‘Multiplicities and Urban Textures’ -reader

The following bibliography is a list compiled of the texts that were brought to The Open Office For Words by participants at Multiplicities and Urban Textures (31.01.2010) at ADA, Area for Debate and Art. This list is entirely accidental and fortuitous.

-Without and Within, Mark Pimlott,

-Delirious New York, Rem Koolhaas

-The Arcades Project; Walter Benjamin, (ed. Howard Eiland, Kevin Mc Laughlin),Harvard University Press,

-City, Rediscovering the Centre, William H. Whyte

- Flesh and Stone, The Body and The City in Western Civilization, Richard Sennett

-Modern Times, Modern Places: Life & Art in The 20th Century, Peter Conrad, Thames &Hudson, 1998.

-The Atlas of Experience, Louise van Swaaij, JeanKlare, Bloomsbury Publishing, 1999.

-Autoidentity, Rotterdam Academy of Architecture and Urban Design, 2002.

-The Most Important Buildings of The Twentieth Century: Airport,(ed. Steve Bode, Jeremy Millar ), 1997.

-Amsterdam, Ed Van Elsken, Van Hokkema & Warendorf, 1979.

-Interfering; A Collection of and About Contextual Interventions in Urban Space, (ed. Hieke Pars, Iris Schutten), 2003.

-Weegee; Naked New York, Neues Publishing Company, New York, 1997.

- The Man of The Crowd, Edgar Allan Poe in Art in Theory 1815-1900, Blackwell Publishers, 1998.

-On The Crowd in The City, Friedrich Engels in Art in Theory 1815-1900, Blackwell Publishers, 1998.

-The Art of Flanerie, Victor Fournel in Art in Theory 1815-1900, Blackwell Publishers, 1998.

Image Contributions:

-Ellen van Vollenhoven

Multiplicities and Urban Textures

Announcing the theme for the month of January 2010:‘Multiplicities and Urban Textures’

January’s Open Office For Words looks at the city and the urban environment in terms of how they can be  read and understood by looking at modes of reading the city and the multiple uses and meanings of urban spaces.

Speakers: Taina Rajanti (Doc. Pol. Sci, Head of Research at Pori School of Art and Media, Helsinki University of Art and Design) will talk about Walter Benjamin and The Arcades Project now and in the last century. Rajanti will focus on the new arcades i.e the semi-public commercialized urban spaces, and people’s need to occupy those spaces, to use them and abuse them for their own practices, and how it is possible to introduce new meanings, ways of reading and uses to those spaces.

Frans-Willem Korsten (Prof. dr. Erasmus University, Leiden University) will talk about modes of reading the city, specifically the possibilities of broadening sensibility and the multiplication of worlds, instead of the vectorization of the urban world. In relation to this, Korsten will consider the principal difference between reading the urban environment as a narrative or as a poem.

You are cordially invited to search through your resources and to see whether you perhaps might have something to contribute to the above themes. Books, journals, research papers and images related, whether from the field of arts or science are all welcome, as are art-works, documentaries and interviews in a dvd-format.

It is preferable to notify The Open Office for Words in advance of your participation.

About The Open Office For Words:

The Open Office For Words is a cross-disciplinary reference library that comes into being for a few hours every month. Its premise is to function as a momentary culmination and dissemination of knowledge, made possibly by the collective act of sharing ones texts, whether part of a literary or theoretical tradition, or indeed texts in the larger sense of the word; including any work whether visual or written. The intention of The Open Office For Words is to facilitate the pooling together of resources in a friendly, semi-intimate space and to create a situation which will allow for chance meetings and conversations between people across different disciplines interested in similar subjects, as well as for quiet reading.

Practical information:

Date: Sunday the 31st of January, 2010.

Time: 13.00 – 15.00

Place: ADA, Area for Debate and Art

Bree 93 B

Rotterdam 3074 BD Rotterdam

http://adarotterdam.nl/

Email: openofficeforwords@gmail.com

Kitchen Lecture at Het Gemaal

The Winter Garden

ADA at Het Gemaal / 30.12.2009 – 4.01.2010

Shaw Gardens (August 1915)

Between 30 December and 3 January ADA will create a winter garden in ‘t Gemaal as part of the exhibition Florida organised by Tent.

People are invited to view the surrounding botanical display and to use the garden for coming together, meeting, talking, relaxing and reflection. The garden in ‘t Gemaal forms a thematic point of departure for a number of activities.

On all days a diaporama can be viewed and listened to in the garden. The diaporama consists of a series of slides by Matts Leiderstam (Gothenburg, 1956), and is accompanied by an audio recording of a lecture by him. Leiderstam researches the complex relationship between landscape and seeing and the genre of landscape painting. He adopts different roles by researching (art-) historical documents, copying paintings and looking through historical, optical instruments. In his work Leiderstam brings together these different gazes, asking us to look at well-known landscape images anew. In his lecture, Leiderstam will talk about these issues in relation to recent work, amongst which is the project Grand Tour.

The Winter Garden programme in ‘t Gemaal:

Saturday 2 January 2010 | 17.30 – 20.30
17.30 Kitchen Lecture, a performance by Deirdre M. Donoghue, hosted by P for Performance.
The performance is accompanied by a meal.
19.00 Interior Arcadias. A lecture on video by artist/designer/writer Mark Pimlott on the architecture of interior public spaces.

Sunday 3 January 2010 | 15.00 – 18.00
15.00 The Symbolics of Swimming Pools in Classical Cinema. A presentation of research by video artist Margo Onnes.
Coffee Break.
16.00 Poetrying, an open poetry reading organised by artist duo SKART and Maja Bekan for P for Performance. To participate with your poems please send your name, date of birth and 2 poems to: pforperformance[at]gmail[dot]com
17.45 Music for the Plants. A ‘garden concert’ specially composed for plants byGerwin Luijendijk.

‘Kitchen Lecture’

Kitchen Lecture / P_for_Performance

As part of ADA’s, (Area for Debate and Art) program at Het Gemaal, I will show/perform my newest work entitled Kitchen Lecture, hosted by Maja Bekan and her ongoing project P_ for _ Perfromance.

Whilst preparing dinner for her family, Deirdre M. Donoghue presents the viewer with a talk on the history of gesture studies and her own research interests evolving around language, gesture and becoming. All at once she prepares meatballs and mashed potato, presents visual material, and is interrupted by her children walking in and out of the kitchen, at times demanding her attention, at times joining in in the activities.

By setting herself this physically demanding task of giving an artist’s-talk while preparing her family a meal, she makes transparent the conditions of the artistic production of many female artists. Rather than separating the two different roles; the role of an artist and the role of a mother, she allows them to collapse together in the video performance entitled Kitchen Lecture.

Platform, (Vaasa, FI)

Platform presents

An artist talk & book presentation & screening programme
Friday 20.11. 20.00 at Ritz

Resonant Bodies, Memories, Voices
Presented by Deirdre M. Donoghue and Gunndís Ýr Finnbogadóttir

Acts of Memory / Muistityöt

Acts of Memory

November 28, 2009 – December 22, 2009

Poriginal Gallery

Eteläranta 6,

28100 Pori

Tel: +358 2 621 1093

www.poriartmuseum.fi/eng/poriginal-galleria/

The exhibition Acts of Memory explores the agency of memory production in relation to the construction of identity and the creation of autobiographical narratives. Referring to both imaginary and actual spaces and the passage of time, the exhibition investigates the production, consumption and affects of memory. Some of the works will be produced in situ, for example Donoghue’s performance piece Performing Memory and a reading table consisting of texts selected by the artists from the Pori Art Museum’s archives and the artist’s own bookshelves.

Opening: Friday 27th November 2009, 6-8 p.m.

The project is supported by Nordic-Baltic Mobility Program.

September’s Open Office For Words

THE OPEN OFFICE FOR WORDS: In The Abyss of The Present.

Phrenology illustration.

An attempt at categorising human abilities and psychic attributes to separate zones of the brain. Woodcut, 1864.

The theme for September is: Consciousness, memory loss and the breakdown of personal narrative.

September’s Open Office for Words looks at consciousness and the creation of personal narrative by looking at the breakdown of autobiographical memory in the case of Clive Wearing, a British musicologist and conductor suffering from anterogade amnesia.

The Office invites you to a screening of the BBC documentary ‘Life Without Memory; The Case of Clive Wearing’, followed by a discussion. Introduction to the theme by Deirdre M. Donoghue.

You are cordially invited to search through your resources and to see whether you perhaps might have something to contribute to the themes of identity, amnesia, the processes of remembering and forgetting. Books, journals, research papers and images related, whether from the field of arts or science are all welcome, as are art-works, documentaries and interviews in a dvd-format.

Practical Information:
Sunday 6 September 2009 | Theme: Consciousness, memory loss, personal narrative.
13:00 -15:00 | studio 207 | Houtlaan 21 | Rotterdam
The Office commences at 13:00 sharp.

Contact:
E: openofficeforwords[at]gmail[dot]com
T: 06 – 53323708

Please Note: Due to the building regulations it is necessary to inform The Office in advance about attendance. You can do so by email up to the day before and by phone on the day itself.

June’s Reader

Theory:

-The Nature of Landscape; A Personal Quest, Han Lorzing, 010 Publishers, Rotterdam 2001.

-Landschap en Herinnering, Simon Schama, 2007. ISBN: 9789046700679

-Intangible and Tangible Landscapes: an athropological perspective based on two South African case studies.Author; Liana Müller. (http://www.up.ac.za/dspace/bitstream/2263/9628/1/Muller_Intangible(2008).pdf)

-Giflandschap;Vervuilde Locaties en Landschappen in Nederland, Wout Berger, Fragment, 1992. ISBN: 9789065790743

Photography:

-Humanature, Peter Goin, University of Texas Press, 1996.

-Innocent Landscapes, David Farrell, Gallery of Photography, Dublin, 2001.

-Tatorte; Bilder Gegen Das Vergessen, Joel Sternfeld, Schirmer, Mosel, ISBN: 3-88814-668-2

-Utö, Het Laatse Jaar Van Een Eiland, Marcel Borsten, 2003.

June’s Open Office For Words

THE OPEN OFFICE FOR WORDS: Innocent Landscapes

June’s Open Office for Words took place on the 2nd of June at ADA, Area for Debate and Art, Rotterdam.                                                                     

The Office looked at the notion of  innocence together with the concept of landscape. Apart from the Sublime, various ways of reading and understanding landscape were discussed. The Office served French Chocolate Cake, Passion Cake and Apple Crumble Cake and a selection of tea’s and coffee was poured.

 

Speakers included: Marcel Borsten and Lasse Lau

Marcel Borsten’s talk Innocent Landscapes looked at the relationship between landscape and photography in territorial conflict areas. By focusing mainly on two different notions of landscape: the territorial and the rational, he touched upon the history and philosophy of landscape as he looked at the photographic works of Paul Graham, Peter Goin, Avi Holtzman and Richard Misrach. 

Lasse Lau‘s talk When Space Becomes Imaginary looked at what the naïve eye and the innocent can add to any unknown site. As part of his talk he will screen his latest film Pine Nuts, which examines the political and social relevance of the “invented” city park Horch al-Sanawbar in Beirut. The unusual history of this closed park becomes told through the recollections of US immigrants of the Lebanese Diaspora. Read More…

To subscribe to The Open Office for Words -podcasts in iTunes click here.