Propositions #9: Deserting from the Culture Wars

Propositions #9: Deserting from the Culture Wars is a week-long series of trainings, lectures, and panel discussions taking place at BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht from November 13–17, 2019. The program seeks—through forms of enactment and performative approaches—to actively evade the current moment of ever-more polarized ideological combat, often characterized as a return of the “culture wars.”

Propositions #9 brings together artists, theorists, and writers in a range of formats to actively reflect upon and work toward a tactical desertion from the cultural conflicts being waged today in a theater of war demarcated by the (far-) right through aggressive hypersensitivity, injured entitlement, angry rants, and memes about “cultural Marxism,” immigration, climate change, and feminism. What possibilities would be opened by a refusal to play these war games, and commit desertion—not as a withdrawal into a realm of apolitical privacy, but as a pursuit of different strategies, tactics, and coalitions?

Rather than being merely an object of debate, an emancipatory understanding of culture is to be conceived as embodied and intersubjective, a collective performance that prevents culture from becoming a self-congratulatory exercise among like minds, but marks instead a space of enactment. How to widen this further and create overlaps and alliances? What might artists and others who are professionally engaged with images and imaginaries, narratives and assemblies, have to contribute to the collective discovery of different modes of culture?

Including trainings, lectures, and panel discussions with Bini Adamczak, Kader Attia, Tom Holert, Patricia Kaersenhout, Charl Landvreugd, Sven Lütticken, Diana McCarty, Dan McQuillan, Dina Mohammed, Johannes Paul Raether, Rose Hammer (Stacey E. Devoe, Dora Garcia, Nora Joung, Per-Oskar Leu, and Niels Munk Plum), Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Jonas Staal, Terra Critica (Birgit M. Kaiser and Kathrin Thiele), and Transformella Malor.

Propositions #9 is co-convened with writer and curator Sven Lütticken as a temporary spin-off from the project Trainings for the Not-Yet and is the ninth iteration of BAK’s long-term research series Propositions for Non-Fascist Living (2017–ongoing), which seeks to collectively think and act out ways of being together otherwise. Incorporating the structure of Trainings for the Not-Yet, Propositions #9 starts each day with a training (a smaller working session), followed by a public program in the evening. 

Program:

Wednesday, November 13:
1:30–5:30pm: Training Organizational Art with Jonas Staal
7:30–9pm: Public program with Sven Lütticken and Jonas Staal

Thursday, November 14:
1:30–5:30pm: Training “The Plague” with Rose Hammer (Stacey E. Devoe, Dora Garcia, Nora Joung, Per-Oskar Leu, and Niels Munk Plum)
7:30–9:30pm: Public program with Tom Holert and Rose Hammer 

Friday, November 15:
1:30–5:30pm: Training Repro Communal Training Camp with Transformella Malor
7:30–9:30pm: Public program with Bini Adamczak and Transformella Malor

Saturday, November 16:
1:30–5:30pm: hrs: Training ReadingRoom on “Refuge, Refuse, Refrain” with Terra Critica (Birgit M. Kaiser and Kathrin Thiele)
7–10pm: Public program with Terra Critica, Jonas Staal, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Bini Adamczak, Charl Landvreugd, and Sven Lütticken

Sunday, November 17:
1–4:15pm: Public program with Kader Attia, Diana McCarty, Dan McQuillan, Dina Mohamed, Johannes Paul Raether, and Patricia Kaersenhout 

Full program with abstracts available here.

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

Propositions #9 is part of Trainings for the Not-Yet, a project made possible with the support of: Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture, and Science; the City Council, Utrecht; VSBfonds, Utrecht; BankGiro Loterij Fonds, Amsterdam; Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds, Amsterdam; K.F. Hein Fonds, Utrecht; and Fentener van Vlissingen Fonds, Utrecht.