Propositions #8: I Wanna Be Adored (the Non-Fascist Remix)

BAK, basis voor actuele kunst in Utrecht proudly invites you to Propositions #8: I Wanna Be Adored (the Non-Fascist Remix), an evening program of performance, music, installations, hosted space, dancing, bites, and celebration with the BAK 2018/2019 Research Fellows. The program is the culmination of the BAK 2018/2019 post-academic Fellowship Program, in which the Fellows individually and collectively developed their research dealing with the pressing issues of the contemporary, including-in concert with BAK’s main research focus Propositions for Non-Fascist Living—the resurfacing undercurrent of fascisms. Propositions #8: I Wanna Be Adored (the Non-Fascist Remix) synthesizes the research and learning trajectory of the past ten months, and addresses it through a celebratory spatial experience of a party otherwise.

As crises of the contemporary compound, society demands our bodies and minds stay productive while simultaneously processing anxiety, violence, and trauma. Through the real risks of social change work and building practices toward liberation, there is a need for collective experiences that can deal with the urgencies of our times while allowing and fostering joy, generosity, celebration, hospitality, and togetherness. Propositions #8: I Wanna Be Adored (the Non-Fascist Remix) takes cues from alternative ways of coming together, whether through collective organizing, artistic practice, study groups, or the dance floor, and is inspired by legacies of club and night culture in which less traditional sites of knowledge production, such as the body, the party, the collective experience, sonic environments, and dance, are key. Spaces that center embodied celebration and enjoyment along with communal knowledges and negotiations can offer tangible tools, imaginaries, and possibilities for fostering joyful and critical acknowledgement, release, healing, conviviality, artistic practice, and expression—modeling practices for being together otherwise. The title of the event is inspired by Madchester band The Stone Roses’ song “I Wanna Be Adored,” taking a facetious spin to the sometimes superficial and isolating position of “the artist” and “the club,” and proposing a “non-fascist remix.” This event is premised on a love for (more than) humanity without sorting according to social “types” or rigorous zones of exclusion for categories of people, while also intentionally facilitating space for those who feel the brunts and violences of structural oppressions.

BAK 2018/2019 Fellows are Netherlands-based writer, researcher, and curator Katayoun Arian; anthropologist, curator, and activist Jessica de Abreu; artist, activist, and womanist Patricia Kaersenhout; artist, writer, and curator Charl Landvreugd; and artist Jeanne van Heeswijk; as well as internationally-based artist and educator Haseeb Ahmed; curator and educator Thiago de Paula Souza; artist Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh; researcher and theorist Lukáš Likavčan; and artist, educator, and researcher Mick Wilson.

The BAK Fellowship Program, inaugurated in 2017, is a site for the post-academic development of talent and critical practice that advance the notion of art as a public sphere and a political space. BAK offers a unique environment for learning, research, and art-making, which evolves in concert with its public programs. Ten research positions are offered per (academic) year to Netherlands-based and international practitioners involved in contemporary arts, theory, and activisms. Throughout the ten-month BAK 2018/2019 Fellowship Program, the ten Fellows have addressed, thought around, and experimented through a number of topics of the contemporary, including collective practices, conceptions of violence, colonial legacies, modeling, embodiment, instituting otherwise, and care, through their artistic practice, individual and collective research, and with exceptional guests.

Propositions #8: I Wanna Be Adored (the Non-Fascist Remix) is the eighth program in BAK’s long-term research series Propositions for Non-Fascist Living (2017–ongoing), prompted by the resurfacing of historical and contemporary fascisms.

The realization of this project has been made possible through financial contributions by the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science and the City Council, Utrecht.

BAK’s main partner in the field of education and research is HKU University of the Arts Utrecht.