Memory Machine II – A series of exhibitions, debates, performances & publications on cultural memory & identity, initiated by Castrum Peregrini Amsterdam.

Exhibition & public program

Things to Remember
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27 February – 25 March

With works by Mehraneh Atashi, Dayna Casey, Amie Dicke, Nickel van Duijvenboden, DNK Ensemble, Maria Guggenbichler with Margit de Sad, Romy A. More, Egbert Alejandro Martina and others, Jonas Lund, Antoine Viviani, Emile Zile. Curated by Radna Rumping

How are digital media, endless storage space and new ways of communicating shaping the way we capture, share and retrieve our personal memories? The things we want to remember, do they still fit in a shoebox or are they floating around somewhere in ‘the cloud’ amongst the thousands of e-mails and images that our external memory can contain nowadays?

Saturday 27 February 2016, 16.00 – 17.30

Free entrance. A conversation with Amie Dicke, Simultaneous/Synchronous (Song) Performance DNK Ensemble (Koen Nutters & Seamus Cater), Performance Emile Zile

Unpacking Sound, Text & Speech

This talk and presentation will look at the staging of sound based works in gallery and non-gallery contexts, and the relationship between sound, language and visual representation. Featuring Emile Zile, Speak Percussion’s Eugene Ughetti and their Artist-in-Residence, Kaylie Melville, Alice Hui-Sheng Chang and Philip Samartzis (facilitator).

http://www.c3artspace.com.au/talk-3-july-1st/
http://abbotsfordconvent.com.au/whats-on/events-exhibitions/c3-talks-unpacking-sound-text-speech

Bill Drummond of the KLF / Timelords / K Foundation was in Amsterdam as guest of the Art Reserve Bank, an alternate currency project based in the Amsterdam Zuidas financial district.

We were The 17, a vocal project that has no audience only participants. A human ring around the financial district where one person after another would scream the word MONEY.

Waiting for the scream to come around, you are left thinking about the pre-crisis office architecture surrounding you, the consensual hallucination that art and banking is, the power of the voice and the trust involved in such a performance. When the scream comes to you it is more of a football chant or rural command, not singing, not melodious. As it passes it feels like the unity of a dance party, solitary individuals united by a moment. The energy of communal experience, a line that passes through acid house, singing in taverns, mosh pits, sport chanting and choirs. The voice – the very first thing and the very last thing.

The White Room was the first ‘grown up’ album I bought. The mythic qualities of the KLF seduced me. Masked pop stars. Sample heavy production. Symbolism and shadow. Read Drummond’s book 45. It’s a self-help text for me, in the same hallowed territory as my viewing of Tarkovsky’s Stalker every six months. Two weeks ago I came across a plastic-wrapped copy of 45 at a small departure lounge shop in Sandakan airport Malaysian Borneo. Sitting amongst Malay fashion and beauty magazines, looking solitary and bemused, it was some kind of omen. I made a photograph of it and took it with me to Amsterdam.

The Black Swan curatorial collective (De Appel Curatorial Programme 2011/2012) is proud to announce Three Artists Walk into a Bar…, a series of works and interventions that take place outside of the premises of the exhibition space, channelled through the website: www.threeartistswalkintoabar.com and framed by public Saturday events at de Appel Boys’ School.

Using the disruptive quality of humour to test the critical potentials of art for the analysis of social, political and cultural issues, this exhibition aims to build a community of peers who speak from and to the challenges of the present time. The commitment to humour stems from a belief in its inherently social capacity to bring subversive voices and unexpected perspectives to mainstream awareness.

My intervention/action will be recorded and uploaded to YouTube.

http://www.threeartistswalkintoabar.com

Orginally screened at Lost and Found, Amsterdam’s long-running night of cultural oddities, video and storytelling hosted at the Theatrum Anatomicum.

http://limboland.tv/kunst/het-beste-van-lost-found/larry-emdurs-suit

Emile Zile (AU/LV) and Vela Arbutina (CH) play pre-recorded repetitive beat music that you can dance to.

N0 M0RE! th0se t|mes are 0ver. |NSTANT DANCE ENJ0YMENT SP|RTUAL HEAL|NG 100%!!!! Bel|eve!!!!D|d y0u ever th|nk….. |t d0esnt w0rk!? N0w |t d0es! Ha 4real! Read 0n–B00MB00MBUSHD00F th|s w|ll help,My l0ved fr|ends t0ld me: “b0red0m and med|0cr|ty equals b0red0m and med|0cr|ty” t0 wh|ch | had 0ne replyDANCE ENJ0YMENT SP|RTUAL HEAL|NG 24 H0urs 0NLY w|th 0ur B00MB00MBUSHD00F!!!!Try |t N0W!… t0 g00d t0 be tr00? | th0uhgt s0 t00  ….at f|rst. Try |t n0w. Be welc0me t0 y0ur new l|ves-style.

http://www.palaisparadiso.nl
http://www.bushdoof.eu

Dafna Maimon’s take on arts industry workers, recent art school graduates, art guards and the dreams and fears of the people at the frontline of cultural institutions. The protagonists use black parcan theatre lights on mic stands to frame their monologues. A white light too strong. Lights. Camera. Action.The repetitious scenes were almost nausea inducing in their hammy under/overacted delivery. Exquisitely bland dialogue, sometimes directed to audience members or the unwitting gallery visitor who becomes part of the narrative. Tiny, intoxicating scenes that would be repeated over the course of an hour.

Inane moving of lights. Incessant moving of the framing devices. The power a directed light has to focus energy and create an immediate stage is profound. The spotlight gives license to the characters to deliver lines in much the same way that social networking platforms or micro-blogging services gives licence to transmit little traumas, everyday desires and narcissistic impulses. These individuals prepare their monologues for the amorphous mass, one liners that are both media-conscious and personal. They recite language to the ether, not a directed conversational language, but a never-ending stream of quotes, self-critical comments and weak commands. The dialogue of mediated individualism. I felt we were trapped in the lucid daydreaming IM chats of bored gallery sitters and wannabe curators.

Melodramatic pauses and romantic dialogue interspersed with asides to the audience “If this was a film I would be shot over the shoulder in medium close-up”. Characters moving in highly artificial arcs. The pacing is drawn out and gives ample room for slippage, coincidences and accidents. A character sighs and delivers a highly breathy and despairing “Help. The website is stuck again”. This is anti-depressant operatic tragedy set to the scale of 21st century comment culture.

09/01/10. W139, Warmoesstraat 139, Amsterdam

Directed by Dafna Maimon

Performers: Anu Vahtra, Lot Meijers, Steven de Jong, Timothy Moore

http://www.dafnamaimon.com
http://www.w139.nl

https://youtube.com/watch?v=QAfTV97vdfU

http://www.steim.org/STEIMBLOG/?p=871

the brutal immediacy of the voice, the ability it has to inspire fleeting recollections of forgotten characters

it’s animalistic sonic attack, the elemental nature of a cry

inherently humorous and intimate

both performers began their solo sets with renditions of dada and futurist sound poems from their respective countries, the transportation of voices through epochs… return to the voice, to the first and last gasp, the formless expulsion of air and communication