Contribution to Propositions #1: What We Mean, a performative conference that begins from an urgency for—and uncertainty about—what living in non-fascist ways could and does mean. The gathering takes place in a makeshift environment amid the renovation of BAK’s new venue. Through impromptu artworks, lectures, readings, discussions, screenings, performances, and explorations of the assembly—of being together—as an art form, Propositions #1: What We Mean practices art as thought and action intervening in the contemporary.

BAK 2017–2018 Fellow and artist Luigi Coppola brings together his ongoing interests in social choreography and “political chorality”—namely, underrepresented communities having voice through public art performances. This collective experiment is part of his research on evolutionary population, which began within Coppola’s projects in Castiglione d’Otranto in the south of Italy. Making use of the writings about interethnic communities by politician and activist Alexander Langer and evolutionary plant breeding by agronomist Salvatore Ceccarelli, the artist coordinates an impromptu choir that addresses these textual sources through a live reading.

Contribution to Propositions #1: What We Mean, a performative conference that begins from an urgency for—and uncertainty about—what living in non-fascist ways could and does mean. The gathering takes place in a makeshift environment amid the renovation of BAK’s new venue. Through impromptu artworks, lectures, readings, discussions, screenings, performances, and explorations of the assembly—of being together—as an art form, Propositions #1: What We Mean practices art as thought and action intervening in the contemporary.

What forms of autonomous infrastructure (e.g., in some refugee camps, common kitchens) can become processes, tools, methodologies, strategies for decolonizing? How can we share and explore meanings and understandings of the current lived realities of “hospitality”? How can radical praxis allow for hospitality to become unconditional? BAK 2017–2018 Fellows Pelin Tan as well as Isshaq Al-Barbary and Diego Segatto of Campus in Camps engage in a discussion that relates to our current times of nomadic dwelling and to living conditions in cities and contested territories capable of sustaining decolonized infrastructure.

Welcome and notes on Propositions #1: What We Mean, a performative conference that begins from an urgency for—and uncertainty about—what living in non-fascist ways could and does mean. The gathering takes place in a makeshift environment amid the renovation of BAK’s new venue. Through impromptu artworks, lectures, readings, discussions, screenings, performances, and explorations of the assembly—of being together—as an art form, Propositions #1: What We Mean practices art as thought and action intervening in the contemporary.

Contribution to Propositions #1: What We Mean, a performative conference that begins from an urgency for—and uncertainty about—what living in non-fascist ways could and does mean. The gathering takes place in a makeshift environment amid the renovation of BAK’s new venue. Through impromptu artworks, lectures, readings, discussions, screenings, performances, and explorations of the assembly—of being together—as an art form, Propositions #1: What We Mean practices art as thought and action intervening in the contemporary.

In April 2017, the booklet Words of Labour was presented to the Social and Economic Council of the Netherlands. This publication, by the Netherlands Trade Union Confederation (FNV), is a collection of some essential terms from International Labour Organization Convention 189, accompanied by stories from domestic workers in the Netherlands that shed light on the often invisible realities of the facts and figures for this field of labor. During the talk, BAK 2017–2018 Fellow Matthijs de Bruijne—who has been involved as an artist in the domestic workers union organization—and Migrant Domestic Workers network FNV representative Charisma Adams discuss the context of the booklet and ways to claim rights to self-determining gestures.

Contribution to Propositions #1: What We Mean, a performative conference that begins from an urgency for—and uncertainty about—what living in non-fascist ways could and does mean. The gathering takes place in a makeshift environment amid the renovation of BAK’s new venue. Through impromptu artworks, lectures, readings, discussions, screenings, performances, and explorations of the assembly—of being together—as an art form, Propositions #1: What We Mean practices art as thought and action intervening in the contemporary.

Wutharr: Saltwater Dreams comprises five ten-minute films shot by Karrabing members on iPhones. Filmmaking provides a technique of self-organization and social analysis. Film acts as a form of survival, a refusal to relinquish their country, and a means of investigating contemporary social forms of inequality; they make reference to third cinema, Boalean political theater, and an innovative local form of improvisational realism. The films represent the lives of the collective, create bonds with their land, and intervene in global images of Indigeneity.

Contribution to Propositions #1: What We Mean, a performative conference that begins from an urgency for—and uncertainty about—what living in non-fascist ways could and does mean. The gathering takes place in a makeshift environment amid the renovation of BAK’s new venue. Through impromptu artworks, lectures, readings, discussions, screenings, performances, and explorations of the assembly—of being together—as an art form, Propositions #1: What We Mean practices art as thought and action intervening in the contemporary.

BAK 2017–2018 Fellow and artist Luigi Coppola brings together his ongoing interests in social choreography and “political chorality”—namely, underrepresented communities having voice through public art performances. This collective experiment is part of his research on evolutionary population, which began within Coppola’s projects in Castiglione d’Otranto in the south of Italy. Making use of the writings about interethnic communities by politician and activist Alexander Langer and evolutionary plant breeding by agronomist Salvatore Ceccarelli, the artist coordinates an impromptu choir that addresses these textual sources through a live reading.