Folds
Reparative reading of the event
11.07.2019, 20:00 — 23:00
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Folds
Reparative reading of the event

Thursday 11.07.2019
20:00 - 23:00 uur

Pia Louwerens in collaboration with Sven Dehens.

‘Folds: Reparative reading of the event’ is a performative event hosted by Pia Louwerens and co-hosted by Sven Dehens, with Émilie Noteris. It is the first in a series of ‘Folds’: experimental evenings in which we experience how we as participant, observer, artist and institution co-create (art) events. The ‘Folds’ are shaped using methods of narrative and performance, seeing double, permeability, collaboration, appropriation, superpositioning and, as the title suggests, folding.

In ‘Folds: Reparative reading of the event’ the practice of Sven Dehens will be joint together with Louwerens’ artistic research into the Alphabetum and auditorium at West. The event proposes a programme around the notion of ‘reparative reading’. This notion stems from scholar Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who proposed the concept in the 90’s as a critique of what she called ‘paranoid reading’: the methodological centrality of suspicion and paranoia in critical practice. ‘Reparative reading’, on the other hand, is a mode of critique that works from assemblage, construction and queer joy.

This event will be accompanied by Émilie Noteris. She will present her book ‘La Fiction Réparatrice’, providing us with strategies to reparatively read the event together. The auditorium will screen Data Feels (2019), a short video by Karisa Senavitis, on webs of care and ghostpipe (an unusual plant studied for medicinal properties). From the library to the bookshop, from the cinema to the auditorium, this ‘reparative reading of the event’ will fold points which are close but also far away together to create different, hybrid constellations.

‘Embedded artistic researcher’* Pia Louwerens uses her strange function description as a starting point for research. What does it mean for an artist and her practice to be embedded into an institution? To be embedded suggests a position of extreme proximity and intimacy. How to be a critical researcher from tshis insider position, rather than one of reflective distance towards an outside object? Attempting to see difference without distance, Louwerens is interested in the entanglement between the inside and the outside, pointing out the moments where they become weirdly indistinguishable.

Pia Louwerens studied fine arts at the Royal Academy in The Hague from 2008-2012. After five years of practice she participated in a post-master in Brussels called a.pass, during which she started to understand her practice as artistic research. Louwerens works through narrative and performance. Essential to her practice are the synchronisation of words and action (performative utterings), and the uncanny role of the script in this regard.

Sven Dehens (1990) is an artist and curataor based in Brussels. He is currently involved with Kunsthal Gent, Art Cinema OFFoff and recently started rile*, a bookshop and project space for publication and performance practices, together with Chloe Chignell. Together with Chloe he organizes 'next to all those organs you love', a series of reading-performance focussed events, among other formats. Over the summer of 2018 he co-organized 'No More Erasers', a summerschool on self-publishing and transcription with Roxane Maillet. He holds an MA in visual art (LUCA, Ghent) and was a participant to the a.pass artistic research program, which he concluded in 2018.

Karisa Senavitis is a researcher, writer and designer working at the intersection of culture and care. Cofounder of NYC design studio WWFG and member of the collective Knowledge Is a Does (KIAD), her recent work is about queer internet research protocols and collective practices for generating and redistributing health data. Senavitis was a resident at the Jan van Eyck Academie, received an MA in design research, writing and criticism from the School of Visual Arts and a BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art.

Émilie Notéris is a textworker, born in 1978. She prefaces the anarchists Voltairine de Cleyre and Emma Goldman ('Femmes et Anarchistes', Blackjack Editions, 2014), translates ecofeminists ('Reclaim!', Cambourakis, 2016) and invites xenofeminists (week-end Eco-Queer, Bandits-Mages, Bourges, 2015). Her latest book, 'La Fiction reparaatrice', published in 2017, puts into practice and theory the art of Japanese kintsugi to propose a queer transcendence of binary cleavages, through the study of popular cinematographic fictions.

*The research position of Pia Louwerens is part of the NWO funded project ‘Bridging Art, Design and Technology through Critical Making’, which is organised by the Critical Making research consortium. For more information, see www.criticalmaking.nl/.