one’s weight so as to leave no trace behind, is heavy work. It is a form of ‘passing’ from the shadows of domination and subjugation, often as a survival strategy. The act of holding space for missing words through brackets, however, is one of holding a different kind of weight. Empty brackets add weight to the missing words of a woman poet from antiquity.

Brackets, by changing the status of words from being erased to being imagined, thus place importance on the memory of what was once there.

It is a story in a story, and as such it mirrors the weight of traces. The imagined traces of a stalker are heavy, because the burden of having to come up against patriarchal domination is heavy. ] bracket is part of the artist’s broader writing practice and literary engagement with the concepts of “ruination” and “disidentification” in the research project Romance Utopia. Comprising a digital archive, a radio show, a video installation and a publication, with Romance Utopia, Day Winkel astutely explores the possibilities of subcultural circulation of radical imaginaries away from patriarchal values, through various platforms and means.

Combatting patriarchal values requires ongoing, daily practices of repositioning through other types of communal and liberatory acts. Undoing is heavy work, however, when done collectively, the weight is held differently. In Maja Chiara Faber’s work Screaming in a Similar Key (2021), the artist focuses on communal, embodied, and material intersections of decoloniality and Eastern European pagan practices of spirituality through music and performance. Concerned with healing and deprogramming the patriarchy via speculative means, with her work she stages collective encounters guided by rituals as a catalyst for reimagining and reliving indigenous beliefs and spirituality. In a hauntingly frail sculpture, bodies appear as fluid instruments of resistance; multiple non-normative bodies are seen merging into one another in a looped video projected on a translucent, white piece of cloth hanging from a light constellation of tree trunks. While the installed work appears to be almost liquid, the artist’s performances unleash a different transformative potential through a choreography of fire and sound in striking and transcendental ways.

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Within the complex social matrix of personal and communal liberation, Negiste Yesside Johnson’s work reminds us that amidst the ruins of neoliberal capitalism, our attempts for liberation are futile if we cease to factor in the implications of larger macroeconomic forces on the lives of undocumented migrants in Europe. In Shuffering and Shmiling (2021), the artist presents several sculptures and a video work that center around the ways in which restrictions of activity on individuals and groups aren’t, by any means, equally distributed. Indeed, our current moment of political confusion and ecological emergency, finds itself in an uncomfortable proximity to collective self-destruction. Yesside Johnson’s work, however, sharply recalls the probability of single-issue politics, which not only justifies underlying ideologies that continue the financial, mental, and social precarity of undocumented migrants in a given social setup, but also omits questions surrounding limiting and halting harmful and extractivist logics of accumulation in conjunction with border politics.

Finally, Vida Kasaie’s video and installation work A Play for Public (2021) is a poetic consideration of the ways in which architecture, urban landscape, and its flaneurs meet. The installation recreates the sidewalks of the autumn streets seen in the film. Through small gestures, and yet sophisticated in its filmic language and scoring, it transports me to another dimension in a different register – one of giving myself over. For lack of better words, this is the most immersive work, which combined with the previously discussed works, allows for that which is imaginative to spark a different meaning.

Indeed, art’s many institutional shortcomings, limitations, and problems compromise its imaginative potential – at times totally eclipsing the art.

How can astrology be used as a plot device for thinking through some of these queries and problems? Departing from Sparkly Kat’s writing, amidst the ruins of hegemonic frameworks, artists and art workers on the one hand uncover, through a variety of strategies, the social conditionings that help to reinforce the status quo and the ideologies that justify a given social setup in a neoliberal order. On the other hand, holding onto art practices offers various registers through which we can communalize certain phenomena towards radical orientation: languages and literacies that together, and along side one and other, allow us to think and speculate new imaginaries and realities away from oppressive blueprints.

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THE SIGN OF THE STARS

DESTINY, TALENT, FORTUNE Federico Campagna

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PANIC AND PARANOIA At times, the flow of things stretches like a deep canal – placid, open to navigation. At times, it grows to such a speed that I can barely hold my vessel together. In a matter of seconds, the feeling of this acceleration can dissipate any strength that I might have, and my ability to grasp the world as a mosaic of distinct objects. When panic makes its entrance, the world truly becomes pan, “whole”.

But panic has also the tendency to evoke its own nemesis, paranoia, as if to open itself to its own healing. Spasms of paranoia regularly sweep through panic’s world, forcefully reinserting those distinctions that had melted away.

Like a stream and a dam, panic and paranoia engage each other in endless battle, oscillating between flood and drought.

Sailing between the Charybdis of fate and the Scylla of freedom, humans have long developed a series of words, notions, and figures of thought, into as many additional oars for their own existential ships. Three notions in particular have been crucial to this perilous journey: destiny, talent, and fortune. These three forms of thought have long permeated our imagination and, regardless of time and place, common sense seems to have always retained a deep familiarity with them.

These three figures, like a weird constellation, align as marks on a segment between two poles: the pole of absolute determinism and that of pure chaos.

These poles are also known by other names: eternity and becoming; necessity and freedom; paranoia and panic. One pole, determinism, pulls toward an arctic heaven, where all things fall according to their inherent gravity toward their inevitable end – it is soothing, like a compulsive addiction, with the same mixture of punishment and reassurance. The other pole, chaos, is the heady panorama of an expanse without a horizon – it is a split flame rising obliquely, promising benevolent annihilation in the form of paralysis-by-speed. Along the distance that separates these poles, we deploy our ways of dealing with the contending forces of their pulling.

DESTINY “Destiny” is the name of the lens pointed toward the pole of necessity, magnetically drawing us in its direction. The notion of destiny addresses the “directionality” of the world, by detecting it as inherent to each existent.

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We could say in simple terms that the destiny of something – whether a material object or an immaterial situation – consists of it having a direction that is innate to the specific form that it has at a certain point in time. At any moment, the destiny of a person, object, or relationship is the direction projected by the angles of its form.

To be able to understand the destiny of something, it is necessary to follow the inner rhythm of its form, and to observe how each of its angles emanates a direction. In this sense, the notion of destiny comes very close to the fields of dance and sculpture – even though it is most frequently (and incorrectly) associated with the practice of future-telling.

Futurology and predictive statistics, too, see the innate rhythms of existence, whether material or immaterial. They see that each form has a direction of its own – yet, they differ from destiny in the way they understand how this bond develops over time. Is each existent necessarily bound to a specific direction, or to a set of directions, for the duration of its existence? Is any existent ever bound to a specific form or set of forms? Future-telling and predictive statistics answer affirmatively. They do so, on the basis of their fundamental accord: in their vision, existence coincides with a whirlpool of manifest energies agitating in the cup of the universe, which is itself spinning in absolute nothingness. The contemporary scientist and the commercial magician share the same closed ontology, according to which existence stretches like the smooth surface of a sphere, where every point exists on the same level as any other.

Their confidence in the potential of their practice is justified by the idea that this web of interactions exhausts all existence, and that it can be mapped, and possibly predicted in its totality. Determinism inevitably follows, tinging the work of future-tellers and predictive statisticians alike with paranoia.

The notion of “destiny” emerges precisely as an antidote to the forces of pure determinism. Unlike statistics or future-telling, the notion of destiny originates in the awe-filled acknowledgement that a factor external to the world interferes with the inner variability of the world itself. The original act of god’s creation has traditionally symbolized such an “external” intervention in the world, which is capable of assigning a direction to its existence. The notion of destiny presents this intersection between the world and the otherworldy in the form of a slant – an inclination marking each existent. Any “thing,” any form that the world might take, is bent in the particular direction which is connatural to that thing’s form at that point in time. As seen through the notion of destiny, existence resembles Shiva, whose dance brings forth the world.

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Destiny has a vectorial ontology, in that it recognizes a unique drive belonging to each form of existence. With its directionality, destiny connects itself also to notion of “desire.” Desire is inherent to the world and to each thing – manifesting itself as a slant, a direction of the form itself. Within this perspective, desire and form, direction and composure share the same ontological home, like Dionysus and Apollo at the sanctuary in Delphi during the winter months.

The world described by destiny is a stroboscopic palette of colors, emanating from a prism where an original formative light is refracted. Each thing, at every point in time, corresponds to one angled face among myriad. The “phenomenon” and the “noumenon,” the visible and the mystery are connected at fundamental level, differing only in the gradation of their manifestation. The very fact of existence, impenetrable as it is to reason, cannot be dissociated from the catalogue of countless forms that existence takes. Through the figure of destiny, it is possible to hold this double recognition of the necessity that characterizes each form, and of the freedom that belongs to existence.

Because existence, which is formless in itself, embraces only temporarily a certain destiny by taking on a specific form – similarly to the souls seen

by Er in his dream, as recounted by Plato.

Mystery is not bound to any of its manifestations. No particular love exhausts love itself. Its generative force travels between the existents, each time becoming faithful to its new form – just before abandoning it. Existence migrates through the forms of language, like a stranger in and to the world – god’s archetypical symbol, the model of a saintly life. Migrants know well that each specific place on the atlas, or moment in history, harbors its own destiny and broadcasts its own melody. Moving between these forms is precisely how existence, the fundamental stranger, performs its own dance.

TALENT The practice of migrations has a close relationship also with the second instrument of our existential sailing: “talent.” A “talented” migrant is able to integrate themselves in their new home, to the point of almost disappearing, while at the same time refusing to swear any real allegiance to its social norms, however novel, advanced, or hospitable they may be. A “talented” migrant vanishes in order to remain a foreigner, since foreignness is the point of equilibrium between subjection and autonomy, necessity and freedom, paranoia and panic.

But the task of remaining a foreigner requires constant and careful negotiation

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of the demands issued by a migrant’s new home and by their own uprootedness. Here lies talent in its essence, in the ability to combine the two polar forces ruling over worldly enterprises: determinism and chaos. Talent is a manifestation of what is symbolically described as “grace”: the force capable of diverting the flow of existence, or its manifestation, away from one destiny, toward another destiny, again and again.

This notion of talent resembles an artist’s relationship between the abstract and the material aspects of their work – how an artist bridges the distance between idea and object. More generally, talent defines the way in which any of us engages with the intricate diplomacy of ontological forces. Far from being measured by the meter of societal success or recognition, talent is tested by our ability to navigate the narrow strait between the Symplegades of determinism and chaos, and to avoid the double catastrophes that they engender. The specific talents that a person shows in life – their ability to manage abstraction and matter, idea and tool, mind and body, and so on – are only instances of this practice of existential navigation.

Borrowing traditional theological parlance, it would be possible to assign an “angelic” quality to talent. This figure of thought, this fundamental ability, shares the same intermediary position as the angel in theology: the role of the messenger between different provinces of the ontological spectrum – as is most explicitly the case in the mythology of traditional societies, where the angelic figure of the “civilizing hero” describes the demi-gods who first taught art to humanity.

FORTUNE Even though talent recognizes the destiny inscribed in each existent form, its horizon doesn’t end there. Talent is equally aware of a third figure of thought, which is placed between a single consciousness and pure chaos.

Proceeding along the thread that passes through destiny and talent, a new figure emerges like a gatekeeper on the way to unfathomable and terrifying chaos: “fortune”. Through the figure of “fortune,” the relationship between the forces of determinism and chaos manifests itself from a perspective which is closer to the latter. In the symbol of the “wheel of fortune” all fixed identities crumble in on themselves, carried to their own catastrophe by the very motion of existence. A chaotic force traverses existence, and a generative force traverses chaos: the “world” is the aura of sparks stretching between hub and wheel.

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While destiny embodies the archetypically paternal voice of necessity, fortune displays the archetypically feminine invitation for existence to take place across multiple forms. Political thinkers have often employed this feminine aspect of fortune – and similarly, of “nature” – in patriarchal terms, considering fortune as the archetype of the subject that has to be tamed, or of the tree that has to be pruned. On the contrary, however, the notion of fortune – like that of destiny – suggests that between consciousness and chaos there is a place where consciousness can plant its tent, waiting, observing, meeting the forces that share and mold its world.

Like destiny’s mix of comfort and pain, fortune also brings with itself irresistible promises combined with unbearable threats. Both destiny and fortune present a truthful account fo how we actually experience our existence in the world – a “coincidence of opposites” between determinism and chaos. But even though their ultimate object coincides, the existential lenses provided by the notions of destiny and fortune offer different angles through which our consciousness can gaze toward the unfathomable mystery of existence.

And talent constitutes a third lens, which is archetypically androgynous and gendered, though which consciousness can gaze at its own unfathomable mystery.

The smokiness and grotesque imprecision of notions such as destiny, talent, and chaos, makes for the gentleness of the world that they manifest. Compared to more current ontological notions like “fact,” “event” and “probability,” those three ancient lenses seem to be uniquely able to regulate the intensity of pure existence, thus allowing our consciousness to remain aware of both the mystery of the territory and the clarity of the map – neither a tempest nor a still sea, but a Zephyr along the coast.

CONSCIOUSNESS As seen in the triangulation of these notions, consciousness itself acquires a different, fluid quality. Rather than a vessel of wood and metal, consciousness takes on the consistence of a jellyfish, its oars turning into tentacles. Its livelihood depends on the sea, and its liquid shape is molded by the force of water.

Consciousness, in this scenario, owes its form to the tides flowing through the notions that it erects around itself.

But consciousness enters this scenario also in a more dramatic and painful way. Destiny is like a sharp blade, cutting shapes into the fabric of one’s

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existence. And consciousness is like a hand, pressing on this blade. The existential threat issued by destiny justifies this blood sacrifice: falling out of the destiny inscribed in the form which one inhabits would feel like falling out of existence itself. Yet, no sacrifice is ever capable of fully appeasing the force of destiny – hence its obsessive repetition, and our constant struggle with paranoia.

Fortune, for its part, might seem milder at first, swapping threats with promises. By manifesting itself as fortune, chaos inserts within reality the very idea of “potentiality” – that all things can develop into one another. This is a terrifying promise, however, if it was ever to be fully accomplished: when everything turns into everything, speed reaches the point where frenzy petrifies itself into paralysis, and panic becomes motionless nausea of absolute freedom.

Finally, talent, molds consciousness with a different movement: not with threats or promises, but with the angelic function of an archetypal model.

It brings in the notion that it is possible to carve a space of autonomy between overpowering forces, and that it is possible to do so only by engaging with them simultaneously, with the tools appropriate to each.

Indeed, the opposing courts of determinism and chaos, destiny and fortune, paranoia and panic, require different approaches. They need to be understood differently. The etiquette of the former revolves around the idea of probability: the intuition of a certain inevitability of the events. To this court, consciousness presents itself dressed as “knowledge,” and eventually as “work.” The code of conduct of the latter court, on the contrary, has the idea of possibility at its core: the vista of a frozen expanse of promised actualizations, a sleeping mind containing all dreams. To it, consciousness arrives dressed as “faith,” and eventually as “love.” In the context of its perennial poverty, consciousness deploys its approach to pure existence as if by placing bets. Faith is an existential bet based on a possibility; knowledge is an existential bet based on a probability.

FORGIVENESS Talent, like a friendly croupier, signals each time where we should place our bet. But its court too, however amicable, requires that consciousness speaks its own language. During the Christian era, this language was often symbolized by the figure of “hope.” Yet, it might be more accurate to bind it with the act of “forgiveness.”

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Even when hopeless in its own ability to negotiate with the forces that seem to overpower it, consciousness can still forgive itself of its own failures. And in doing so, it gives itself the ability to start anew once again. The cloak of forgiveness, however, is nowhere to be found in the wardrobe of consciousness. It is provided at the entrance to the court of talent, like clothes given to a novice. Being able to engage with “talent” requires an initial act of forgiveness bestowed by consciousness upon itself. Through forgiveness, consciousness is able to take on a new form – yet, this is only made possible through the external help of a borrowed cloak, like Cinderella’s clothes.

Where does this initial and inexhaustible authorization come from? Indeed, from the same place as the sad passions that belong to existence. Like the fear instilled by destiny, and the credulity elicited by fortune, also the fundamental authorization granted by talent rightfully belongs to the primitive facts of existence. Together, like the angles of a geometrical figure, they draw a possible shape for existence in the world – a biased riddle, hinting at its own solution. Talent, the benevolent voice of existential authorization, shines from the pinnacle of the triangle. Its suggestion to consciousness, as it encounters the mystery of existence, is to treat it with forgiveness – a forgiveness that has to be prior to each engagement, as if abolishing the consequentiality of linear time; a pre-eternal forgiveness to existence, including to one’s own, that allows existence to take place and consciousness to operate each time anew, under a different destiny, chasing a different fortune.

Through the optical system composed by the figures of destiny, talent, and fortune, the experience of living between panic and paranoia, between determinism and chaos, acquires a more hospitable character. Not because it’s necessarily made easier – the same acrobatics of existential diplomacy are required – but because the world that this optical system manifests is wide enough to allow for movement, while remaining defined enough to temper the frenzy of absolute freedom.

Is this true? It is no less true than the optical-existential systems that are most commonly employed today. For my part, I have recently started to venture along its lines of perspective. I try to keep in mind that these lines are just projections, while trying to engage with them as if they were real. It certainly isn’t an impeccable philosophical system, but it does function as a something of a cure – and that’s enough for now.

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MAJA CHIARA FABER Krakow, Poland 1992

LEO Main Department Fine Arts

SCREAMING IN A SIMILAR KEY With sound as her main subject and method, Maja Chiara Faber (Krakow, Poland, 1992) explores esotericism, sexuality, memory, and fiction. Her research focuses on queer female narratives and the deconstruction of patriarchal structures, emphasizing healing and communal bonding.

Screaming in a similar key consists of a video installation and performance.

It maps the connections that the pre-Christian and pre-colonial era have with current decolonial movements. By mixing Slavic paganism’s iconography, rituals, legends, and facts with her own mythology of being queer, femme, and intersex, Faber

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speculates about possible futures.

MAJA CHIARA FABER Krakow, Poland 1992

SCR EAM ING IN A

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/draft/maja-chiara-faber

LEO Main Department Fine Arts Maja Chiara Faber’s work navigates explorations of esotericism, sexuality, memory, and fiction. Sound is her collaborator, theme and method at the same time. Her research is exploring queer femxle-identified narratives and deprogramming patriarchal structures by enlisting femme aesthetics to do a labor of it. Maja Chiara’s practice focuses on healing and communal bonding. Polish musician and DJ, performs under the moniker Satin de Compostela.

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MICHELLE MILDENBERG Bogotá, Colombia 1991

LEO Temporary Programme Resolution

THE DO MES TI VOL CA CA TION NOES OF

It’s 1973, Fernanda is 13 years old and has embarked on a journey across Colombia to join older friends that are hanging out in Santa Marta in the Atlantic coast, her friend Beatriz comes along. Together, they have plotted an intelligible escape from their parents. During the trip, Fernanda will leave the bubble of her neighborhood in Bogotá, transgressing the vast and plural territory in front of her and acquiring a different understanding of her body through doing so. She will encounter a series of women that are a historical testimony of the period in which her journey takes place.

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MICHELLE MILDENBERG Bogotá, Colombia 1991

LEO Temporary Programme Resolution

THE DOMESTICATION OF VOLCANOES (CHAPTER 1: FERTILITY) Michelle Mildenberg (Bogotá, Colombia, 1991) is interested in biopolitics, territories of conflict, and historiography from a gendered perspective. Mildenberg’s animation is set in 1973; Fernanda is thirteen years old and has embarked on a journey across Colombia to join older friends that are hanging out in Santa Marta on the Atlantic coast.

Her friend Beatriz comes along, with whom she has plotted an intelligible escape from their parents. During the trip, Fernanda leaves the bubble of her neighborhood in Bogotá,

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transgressing the vast and plural territory in front of her and acquiring a different understanding of her body through doing so. She encounters a series of women that hold a historical testimony of the period in which her journey takes place.

PERNILLA MANJULA PHILIP Uppsala, Sweden 1978

LEO Main Department Design

CARE UNIT Pernilla Manjula Philip (Uppsala, Sweden, 1978) is fascinated by feelings and the embodiment of emotions.

For the installation Care Unit, Philip combined features from a traditional doctor’s office, a domestic space, and a lab. It offers an alternative perspective on medical care products, and encourages questions around agency of the ill body in relation to the medical-industrial complex. Care Unit envisions hacking and tinkering as collaborative tools of activism in order to reimagine alternative collective care systems.

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PERNILLA MANJULA PHILIP Uppsala, Sweden 1978

THE CARE UNIT

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/draft/pernilla-manjula-philip

LEO Main Department Design The Care Unit, obtains and simultaneously challenges features from a traditional hospital room. It offers an alternative perspective on medical care-products and encourages questions around agency of the ill-body in relation to the medical industry. The care-unit is a test-site for exploring vulnerabilities as well as the strengths of collective forces such as DIY and open-source approaches to healing and sickness management. By proposing medical open-source hardware and software this scenographic installation aims to motivate curiosity around communal care and turns around the essential question of who has agency over our bodies.

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ROMY DAY WINKEL Amsterdam, The Netherlands 1994

RO MANCE U TO PIA https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/draft/romy-day-winkel

LEO Temporary Programme Critical Studies As a final outcome of my research project, I have worked on a publication titled Romance Utopia. In this book I have collected some of my written and visual work, as well as curatorial work, around romance. It contains three essays, one interview with writer and artist Geraldine Snell and four visual works by artists Dagmar Bosma, Becket MWN, Mónica Mays, and Mafalda Costa. The graphic design is done by Tjobo Kho.

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ROMY DAY WINKEL Amsterdam, The Netherlands 1994

LEO Temporary Programme Critical Studies

] BRACKET The installation ] bracket, by Romy Day Winkel (Amsterdam, the Netherlands, 1994) is part of a bigger research project titled Romance Utopia. This project questions how to “save” romance from being instrumentalized for boring or harmful purposes, and instead aims to steer it into a radical direction. ] bracket is an installation that deals with the fear of being followed, informed by the experience of being stalked over the past couple of years. The paranoid perspective that comes with that can feel like a continuous and involuntary trace of someone else, as if there is always a sound shadowing one’s own.

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By erasing the possibility of hearing someone else’s footsteps, the work aims to tip-toe toward consensual imaginal possibilities, drawing parallels with Anne Carson’s usage of brackets in her Sappho translations.

TEUN F. GRONDMAN Enschede, The Netherlands 1994

LEO Temporary Programme Approaching Language

THE REAL TIME Teun F. Grondman’s (Enschede, the Netherlands, 1994) video The Real Time is about Lewa, a green LEGO-Bionicle figure. Born from Late Devonian organic matter, injection-molded into a humanoid form and then digitized into a 3D-environment, Lewa wanders the earth and wonders how to live in a natural way.

As a canonical god of nature, Lewa is tasked to save the world from a frightening future where nature and beauty are seemingly obliterated. The Real Time is a search for comfort, an attempt at freeing oneself from the matrix of industrial civilization.

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TEUN F. GRONDMAN Enschede, The Netherlands 1994

LEO Temporary Programme Approaching Language

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UN TI TLED

VALENTINE LANGEARD Les Yvelines, France 1997

THEY, CAN T STOP THE SPRING https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/draft/valentine-langeard

LEO Main Department Studio for Immediate Spaces A ZAD (Zone A Defendre) has been installed in the garden to protect this vegetal oasis threatened by architectural projects devising its desertification. The precious ecosystem is occupied by the furtives, hybrid creatures that relate in absolute symbiosis to their environment and rightfully became a symbol of environmental activism. Crystallized furtives stand as lookouts. They have been seen and as their self-defense technic is to freeze, they remain immobile as statues guarding the wild flora and fauna. A tripod was raised blocking the access of any machinery coming to destroy the garden. The eviction must not occur. A stilt-walker wanders through the occupied space. Her hybrid body, oscillating between human curves and tree branches, makes you wonder if she might also be a furtive.

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VALENTINE LANGEARD Les Yvelines, France 1997

LEO Main Department Studio for Immediate Spaces

FURTIVE KASKANTINA Within her practice, Valentine Langeard (Les Yvelines, France, 1997) questions the contemporary drifts of human domestication of nature and analyses its different charges of traditions and spiritualities. The installation, Furtive Kaskantina, consists of a video work and multiple sculptures. Visitors can discover the 3D reproduction of the actual Kaskantina through a notentirely-human sight, making them aware of the furtive presence of environmental activists. The Kaskantina is a self-sufficient urban farm and greenhouse in Amsterdam-Zuid, an ecological community space created

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by nomad farmer Menno Houstrat to gather neighbors around their food autonomy.

MANOLA BUONINCONTRI Pescia, Italy 1995

VIRGO Temporary Programme Approaching Language

LAND OF SLEEP Having a background in communication design, Manola Buonincontri (Pescia, Italy, 1995) focuses on their writing practice. Land of Sleep is an installation in which writing becomes a spatial practice, and text a space where one could “install” a memory.

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MANOLA BUONINCONTRI Pescia, Italy 1995

LAND OF SLEEP

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/draft/manola-buonincontri

VIRGO Temporary Programme Approaching Language There are places in literature writers go to, the sky for example – often considered as a virtual space to aspire to. In Land of Sleep writing becomes a spatial practise and text a space where to install a memory.

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VIOLETA PAEZ ARMANDO Cordoba, Argentina 1994

VIRGO Main Department Critical Studies

AN AB SEN RE CE MO VED TW ICE

A speculative fiction developed through sculpture and writing considering traces and queer ephemera as both a strategy for queer survival and keepers of queer stories and lives.

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VIOLETA PAEZ ARMANDO Cordoba, Argentina 1994

VIRGO Main Department Critical Studies

ABSENCE, TWICE REMOVED The work of Violeta Paez Armando (Cordoba, Argentina, 1994) sits in the interstices of sculpture, writing, and theory. Informed by queer and decolonial discourses, her practice deals with questions of permeability, malleability, and monstrosity.

Absence, twice removed is a speculative fiction story constructed both through sculpture and text. It is a modification of the story of Echidna, a monster in Greek mythology considered to be the mother of monsters. It starts from the premise: what if the mother of monsters was in a queer relationship and had a fight?

What if they bred all of these monsters

to keep this relationship alive? It talks about queer futurity and an extended idea of queer ephemera and traces as essential to queer survival.

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ZGJIM ELSHANI Aarau, Kosovo 1990

VIRGO Main Department Design

EMOTECH CRYSIS 1.0

EmoTECH CRYSIS 1.0 is an instllation by Zgjim Elshani’s (Aarau, Kosovo, 1990). Facing the end of the world in the age of communication technology, the feelings of loneliness, alienation, and isolation have become deeply internalized by Elshani’s generation. By recovering the Gjama, an ancient and nearly forgotten Albanian mourning ritual with collective grieving at its core, this audio-visual installation aims to counter this mode of existence while creating a space for reflection upon, and re-interpretation of, collective emotive experiences.

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ZGJIM ELSHANI Aarau, Kosovo 1990

VIRGO Main Department Design

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UN TI TLED

BENJAMIN SCHOONENBERG Rotterdam, The Netherlands 1996

LIBRA Main Department Critical Studies

PROPO SI DIS TIONS CI FOR PLI NAR I POST TY

Propositions for Post-disciplinarity is a (spatial and textual) proposal for post-disciplinarity as a practice that centers unlearning, takes place beside(s) the institution and departs from existing disciplinary boundaries.

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BENJAMIN SCHOONENBERG Rotterdam, The Netherlands 1996

LIBRA Main Department Critical Studies

PROPOSITIONS FOR POSTDISCIPLINARITY Having a predominantly academic background, Benjamin Schoonenberg (Rotterdam, the Netherlands, 1996) is interested in the supposed separation between academic theory and artistic practice. With his installation and reading performance Propositions for post-disciplinarity, Schoonenberg proposes “postdisciplinarity” as a practice that centers unlearning and takes places beside the institution.

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GHENWA ABOU FAYAD Bikfaya, Lebanon 1992

LIBRA Main Department Design

ALLAH PROJECT MASHROU ALLAH IN THE NAME OF GOD The title of ghenwa abou fayad’s (Bikfaya, Lebanon, 1992) installation allah project mashrou allah in the name of god is derived from one of many expressions commonly used among people with different religious beliefs in Lebanon. The frequent usage of these religious expressions across decades, however, has slightly altered their meaning. Within her installation, abou fayad explores these expressions and the specificity of their context. The word god or “allah” can express frustration or distress at times, and at others,

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the word is used to express false hope, like “inshallah,” depending on the sociopolitical context. abou fayad is interested in the way the patriarchal system in Lebanon has led people to project the intangible figure of allah onto the portraits of warlords that still rule the system: the more that religion is instrumentalized, the further that the concept and visual representation of allah becomes unfounded.

GHENWA ABOU FAYAD Bikfaya, Lebanon 1992

LIBRA Main Department Design

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UN TI TLED

JIHYE LEE Seoul, South Korea 1992

UN TI TLED

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/draft/jihye-lee

LIBRA Main Department Fine Arts Air-dry clay, acrylics: (2019–2021, Amsterdam and Düsseldorf) v. to carry; to emit; to spread f.n. toxic (max. 5 for children, 7–8 for women and 10 for men); memory; smallest unit; female; medicine; cleaning blood; vomit; activation; mis-naming; yellow Plaster, edible silver leaves, water, wire, paper: (2021, Amsterdam) v. to fold and unfold; to wrap and unwrap; to write f.n. Dear. R Wood, beeswax: (2021, Amsterdam) v. to make love easier; to scratch n. skin of dusts

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JIHYE LEE Seoul, South Korea 1992

LIBRA Main Department Fine Arts

UNTITLED Jihye Lee’s (Seoul, South Korea, 1992) floor installation consists of different materials such as clay, acrylics, and aluminium. The different objects all have some kind of imprints on them or look like they have been used before as a mold. Their quasi-functional appearance is emphasized by the way they are scattered throughout the exhibition space.

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MARIAN ROSA VAN BODEGRAVEN São Paulo, Brazil 1993

LIBRA Temporary Programme Resolution

LITTLE BRAZILIANS The research of Marian Rosa van Bodegraven (São Paulo, Brazil, 1993) orbits around sexuality and its intertwining with architecture and digital culture. Little Brazilians is a collection of erotic-satirical spam emails to Brazilian politicians, based on episodes of moralizing sexuality in recent Brazilian politics. Twisting the use of sexuality as a vehicle for political ideology while working with the same currency, the construction of the emails as spam comes as a form of strategic response to the fake news that flooded Brazilian social media, and played a crucial role in the 2018 elections.

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MARIAN ROSA VAN BODEGRAVEN São Paulo, Brazil 1993

LIT TLE BRAZIL IANS https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/draft/marian-rosa-van-bodegraven

LIBRA Temporary Programme Resolution This work consists of writing erotic satires in the form of spam emails to Brazilian politicians. The emails are based on episodes in recent Brazilian politics that contain an aspect of moralizing sexuality, with a focus on posts from conservative politicians. The construction of the emails as spam comes as a form of strategical response to the fake news that flooded Brazilian social media, aiding Bolsonaro’s election. Working with spam as a counternarrative, twisting the use of sexuality as a vehicle for political ideology, I want to reply in the same coin (as we say in Brazil), deconstructing the format adopted by conservative politicians, and their views on sexuality. It is in essence, a work about sexuality and language.

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MARIEL WILLIAMS San Clemente, California, USA 1992

FOR THE GES TURE SUP PORT https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/draft/mariel-williams

LIBRA Main Department Studio for Immediate Spaces For the Gesture Support is a proposed installation of several phones to be housed throughout the rooms surrounding the courtyard of Maison Descartes. Each phone will operate on a single landline to create an alternative chorale amplification and intimate broadcasting system.

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MARIEL WILLIAMS San Clemente, California, USA 1992

LIBRA Main Department Studio for Immediate Spaces

FOR THE GESTURE SUPPORT Mariel Williams’s (San Clemente, California, USA, 1992) For the gesture support is a moving vocal collaboration between local performers set to the timetable of the F20 ferry.

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NOÉ COTTENCIN Rennes, France 1994

LIBRA Temporary Programme Resolution REALITY AND FICTION Within Noé Cottencin’s (Rennes, France, 1994) 10 minute film Reality and Fiction, humans and non-humans join forces in the insurrection of daily life. “Reclaim the dawn, write everywhere, rewild the camera, fiction is in the service of life, the melody is in your eyes, this is a film about beginnings.”

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NOÉ COTTENCIN Rennes, France 1994

RE AL I TY AND FIC TION

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/draft/noe-cottencin

LIBRA Temporary Programme Resolution Three individuals with three different trajectories and apparently no connection between them are trying hard to situate themselves in their environment by producing stories.

Simultaneously, a group of skaters are turning the city into a giant playground. While the three seem to be looking for something, the group seem to have found it.

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RAPHAEL JACOBS Oedt, Germany 1994

500

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/draft/raphael-jacobs

LIBRA Temporary Programme Approaching Language Begegnungszone is a transmedial exploration of the drama within the quotidian, inspired by ideas of urban planning to create spaces of encounter. In Begegnungszone characters meet within the performance of their everyday life. Within materialities such as film, text, and drawing, the archived encounters are blurring the boundaries of dramatic theatre, rehearsal, short film, live-experience. The individual streams float together in a state between private revelation and rendered fiction.

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RAPHAEL JACOBS Oedt, Germany 1994

LIBRA Temporary Programme Approaching Language

BEGEGNUNGSZONE Raphael Jacobs’s (Oedt, Germany, 1994) Begegnungszone is a transmedia exploration of the drama within the quotidian, inspired by ideas of urban planning to create spaces of encounter. In Begegnungszone characters meet within the performance of their everyday life. Within materialities such as film, text, and drawing, the archived encounters blur the boundaries of dramatic theater, rehearsal, short film, and live experience. The individual streams float together in a state between private revelation and rendered fiction.

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JAE PIL EUN Wonju, South Korea 1991

SCORPIO Temporary Programme Approaching Language

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JAE PIL EUN Wonju, South Korea 1991

FAIRY TALES, HOR ROR FILMS https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/draft/jae-pil-eun

SCORPIO Temporary Programme Approaching Language I wrote poems and made performances based on the elements of a horror genre film. In this writing, I will bring these practices. First I will introduce a beginning form of fairy tale and then try to find similarities between horror stories. After that, subjects and camera techniques of horror films will be shown and my practices will be proposed.

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JEANINE VAN BERKEL Curaçao 1995

A SCORE FOR SI LENCE https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/draft/jeanine-van-berkel

SCORPIO Main Department Critical Studies The performance and installation works through the concept of ghosts and haunting in combination with previous ideas about the relationship between Curacao and The Netherlands together with personal forgotten history. “Haunting lies precisely in its refusal to stop” (Quote, Eve Tuck). I can’t stop re-shaping this question of the past, because it shapes my present. In a way, I’m the ghost that is haunting myself.

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JEANINE VAN BERKEL Curaçao 1995

SCORPIO Main Department Critical Studies A SCORE FOR SILENCE Jeanine van Berkel (Curaçao, 1995) is a graphic designer, visual researcher, and writer. She is interested in what way her multi-ethnic body relates to the bigger colonial structures – especially focusing on the relationship between Curaçao and the Netherlands.

In her ongoing research through the semi-forgotten memory of herself and (un)known history of her various motherlands, she explores urgent questions and shapes what silence looks like. For the performance and installation A Score for Silence, van Berkel combines concepts of ghosts and haunting with ideas about the relationship between Curaçao and

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the Netherlands, intertwining these with her personal, forgotten history.

By reshaping questions of the past, van Berkel shapes her present.

STELIOS ILCHUK Cyprus 1993

SCORPIO Main Department Design

STILL DRIVE The sculptural installation Still Drive

by Stelios Ilchuk (Cyprus, 1993) takes evolution as its starting point.

Within the work, Ilchuk explores the influence that all life forms have on each other, and how they are shaped through complex relationships. As individual species, humans may have drifted apart from each other, but they still share an experience of interconnectedness with the world.

Within Still Drive, Ilchuk reveals a bigger, more complicated picture at play, where humanity’s fabricated eminence and augmented realities are not separate, but part of the same process. Each sculpture

explores future-past scenarios where the artificial and the organic blur into one, and the division between humanity and nature is put into question.

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STELIOS ILCHUK Cyprus 1993

SCORPIO Main Department Design

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UN TI TLED

ZUZA BANASINSKA Warsaw, Poland 1994

THE HOUSE THAT SHAD OWS BUILT https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/draft/zuza-banasinska

SCORPIO Temporary Programme Resolution The chroma key screen – a point of connection between, land, machine, body and the virtual. A trick of masking out the background, has been used in cinema (as blue screen, black screen, sodium vapor) to create flatness through depth, to move from the “beyond” to the “here” that could be anywhere. The work will be a video that strives to search for ways to abolish the conceptualisation of space as backdrop through a three episode structure: staging a fictional film studio of Olga Petrova, the story of Falls Lake in Universal Studios, and Warsaw’s history in playing New York.

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ZUZA BANASINSKA Warsaw, Poland 1994

SCORPIO Temporary Programme Resolution

THE HOUSE THAT SHADOWS BUILT Zuza Banasinska’s (Warsaw, Poland, 1994) The house that shadows built is a three-channel video installation consisting of spaces of worlding that allow for a reconfiguration of the real in a way that escapes commodification. Dismantling seemingly fixed identities – both of the subject and their background – the work takes form of a tour through a fictional film studio, guided by a green screen.

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CALLI UZZA LAYTON Corvallis, Oregon, USA 1995

SAGITTARIUS Temporary Programme Approaching Language

TREE PITCH Calli Uzza Layton’s (Corvallis, Oregon, USA, 1995) installation Tree Pitch consists of an environment created by nature and contextualised by sound, depicting real and imagined journeys through space and memory.

The tactile resonance of wood becomes the vessel for language.

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CALLI UZZA LAYTON Corvallis, Oregon, USA 1995

TREE PITCH

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/draft/calli-uzza-layton

SAGITTARIUS Temporary Programme Approaching Language An environment created by nature and contextualized by sound, this installation depicts real and imagined journeys through space and memory. The tactile resonance of wood becomes the vessel for language.

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CONSTANZA CASTAGNET Buenos Aires, Argentina 1987

LIQUID LIPS

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/draft/constanza-castagnet

SAGITTARIUS Temporary Programme Approaching Language The sound of the singing voice detunes the semantic sense.

Hearing voices deconstructing words, sparks up a mix of complex and eerie textures, gently disorienting the listener’s ears. Sense can be fractioned and suspended in amorphous linguistic contexts. Words are stripped from their layers of meaning and are shadowed by echos or stutter in digital cut-ups, as a way to engage with language in a way that is not modulated by expectation.

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CONSTANZA CASTAGNET Buenos Aires, Argentina 1987

SAGITTARIUS Temporary Programme Approaching Language

LIQUID LIPS With an interest in the interaction between abstract sound and human voice Constanza Castagnet (Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1987) questions the malleability of language and the limits of sense.

Castagnet mainly uses the voice as an instrument of resistance over its function to transmit and communicate meaning. Standing within the sound installation Liquid Lips, you hear a singing voice that detunes the semantic sense. Hearing voices deconstruct words sparks a mix of complex and eerie textures, gently disorienting the listener’s ears. Words are stripped from their layers of meaning

and are shadowed by echoes and stutters in digital cut-ups, as a way to engage with language in a way that is not modulated by expectation.

The work features illustrations by Bin Koh.

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MATHIAS VINCENT Paris, France 1994

SAGITTARIUS Main Department Studio for Immediate Spaces

ALL YOU CAN FIT! Working from the border of poetics and politics, Mathias Vincent (Paris, France, 1994) is looking for alternative narratives. For All you can fit! Vincent investigates how things balance between order and chaos by asking himself where ontological displacements happen: “There are tools that contain objects, help them finding a place, organize them: shelves, storage boxes, closets. There are moments where objects overflow: when a container carrier capsizes, when an owner dies, when we no longer know who owns an object that no one wants. There are techniques that allow us to make objects disappear:

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we burn them, put them in water, bury them, cast them in concrete, send them into space.”

MATHIAS VINCENT Paris, France 1994

ALL YOU CAN FIT! https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/draft/mathias-vincent

SAGITTARIUS Main Department Studio for Immediate Spaces There are tools that contain objects, help them finding a place, organize them: shelves, storage boxes, closets. There are moments where objects overflow: when a container carrier capsizes, when an owner dies, when we no longer know who owns an object that no one wants. There are techniques that allow us to make objects disappear: we burn them, put them in water, bury them, cast them in concrete, send them into space. When does these ontological displacements happens?

How does things balance between order and chaos? How do we keep chaos at a distance?

189

VIDA KASAEI Tehran, Iran 1990

A PLAY FOR PUB LIC https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/draft/hida-kasaei

SAGITTARIUS Temporary Programme Resolution The protagonist is a young poet, who is reflecting with her poems on the fragile psychological state of humanity in the mundanity of her domestic existence. She eventually ventures out into the urban crowd, only to seek consciousness and to be lured with the pressure of the changes, generated a sense of bewilderment. In the end she finds herself in an abandoned playground where she is able to utter words again.

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VIDA KASAEI Tehran, Iran 1990

SAGITTARIUS Temporary Programme Resolution A PLAY FOR PUBLIC Vida Kasaei’s (Tehran, Iran) projects stem from sociopolitical matters. A Play for Public is a poetic film that narrates the struggles of modern thought, such as the undecidability of truth and falsity, the relation of inside and outside, the nature of “the people,” and the relation between brain and body in the neoliberal urban landscape. This is done through the persona of a poet.

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CHRISTIAN HERREN Bern, Switerland 1992

CAPRICORN Main Department Fine Arts

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CHRISTIAN HERREN Bern, Switerland 1992

CAPRICORN Main Department Fine Arts

TO BE RE RI BUILT ALS WITH OF THE OUR MATE TIME

In 1964 Andy Warhol exhibited his Flowers series for the first time: Prints that show flowers in bright colours, which do not exist in nature. At the very same time the biology department of the University of Amsterdam bred petunias, which also take on colours that do not exist in the natural environment. Warhol and the researchers knew nothing about each other. The breeding experiments served as the basis for Christian Herrens installation that recalls the tradition of still-life paintings.

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LILA BULLEN-SMITH Johannesburg, South Africa 1995

UN TI TLED

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/draft/lila-bullen-smith

CAPRICORN Temporary Programme Resolution This work is a part of an ongoing collaborative project between core members Lila Bullen-Smith, member of the student council, and Naira Nigrelli, member of BAC (Appointment Committee) and MR (Participation Council). It involves creating a commons that unites members of the academy through the creation of an open-source, local archive dedicated to gathering, archiving, and contextualising various materials related to the social-political life of the Gerrit Rietveld and Sandberg Instituut. It starts with an attempt at mapping; a research-led process of creating an institutional navigation map/blueprint for members of the academy that provides an overview of the various initiatives across both academies and decision-making structures within the school. No such document exists; what is presented is speculative, the result of trawling through emails and official documents, having conversations with many people from different parts of the school, and – going forward – your contributions.

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LILA BULLEN-SMITH Johannesburg, South Africa 1995

CAPRICORN Temporary Programme Resolution

WHOSE ACADEMY? TOOLS OF RELATION Through collaborative working methodologies, Lila Bullen-Smith’s (Johannesburg, South Africa, 1995) work explores community and institutional models that create the material conditions for assembly and mobilization. whose academy? tools of relation is part of an ongoing collaborative project between Lila Bullen-Smith, member of the student council, and Naira Nigrelli, member of BAC (appointment committee) and MR (participation council). It aims to create a commons that unites members of the academy through an open source, local archive dedicated

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to gathering, archiving, and contextualizing various materials related to the social and political life of the Gerrit Rietveld Academy and Sandberg Instituut. It starts with an attempt at mapping – a research-led process of creating an institutional navigational map for members of the academy that provides an overview of the various initiatives and the decision-making structures within the school. What is presented is speculative, the result of trawling through emails and official documents, having conversations, and – going forward – further contributions.

LUCIE SAHNER Völklingen, Germany 1986

CAPRICORN Main Department Dirty Art Department

COLLEEN WAITS FOR THE BUS From her background as a nurse, Lucie Sahner (Völklingen, Germany, 1986) is fascinated by processes of transformation and changes in the human body as seen from a non-humancentric worldview. In Colleen waits for the bus, Sahner merges reality with her personal fiction, creating an installation in which domestic objects and human fragments (or relics) are combined with videos. Sahner plays with an expansion and detachment from body boundaries, employing natural materials with corporeal connotations such as gelatine, wax, cream, and latex.

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LUCIE SAHNER Völklingen, Germany 1986

COLL EEN WAITS FOR THE BUS https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/draft/lucie-sahner

CAPRICORN Main Department Dirty Art Department In Colleen Waits for the Bus, Lucie Sahner merges reality with her personal fiction. In her large, neo-absurd installation, one finds various materials, unidentifiable puddles on the floor, food, human fragments (or relics) mixed with mouldy tomatoes and slowly moving objects. All this gives the impression of seeing body transformations brought about by death in a different, serious yet colourful light.

197

ELOY CRUZ DEL PRADO Madrid, Spain 1992

LOOK ING FOR REAL ? https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/draft/eloy-cruz-del-prado

AQUARIUS Main Department Dirty Art Department Through three acts, a changing manipulation of water – from contained reflection to a force defiant of control, and later, a puddle of introspection – speaks to the ever-changing nature of shame. Within a choreography of endurance, friction and the communal, social and intimate gestures are abstracted, becoming actors for the destabilisation of normative structures. I assume the stranger as a subject who can be trusted.

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ELOY CRUZ DEL PRADO Madrid, Spain 1992

AQUARIUS Main Department Dirty Art Department A HUNDRED SECONDS LONGER AND IT’S OVER. LOOKING FOR REAL? FOR REAL. NEW IMAGINED MEMOIR. CÁLLATE, QUE MENUDO POLVO ECHARON TUS PADRES PARA TENERTE. THERE IS NO LOVE, BUT I CALL THEM LOVERS. CARETAKER. HEART-SHAPED PIGGY BANK. Eloy Cruz del Prado (Madrid, Spain, 1992) works between the roles of resistance and self-reliance in the development of intimacy, sexuality, care, and love. Using performance and installation, social belonging is unraveled through an emotional and political lens. Tradition as a repeti

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tion of daily social rituals, and memory as a malleable object, are some of the interests of del Prado. Within a choreography of endurance, friction, and the communal, social and intimate gestures are abstracted, becoming actors for the destabilization of normative structures.

MARIA VAN DER TOGT Haarlem, The Netherlands 1997

AQUARIUS Main Department Studio for Immediate Spaces

HARD COPY SOFT COPY – IMPERMEABLE DOMAINS Maria van der Togt’s (Haarlem, the Netherlands, 1997) work is an exploration into the spatial implications of data architecture – continuously dissecting the digital structures that guide our on- and offline interactions.

With the corporatization of higher education, there is a need to create more projects that imagine different, less-centralized modes of studying, and which take a stand for the free sharing of knowledge, unrestricted by copyrights and contracts and other economic barriers, according to van der Togt. The project Hard Copy Soft Copy – Impermeable Domains https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/final/maria-van-der-togt

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aims to provide a virtual platform through which all students can share files they have collected over time from behind paywalls and from misty corners of the internet. A process of becoming-with occurs: getting to know people through the things they share, what they value as knowledge, and what they discard.

MARIA VAN DER TOGT Haarlem, The Netherlands 1997

AQUARIUS Main Department Studio for Immediate Spaces

SOFT COPY IM HARD PER COPY ME ABLE DO MAINS How to allude to the ghostly infrastructure? With the corporatization of higher education, there is a need to create more projects that imagine different, less centralized modes of studying, and which take a stand for the free sharing of knowledge, unrestricted by copyrights and contracts and other economic barriers. This project aims to provide a virtual platform through which all students can share files they’ve collected over time from behind paywalls and from misty corners of the online. A becoming-with in surprising relays; Knowing people through the things they share, what they value as knowledge and what is discarded.

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SINA EGGER Zurich, Switzerland 1990

FEELS RICH

https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/draft/sina-egger

AQUARIUS Main Department Critical Studies From the lines in my hands an outline of things, all while trying to read what accumulates between them. Feeling overwhelmed by a sudden self-propulsion of things, searching for them in invisible spaces, tuning into the ongoing echoes of repair in the home improvement store, reading into what gets assembled in palms and pieces of poetry.

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SINA EGGER Zurich, Switzerland 1990

AQUARIUS Main Department Critical Studies

AN OUTLINE OF THINGS, SOUND CARTOGRAPHY Sina Egger (Zürich, Switzerland, 1990) is a graphic designer and researcher, interested in exploring the processes which shape shared space via sounds and gestures. The installation An Outline of Things, Sound Cartography is based on Egger’s research on new materialism.

By capturing “emotional materiality,” she proposes sounds and listening as ways to map out ecologies in capitalist ruins. By doing so, she reconsiders and recontextualizes the familiar and the ordinary and investigates relational thinking.

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ZANE ZEIVATE Riga, Latvia 1993

AQUARIUS Main Department Studio for Immediate Spaces

PROP NR. 1 Zane Zeivate (Riga, 1993) is interested in the dialogue between human perception and the built environment, and questions the significant impact that the fabricated environment can have on our senses, shaping our perception and vice versa. Zeivate tells intimate stories about hope, seduction, and love, and tries to understand each story as a small-scale model that reveals power dynamics between herself and (male) partners. She also applies it to a larger scale, i.e., western society as a whole. By drawing out the analogies between the two scales, Zeivate is criticizing the predominantly man-made environments

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that we live in. Prop Nr. 1 invites visitors to transform their observations and deconstruct existing power dynamics.

ZANE ZEIVATE Riga, Latvia 1993

THE RE FLECT ED PRES ENCE https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/draft/zane-zeivate

AQUARIUS Main Department Studio for Immediate Spaces I aim to understand the dialogue between human perception and the built environment, questioning the significant impact that the man-made environment can have over our senses, shaping our perception and vice versa. I tell intimate stories of my struggles, fears and hopes experienced in flirt, seduction and love. Understanding each story as a small-scale model that reveals power dynamics between me and my (male) partners, I’m trying to apply it on a larger scale – western society. By drawing out the analogies between two scales I’m criticizing male made environments that we are living in. I transform my observations and criticism into spatial installations, where through text, performance, video and sculpture I sensorially deconstruct those power dynamics that determine our everyday life.

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ALICE SLYNGSTAD Sykkylven, Norway 1990

GOOD IE BAGS

https://www.sandberg.nl/graduation2021/draft/alice-slyngstad

PISCES Main Department Fine Arts Two-channel video installation with sound and programmed light.

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ALICE SLYNGSTAD Sykkylven, Norway 1990

PISCES Main Department Fine Arts

GOODIE BAGS Working through writing and performance, Alice Slyngstad (Sykkylven, Norway, 1990) explores topics like negotiations of comfort, the shaping of voices, and notions of authenticity. Goodie Bags is a two-channel video installation in which texts alternate with images of a body. The textile arena around the two screens is illuminated with a programmed light show, in sync with the sounds of the installation.

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CATALINA REYES Santiago, Chile 1992

PISCES Temporary Programme Resolution

CLAVELES DEL AIRE (AIR CARNATIONS) By exploring her inherited lived experiences growing up in Chile, Catalina Reyes (Santiago, Chile, 1992) looks at memory as a malleable source for reflection. They investigate their past through the cracks of oblivion, looking at them as tension points of forgetfulness. Reyes’s film Claveles del Aire portrays a return to home, a facing lost memories; it explores the possibilities of filmmaking and editing as a form of remembering. Researching different perspectives on the filmmaker’s childhood home in Chile, interviews with their mother and sister reveal complex family dynamics. https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/final/catalina-reyes

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CATALINA REYES Santiago, Chile 1992

CLA VEL DEL AIRE https://sandberg.nl/graduation2021/draft/catalina-reyes

PISCES Temporary Programme Resolution The film portrays the return back home to Chile after a year from living abroad. In an exploration of memories around the figure of the house, family dynamics reveal themselves throughout the film. Using archival footage from my childhood, recordings around the house and interviews with my mother and sister, the work and the process itself are an effort to put the pieces together, both in the editing and through memory recollection.

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MANON BACHELIER Paris, France 1995

PISCES Temporary Programme Approaching Language

THAT MU THE SIC ON WHICH LY I , ONE CAN T TO BE HEAR

That Music Which I can’t be the Only One to Hear is a polyphonic cut-up song. Silently released, the words, verses, breaths and rhymes make their own connections onto paper and into the space inside which they echo. Neither a score nor a recording, the installation lies more on the side of performance, calling up paper and words as active mouth and voices.

Contemplating the agency of words to sing themselves, the song also recites the wider research into the written voice that it is sampled from. Undulating around, the song (and its in-scripted logics) amplifies as you read and listen.

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MANON BACHELIER Paris, France 1995

PISCES Temporary Programme Approaching Language

THAT MUSIC WHICH I CAN’T BE THE ONLY ONE TO HEAR As a graphic designer, Manon Bachelier (Paris, France, 1995) is concerned with the ways the voice resonates through text and letters, and engenders new textural lives. That music which i can’t be the only one to hear is an installation consisting of different texts. Silently released, the words, verses, breaths, and rhymes make their own connections onto paper and into the space inside which they echo.

Neither a score nor a recording, the installation lies more on the side of performance, calling up paper and words as active mouths and voices. Contemplating the agency of

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words to sing themselves, the song also recites the wider research about the written voice that it is sampled from. Undulating around, the song (and its inscripted logics) amplifies as you read and listen.

SANDBERG INSTITUUT GRADUATION 2021

STU DENT UN IONS

STUDENT UNIONS

THE BLACK STUDENT UNION The Black Student Union (USB) is an organization aiming to facilitate and support a network of Black students, alumni, and partners of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and Sandberg Instituut.

NEAR EAST UNION Near East Union consists of people from Middle East or people with Middle Eastern roots to recalibrate the compass to understand: middle of what and whose east? NEU aims to start a discussion about Non- European people’s situations in Sandberg Institute and Gerrit Rietveld Academy. NEU wants to bring its members together to share their experiences in their new life, and find out common strategies from the common struggles. NEU welcomes all who have something to say about being a Middle Eastern within the frameworks of the Gerrit Rietveld Academy and Sandberg Institute.

ASIAN UNION The Asian Union strives to create a safe space for asians whose needs, interests and experiences are neglected and manipulated within the euro-centric constraints of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and Sandberg Instituut. The Asian Union would like to embrace all who feel imposed under the term Asian, judged through such superficial aspects as your appearance, background, and racial orgin. Since 2018, we imagine silence becoming action.

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https://www.instagram.com/blackstudentunion.usb

BLACK STUDENT UNION

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STUDENT UNIONS

GRADUATION ROLLING INTO THE INEVITABLE QUESTION OF “WHAT’S NEXT?”

By Pernilla Manjula Philip During the first lockdown I obsessively observed the daily Covid-19 numbers in order to guess at possible outcomes. What did the current number of cases tell me about the near future? Looking at the figures, I was guessing the possibilities around government and school regulations, my family and friends’ safety, opening and closing hours, my child’s day care, and whether my end would exam be online. Untimely, I wondered if I’d even survive this pandemic with my underlying condition and “risk group” status.

Like most of us, I too try to stay in the present, but the mind often slips into the future, triggering bother fear and joy alike. The future is always blurry. From the outbreak of this pandemic, until today, no one can be sure of what the future holds. However, most of us use the information we have in order to make the most sense of our future.

Disease doctors, scientists, and data analysts all aim to predict potential illnesses and medicinal side effects. They attempt to quantify risk and try to select the best time for surgery. Living with illness can be painfully lonely and isolating. To add to the bodily pain and strain, sick people’s connection to society is contested in various ways, and even more so with the pandemic. When I became ill and started to experience tensions in my personal connection to society, the world and universe felt even more present than they had before.

In the Middle Ages, alchemy was the science in which astrology overlapped with medicine.

Medical predictions were made with consideration of the heavenly bodies: the sun, moon, planets, and constellations. Physicians and healers would time their prescriptions according to the celestial bodies. The drive to stay alive was as universal then as it is now. Preventative treatment and the idea of latent disease formed an overlapping field of research for alchemists of the past, as much as they do for the doctors of today. Alchemists believed that disease could be classed under two categories: latent and active. The key to the soul—the horoscope—would unlock a patient’s weakest link and in turn suggest a course of action to prevent a latent disease from turning into an active one.

Iatromathematics, also known as medical astrology, recognized the importance of looking at our bodies’ connection to their environment.1 It was impossible for an astrophysician to treat any patent without consulting the celestial body.2 It was common belief that the terrestrial world was connected to the celestial world, and thus cosmic harmony was linked to harmony of the body.

The link between the body and its environment is rarely contested or denied in modern science. However, origin of this link—whether it be genes, planets, or the stars—is up for debate. I’m not alone in recognizing the link between the rise of illness and the growth of global industrialization.3 I’m also very much in favor of fleshing out narratives beyond medical diagnosis. Genes and other personal choices cannot be separated from disease, but why stop there?

In Astro-diagnosis: A Guide to Healing (1928) by Max Heindel, there is a collection of astro-medical teachings from a span of over 300 years.4 One of the pages contains life-sized illustrations of fingers with a variety of fingernails. Readers are invited to compare the illustrations to their real finger. One distinctly shaped nail links with weakness of the heart, and another shape of nail with weakness of the liver. We can see nails that link with weak lungs and nerves, and even one that links with anxiety (termed in the book as “worrisome”). These seemingly random correlations pretty much mirror the experience of my yearly visit to my endocrinologist. Even though my fingernails look different to the illustration matching the “worrisome” description, I still tend to leave the hospital with such a feeling.

When I first got sick and was eventually diagnosed, I was advised by friends not to take the medicine I was prescribed. “Natural remedies are softer and kinder for the body,” I was told. “The body is meant to heal itself.” This well-meant advice painfully clashed with the violent autoimmune attack on my pancreas that was anything but soft or kind.

Like most sick people, I am willing to go far and try almost anything in order to be strong enough, and capable and connected to the society we live in. The stars quite possibly know more than me about how to empower my body’s regenerative abilities. But until I find out, I will take my medicines, paint my fingernails in sunset gradients and at times rock astro-pattern fake nails to match the night sky. “As above, so below.”

1. Liana Saif, “The Arabic theory of astral influences in early modern medicine,” Journal of the Society for Renaissance Studies 25, no. 2 (November 2011), pp. 609–626.

2. Hiro Hirai, The New Astral Medicine, in ed. Brendan Dooley, A Companion to Astrology in the Renaissance (Leiden: Brill, 2014), pp. 267–286.

3. Carolyn Lazard, How to be a Person in the Age of Autoimmunity, http://www.carolynlazard.com/s/HowtobeaPersonintheAgeofAutoimmunity-1.pdf.

4. Max Heindel, Astro-diagnosis: A Guide to Healing (Oceanside, CA: Rosicrucian Fellowship, 1928).

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https://www.instagram.com/neareastunion

NEAR EAST UNION

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https://www.instagram.com/neareastunion

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ASIAN UNION

Graphic Design : Hayoung Kim, Coordinator : Juni Mun with joint efforts of Black Student Union, and GRA

LOCATION THE ASIAN UNION WOULD LIKE TO EMBRACE ALL WHO FEEL IMPOSED UNDER THE UMBRELLA TERM ASIAN, JUDGED THROUGH SUCH SUPERFICIAL ASPECTS AS YOUR APPEARANCE, BACKGROUND, AND RACIAL ORIGIN.

THE ASIAN UNION STRIVES TO CREATE A SAFE SPACE FOR ASIANS WHOSE NEEDS, INTERESTS AND EXPERIENCES ARE NEGLECTED AND MANIPULATED WITHIN THE EURO-CENTRIC CONSTRAINTS OF THE GERRIT RIETVELD ACADEMIE AND SANDBERG INSTITUUT.

THE RELATIVELY RECENT TERM ASIANS CAN NEVER TRULY DEFINE A GROUP OF PEOPLE, EACH WITH VASTLY DIFFERING MILIEU, BUT IT IS RATHER A LABEL OF CONVENIENCE WHICH WE IN TURN BORROW, TRYING TO GIVE IT NEW MEANINGS AND POSSIBILITIES.

9 / 2019 GUEST ARTISTS 4 You can sit with us!

Tia Yoon , Raoni Saleh, KIRARA CREDITS Peformance by Tia Yoon & , Raoni, KIRARA

THE ASIAN UNION STRIVES TO ACHIEVE SOLIDARITY BETWEEN “DIFFERENT POSITIONS WITHIN THE GLOBAL CLASS HIERARCHY AND SUBSEQUENT INEQUALITIES WITH REGARD TO . . .

OPPRESSION, EXPLOITATION, TO DISCRIMINATION AND SUBJECTION,” THROUGH ITS BASIS AS A STUDENT ORGANIZATION.

2019 Manifesto Redesigned 5 Yunie Chae Graphic Design & Print : Yunie Chae

11 / 2019 6 Artist talk

11 / 2019 7 籆癲湂 Tropical Fish

02 / 2020 8 2o_20 lunar 2o_20 WE WILL NOT BE DISMISSED AS “SENSITIVE” BUT WILL DE- MAND SENSITIVITY FROM AND TOWARD TRANSGRESSORS. WE IMAGINE SILENCE BECOMING ACTION.

RADION, AMSTERDAM

03 / 2020 9 CinemAsia LGBTQ+ Comfort+ball, Body Sessions ( Tia and Nell ) Organized and Executed by CinemAsia

STUDIO / K WE WILL DEMAND “A ROOM THAT CAN HOLD ALL THE MEMORIES, EVEN THE UNCOMFOR TABLE ONES.”

Written together by Oat, Seoyoung, Bin, Yunie, Irene, Ken, Juni, Joyce Graphic Design : Yunie Chae

Joyce Chang Graphic Design : Joyce Chang

6 / 2019 3 Digitizing Race

Jay Tan, Belle Promchanya, Comfort+ball Artist talk and round table with Jay Tan, Belle Promchanya, Bin Koh of Comfort+ball Performance : Comfort+ball, Graphic Design: Yunie Chae & Bin Koh, Coordination: Juni Mun

https://www.instagram.com/the.asian.union

Mobilegirl, WHY BE, HaKiim, Yiyi, Sumin Lee from the Comfort+ball, NON NATIVE NATIVE, and Soyun Park from RGBdog

Performance by : Mobilegirl, WHYBE, HaKiim, and Yiyi, Visuals by : Soyun Park from RGB dog (Coordination by NNN), Food on site : Sumin Lee, Photographer : Oat Sankrit Kulmanochawong, On Location : Nagaré Willemsen, Graphic design & Coordination : Juni Mun, Supported by Gerrit Rietveld Academie & AFK (Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst)

GUEST ARTISTS Oat, Seoyoung, Bin, Yunie, Irene, Ken, Juni, Joyce

12 / 2018 2 Logo Design

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Organized and Executed by Goy Tung, Graphic Design : Ken Wenrui Zhao Movie Van provided by Jan Tan

WE DO NOT TOLERATE INCONGRUOUS NOTIONS OR FETISHIZATION TOWARDS ASIAN REALITY

BY MERELY REFERRING TO “UNAMBIGUOUSLY UNINFORMED OR NAÏVE,” AN OUTDATED DISGUISE NOT IN KEEPING WITH THE CURRENT CONTEXT.

CREDITS

Abhijan Toto & Rosalia Engchuan

Graphic Design: Bin Koh & Juni Mun

WE SEEK TO RECOGNIZE AND REMAKE INTERNALIZED NOTIONS OF RACISM IN OUR OWN CULTURE AND ACKNOWLEDGE THE ASYMMETRICAL AND VARYING EXPERIENCES THAT INDIVIDUALS HAVE WITHIN THE UNION, WITH THEIR OWN CLASS, COLOUR, GENDER, SEXUALITY, IMMIGRATION STATUS, RACIAL ORIGIN, AND RELIGION.

12 / 2018 1 Manifesto (No.1)

NEVERNEVERLAND

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AMSTERDAM

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STUDENT UNIONS

GUEST ARTISTS 2020 Black Student Union, Near East Union, Asian Union, Unsettling 10 Make Racists Afraid Again CREDITS Organized and Executed by Nagaré Willemsen of Black Student Union,

Emirhan Akin of Near East Union, Juni Mun of Asian Union, Judith Leysner and Tracian Meikle of Unsettling

10 / 2020 11 OTRadioxAsian Union

Ken Wenrui Zhao, Juni Mun, Joyce Chang, Oat Sankrit Kulmanochawong

Organized and Executed by OTradio

LOCATION OT301, AMSTERDAM 03 / 2021 Jaepil Eun, Tao Yang 12 Inhale the breeze Make a Dumpling Wish ņᦜӻ᷽ৼ鏋 Organized and Executed by Jae Eun, Tao Yang and Wei Yang, Graphic design by Goy Tung

04 / 2021 13 Inhale the breeze - Free Tarot 공짜타로’ ★

05 / 2021 14 Manifesto (No.2)

Jaepil Eun Organized and Executed by Jae Eun, Graphic design by Goy Tung

Pam, Jae, Tao, Wei, Oat, Juni, Goy, Bin Written together by Pam, Jae, Tao, Wei, Oat, Juni, Goy, Bin, Graphic Design: Oat Sankrit Kulmanochawong, Coordination by Oat Sankrit Kulmanochawong and Juni Mun

05 / 2021 15 Artist talk

Ho Tzu Nyen, Shen Xin Coordination & Moderation by Tracian Meikle of Unsettling and Juni Mun of the Asian Union

ONLINE 07 / 2021 16 Shed no tears

Irene Ha, a.k.a. Baby Reni, and Oat Sankrit Kulmanochawong Shed No Tears _ Crewnecks Size available in S, M, L Organic Cotton 100%, Baby blue colour Design by Irene Ha, a.k.a. Baby Reni, and Oat Sankrit Kulmanochawong Coordination Juni Mun Made in Portugal, Hand printed in NL

GERRIT RIETVELD ACADEMIE, AMSTERDAM & THE BOOK SOCIETY, SEOUL

Shed No Tears_Gym Bags polyester / 45x34 cm String colour in neon green, neon yellow, neon pink, purple, baby blue Digital Print with sublimation on polyester Design by Irene Ha, a.k.a. Baby Reni, and Oat Sankrit Kulmanochawong Coordination Juni Mun Hand printed in Amsterdam, NL

07 / 2021 17 NNN Fair

NON NATIVE NATIVE Organized by Pam Virada and Juni Mun

01 / 2022 18 Asian Union x Library

LIBRARY AT GERRIT RIETVELD ACADEMIE/SANDBERG INSTITUUT

02 / 2022 19 LNY ᔛৼ Sticky Rice Dumplings Workshop / Steam-up by Oat, Jae, Goy and Jun.

03 / 2022 20 Re-union

ONLINE AND OFFLINE

09 / 2022 21 Asian Union Publication https://www.instagram.com/the.asian.union

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UN SET TLING

https://www.instagram.com/unsettlingrietveldsandberg

UNSETTLING

Can Gerrit Rietveld Academie and Sandberg Instituut become radically inclusive structures? An intra-curricular initiative is working actively between and beyond the structures and discourses of the academy to unsettle the Rietveld and Sandberg from the roots up, supporting existing initiatives, while also developing outreach programs, drawing in new perspectives, and making the context of the academy more inclusive to other voices, minds, and bodies. Founded in 2018

by Judith Leysner and Clare Butcher, Unsettling Rietveld Sandberg began working towards a policy on inclusion and diversity in the academy.

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UNSETTLING

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about:blank

SANDBERG INSTITUUT GRADUATION 2021 Al Primrose Alice Slyngstad Allison Henriquez Anna Bierler Anna-Bella Papp Benjamin Schoonenberg Calli Uzza Layton Catalina Reyes Cesar Majorana Christian Herren Constanza Castagnet Daphné Keraudren Diego Virgen Eleni Papadimitriou Eloy Cruz del Prado Eva Bosveld George Mazari Ghenwa Abou Fayad Hannah Rose Whittle Helena Keskküla Jae Pil Eun Jan Vahl Jeanine van Berkel Jeanne Vrastor Jeroen Exterkate Jihye Lee Johan Delétang Jun Zhang Kaspar Dejong Lila Bullen-Smith Lucie Sahner Maja Chiara Faber Manola Buonincontri Manon Bachelier Margaux Koch Goei Maria Paris Maria van der Togt Marian Rosa van Bodegraven Mariana Jurado Rico Mariel Williams Marisa Esther Torres Rodriguez Marvin Ogger Mateo Vega Mathias Vincent Megan Hadfield Michelle Mildenberg Mylou Oord Negiste Yesside Johnson Noé Cottencin Pernilla Manjula Philip Raphael Jacobs Romy Day Winkel Sabrina Schlosser Sigrún Sveinsdóttir Sina Egger Stelios Ilchuk Tao Yang Teun F. Grondman Toni Brell Valentine Langeard Vida Kasaei Violeta Paez Armando Zane Zeivate Zgjim Elshani Zuza Banasinska

DIRECTORY

http://www.eirikslyngstad.com https://airloom.cargocollective.com/ http://www.annabierler.de https://calliuzzalayton.cargo.site https://www.catalinar.com http://instagram.com/cesaforever https://www.christianherren.com https://constanzacastagnet.co https://djoufni.com/ https://diegovirgen.com http://www.elenipapadimitriou.net http://eloycruzdelprado.tumblr.com/ https://evabosveld.com https://ghenwaaboufayad.com http://www.hannahrosewhittle.co.uk http://helenakeskkula.com https://janvahl.de http://www.jeaninevanberkel.com

http://www.johandeletang.com http://www.jun-zhang.com https://www.kaspardejong.com/ http://www.luciesahner.com https://linktr.ee/majachiarafaber http://www.manolabuonincontri.eu https://manonbachelier.com https://www.mariavandertogt.com http://www.marianajuradorico.com http://air.florist https://marisatorres.work http://www.45543.de http://www.mateovega.com https://www.niveauzeroatelier.space/ https://michellemildenberg.com https://mylouoord.com http://wwww.negisteyesside.tumblr.com/ http://noecottencin.justawalk.com http://www.pernillaphilip.com http://www.raphaeljacobs.com https://romydaywinkel.net https://sigrungyda.com https://www.instagram.com/mrvlsly https://www.marianajuradoquerico.com https://mateovega.com https://www.tonibrell.de https://www.valentinehhevah.com/ https://vidamir.nl

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SANDBERG INSTITUUT GRADUATION 2021 AIDAN WALL is a writer, artist, musician, game designer, and editor from Dublin, Ireland. They work with Public Sandberg as its editor. Wall lives and works in Amsterdam.

ARTUN ALASKA ARASLI is a writer and artist based in Amsterdam.

CACONRAD has been working with the ancient technologies of poetry and ritual since 1975. They are the author of AMANDA PARADISE: Resurrect Extinct Vibration (Wave Books, 2021). Other titles include While Standing in Line for Death and Ecodeviance. The Book of Frank is now available in 9 different languages. They received a Creative Capital grant, a Pew Fellowship, a Lambda Literary Award, and a Believer Magazine Book Award. They teach at Columbia University in New York City and Sandberg Art Institute in Amsterdam.

BIOGRAPHIES

re-imagine alternative collective care systems. Via methods of material research and lived experience, her work takes the form of installation, sculpture and performance.

ROSIE HAWARD is a writer and researcher based in Amsterdam. Her work engages with queer and feminist studies and visual culture, and the queer potential of experimental fiction. She has an MA in Critical Studies from the Sandberg Instituut and a BA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths, University of London.

SAJA AMRO is a Palestinian architect, exhibition developer, and researcher based in Amsterdam. Amro is currently part of the temporary programme Disarming Design at Sandberg Instituut, where she is writing her thesis on the power dynamics that result from the spatial design and choices in classrooms, powered by her personal experiences with education in occupied Palestine.

FIEP VAN BODEGOM is a writer, translator and critic based in Amsterdam. She is an editor of the literary magazine De Gids and Extra Extra Magazine.

FEDERICO CAMPAGNA is an Italian philosopher based in London. His latest books are 'Prophetic Culture' (Bloomsbury 2021) and 'Technic and Magic' (Bloomsbury 2018). He is a lecturer in philosophy at KABK in the Hague, and he is part of the radical publishing house Verso Books.

ISABELLE SULLY practices across art-making, curating, editing and writing. Working with feminist histories in mind, she takes the mechanisms and materiality of administration as the main focus within her work, developing conceptual projects that span experimental writing, sculpture, performance and publishing. Originally from Melbourne, she now lives in Rotterdam where she is the founding editor of Unbidden Tongues. Her involvement with the administrative sphere of institutional practice also plays out in her current role as assistant curator at Kunstverein, Amsterdam.

KATAYOUN ARIAN is a curator based in Amsterdam, currently working for TENT, Rotterdam. Attending to different methodologies and analytical frames, and cross-disciplinary practices, her projects range from exhibitions, discursive events, to a self-directed DJ-ing archival practice. Her research is embedded in intersectional feminist and queer legacies, and divergent decolonial and diasporic frameworks and positionalities for envisioning a collectivity that is otherwise. As an art historian and organization scientist, her education informs her interest in institutional logics and infrastructures.

MAURITS DE BRUIJN is a writer, publicist and editor at art magazine Mister Motley. His essays have been published in de Volkskrant and Trouw. His debut novel Broer (Brother) was published in 2012, followed in 2016 by De achterkant van de zon ( The Back of the Sun). In his non-fiction debut My Holocaust, Too (2021), Maurits examines how his mother’s ordeals in the Second World War impacted his own life.

OAT SANKRIT KULMANOCHAWONG is a graphic designer and visual artist based in Amsterdam and is currently much inspired by the sense of lived realities – bringing the everyday into view and observing little gems or cultural clashes that often get left unnoticed in the busyness of it all.

PERNILLA MANJULA PHILIP is interested in the field of medical history and investigates aspects of sickness and its multiple ties to the medical industrial-complex. While addressing issues containing mechanisms of control, she uses hacking and tinkering as collaborative tools of activism to

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COLOPHON

Publisher Sandberg Instituut Director Jurgen Bey Curator Jules van den Langenberg Artun Alaska Arasli Editor Jason Page Aidan Wall Coordinator Anke Zedelius Contributors All graduates Main Departments Temporary Programmes Contributing authors Graphic Design Our Polite Society Website Katja van Stiphout Jeroen Vader Max Peeperkorn Mike Kokken Printing pumbo.nl (book block) Raddraaier SSP (cover) © 2021 Sandberg Instituut Amsterdam (NL) Disclaimer The information in this publication is generated via www.sandberg.nl/graduation2021 and has been carefully checked and implemented. Despite these efforts towards accuracy, the presence of errors cannot be excluded. Please send any remarks or corrections to ps@sandberg.nl.

Sandberg Instituut Masters of Fine Arts, Interior Architecture and Design Gerrit Rietveld Academie Visitor Address Fred. Roeskestraat 98 1076 ED Amsterdam Contact T: +31 (0)20 588 24 00 E: info@sandberg.nl W: www.sandberg.nl ISBN 978-90-827670-4-9

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THE SIGN OF THE STARS

AL PRIMROSE ALICE SLYNGSTAD ALLISON HENRIQUEZ ANNA BIERLER ANNA-BELLA PAPP BENJAMIN SCHOONENBERG CALLI UZZA LAYTON CATALINA REYES CESAR MAJORANA CHRISTIAN HERREN CONSTANZA CASTAGNET DAPHNÉ KERAUDREN DIEGO VIRGEN ELENI PAPADIMITRIOU ELOY CRUZ DEL PRADO EVA BOSVELD GEORGE MAZARI GHENWA ABOU FAYAD HANNAH ROSE WHITTLE HELENA KESKKÜLA JAE PIL EUN JAN VAHL JEANINE VAN BERKEL JEANNE VRASTOR JEROEN EXTERKATE JIHYE LEE JOHAN DELÉTANG JUN ZHANG KASPAR DEJONG LILA BULLEN-SMITH LUCIE SAHNER MAJA CHIARA FABER MANOLA BUONINCONTRI

MANON BACHELIER MARGAUX KOCH GOEI MARIA PARIS MARIA VAN DER TOGT MARIAN ROSA VAN BODEGRAVEN MARIANA JURADO RICO MARIEL WILLIAMS MARISA ESTHER TORRES RODRIGUEZ MARVIN OGGER MATEO VEGA MATHIAS VINCENT MEGAN HADFIELD MICHELLE LINDENBERG MYLOU OORD NEGISTE YESSIDE JOHNSON NOÉ COTTENCIN PERNILLA MANJULA PHILIP RAPHAEL JACOBS ROMY DAY WINKEL SABRINA SCHLOSSER SIGRÚN SVEINSDÓTTIR SINA EGGER STELIOS ILCHUK TAO YANG TEUN F. GRONDMAN TONI BRELL VALENTINE LANGEARD VIDA KASAEI VIOLETA PAEZ ARMANDO ZANE ZEIVATE ZGJIM ELSHANI ZUZA BANASINSKA

The Sign of the Stars compiles both the works in progress and final works – exhibited at Hembrugterrein (het HEM/Project.Fabriek/DOOR), Zaandam (NL), 8–10 October – of the 2021 Sandberg Instituut graduates from the Master’s Programmes Critical Studies, Design, Dirty Art Department, Fine Arts, Studio for Immediate Spaces, Resolution, and Approaching Language.

The Sign of the Stars includes contributions by Artun Alaska Arasli (TR/NL), Katayoun Arian (IR/NL), Federico Campagna (IT/UK), CAConrad (US), Maurits de Bruijn (NL), Rosie Haward (UK), Isabelle Sully (AU/NL), Aidan Wall (IE), and Fiep van Bodegom (NL).

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