Zoekresultaten

It Happened Tomorrow

It happened tomorrow is an artistic research contribution, in the form of video loops on CRT monitors, to the final exhibition of the programme Climate Imaginaries at Sea. The exhibition is titled 'Unimaginable, clarion calls from rising seas' and was hosted at Bradwolff from 19 to 25 April 2024.De Gaetano curated a special collection of more than 400 videos from the open archives of Sound & Vision, including short films, documentaries, and news reports about different forms of (other than) human relationships with water in the Netherlands. In an ongoing series of workshops called “It Happened Tomorrow/ Reflections on Water,” still images from the collection have prompted students, artists, researchers, and policymakers currently based in the Netherlands to collectively speculate on future ways of living in a country with higher waters. Through individual and collective drawing and climate fiction exercises, people were invited to look at and expand on still frames from the collection as a way to imagine possible future landscapes, adaptation scenarios, and how to co-inhabit them with other species. These video montages explore and respond to the imaginaries generated during the participatory workshops and the narratives encountered in the audiovisual collection. Conversations from the workshops informed the textual captions on the videos, which take the form of fictional letters from an unknown researcher travelling through the Netherlands in 2124. Following Ursula Le Guin Carrier's bag theory of fiction, the audio-visual assemblages propose non-linear accounts of possible futures, open-ended and without heroes. Generative AI takes the role of co-fabulator in queering the boundary between past and future, human and more than human, giving shape to tiny climate fictions that question how we look at nature and how we can reimagine ourselves as part of it.

Plot Work as an Artistic Praxis in Today’s Cityscapes

This is a print publication of the inaugural lecture of Research Professor (Lector) Patricia de Vries at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, in Amsterdam. In this lecture, she elaborated on the research area of her research group Art & Spatial Praxis. The research group Art & Spatial Praxis focuses on artistic practices that broaden our imaginations of alternative social orders and ways of living within capitalist city structures.The thematic focus of Art & Spatial Praxis builds on Sylvia Wynter’s rich notion of the plot. With her conception of the plot, Wynter connects the historical enclosures of the plantation to today’s cityscapes. The plot stands for other possibilities that are always present. It represents possibilities rooted in different values and different social orders. This is to say, cityscapes and public spaces are relational, contingent and always contested. The plot challenges the forces of domination, appropriation, exploitation, commodification, gentrification, segregation, digitization, and quantification.What if plot work is a praxis that is socially enacted, embodied, narrativised, and materialised in art practices? What could the plot as artistic praxis be(come)? What constitutes it? What conditions and sustains it? What kind of behaviour, ways of seeing, knowing, and relating does it encourage? In short: what does the plot mean as a spatial art praxis in today’s cityscapes? These are some of the questions the research group Art & Spatial Praxis engages with. These are also pressing questions in the increasingly regulated, privatized, surveilled, and diminished public spaces in ever-more neoliberal cities.Over the years, De Vries has written on a range of topics – be it on fungal co-existence or facial recognition technology: the relationship between society, art, design and research is always the connecting thread.

Before building the avant–garde of the commons

It Happened Tomorrow

It happened tomorrow is an artistic research contribution, in the form of video loops on CRT monitors, to the Warming Up festival at Tolhuistuin in November 2024. It was part of the Kunstroute, a program running from November 7 to November 10, where visitors were guided through a series of installations and artworks around climate change. De Gaetano curated a special collection of more than 400 videos from the open archives of Sound & Vision, including short films, documentaries, and news reports about different forms of (other than) human relationships with water in the Netherlands. In an ongoing series of workshops called “It Happened Tomorrow/ Reflections on Water,” still images from the collection have prompted students, artists, researchers, and policymakers currently based in the Netherlands to collectively speculate on future ways of living in a country with higher waters. Through individual and collective drawing and climate fiction exercises, people were invited to look at and expand on still frames from the collection as a way to imagine possible future landscapes, adaptation scenarios, and how to co-inhabit them with other species.These video montages explore and respond to the imaginaries generated during the participatory workshops and the narratives encountered in the audiovisual collection. Conversations from the workshops informed the textual captions on the videos, which take the form of fictional letters from an unknown researcher travelling through the Netherlands in 2124. Following Ursula Le Guin Carrier's bag theory of fiction, the audio-visual assemblages propose non-linear accounts of possible futures, open-ended and without heroes. Generative AI takes the role of co-fabulator in queering the boundary between past and future, human and more than human, giving shape to tiny climate fictions that question how we look at nature and how we can reimagine ourselves as part of it.