→ July 30:
PROGR Zentrum für Kulturproduktion, room 369, Speichergasse 4, Bern
2 pm: Lecture by Tirdad Zolghadr
A Cheerful Nature is an Utterly Ruthless Thing.
How Contemporary Art might come to grips with gentrification after all
For well over a year, the REALTY program has been exploring answers to Contemporary Art’s complicity with gentrification. And by now, it has even spawned some ideas of its own. By and large, if we really expect art to stop servicing real estate, we need to fundamentally reinvent Contemporary Art – or surpass it altogether. As it stands, broke artists cannot be expected to resist cheap studio space wherever they find it. Art schools will not teach resistance if they think ambiguity is a best-case scenario. And the Right to the City cannot be taken seriously when unending mobility remains so crucial to our careers. This lecture will trace some fundamental misunderstandings concerning the role of art within the financialization of space. But it will also argue why there may be cause for stubborn optimism after all.
→ August 8:
Bern University of the Arts HKB, Fellerstrasse 11, Bümpliz
10 am: Presentation by Rival Strategy
Contemporary Strategy
Benedict Singleton and Marta Ferreira de Sá are partners at Rival Strategy, which they co-founded in 2016 to address the question: “what is contemporary strategy?“ Rival’s work focuses on this question through projects to maximise the strategic potential of services, technologies, places and organisations. While in Bern, Benedict Singleton and Marta Ferreira de Sá will present emerging questions of their work and explore new ones in conversation with the fellows. Some of the thoughts they will be bringing with them concern:
- Creative optics—how the strategic presence of different kinds of actor is changing
- Platform design—deleting common myths and poor understandings of its internal logic
- Playable organisations—institutions that are configured like technologies
- Hard forking the art world—shifts in the artistic landscape, considered as an industry
→ August 15:
Kunsthalle Bern, Helvetiaplatz 1, Bern
7 pm: Lecture by Jaya Klara Brekke
as part of Eric Golo Stone’s curated program „Contractual Situations We Live By“ at the Kunsthalle Bern
Strategies for understanding the power, politics and ethics of blockchain and smart contracts
Blockchain is a new technology proposing a decentralized method for establishing ownership and scarcity. This within an otherwise infinitely replicable space of digital information. Conversely, previously offline forms of property might be assigned digital identities with the potential incorporation into new rights management technologies. The ramifications of which may soon be visible even in a real estate context where ownership traditions have remained unchanged for centuries. (It is no coincidence that one of the first Ethereum smart contract start-ups produced physical locks.) We will collectively work through the many ways in which blockchain transforms understandings and practices around property, from smart contracts and automated enforcement to tracing provenance, production methods and other questions of mattering.
→ August 18:
PROGR Zentrum für Kulturproduktion, erlesen - Raum für gedruckte Feinkost (access through the PROGR courtyard), Speichergasse 4, Bern
5 pm: Closing Event of the Sommerakademie Paul Klee 2018
with the Fellows 2017-19, Tirdad Zolghadr and Andreas Vogel
You may think there’s nothing wrong with gentrification. Or you may think you have nothing to do with it. You’re just painting in your studio, no harm done. Or perhaps you think capitalism does what it does, nothing you can do.
BLOCC can sort you out. Come join us for an aperitif, August 18, 5 pm.
BLOCC (Building Leverage Over Creative Capitalism) was formed 2017, by the eight artist Fellows of the Sommerakademie Paul Klee in Bern. August 18, we’ll present the first blueprint of our teaching template, and show you an amusing, short video. Or maybe just a video. BLOCC seeks to alter the relationship between Contemporary Art and Gentrification, one generation at a time. By means of an experimental, adaptable teaching method. In essence, BLOCC reflects an entirely new way of learning art. On the one hand, it places art’s relationship to city politics at the very center of formal training. Right alongside feminism, critical theory, Harry Szeemann, Paul Klee and all the rest. On the other hand, it introduces a teaching template that is introduced from afar, but remains open-ended as it builds, crystalizing differently in different cities.
So, you know... Be part of the alternative. It’s already here.
The Fellows 2017-19:
Johanna Bruckner, Crystal Z Campbell, Luiza Crosman, Alexandros Kyriakatos, Alexis Mitchell, Bahar Noorizadeh, Heather M. O'Brien and Jonathan Takahashi
Rival Strategy
Benedict Singleton and Marta Ferreira de Sá are partners at Rival Strategy, which they co-founded in 2016 to address the question: “what is contemporary strategy?“ Rival’s work focuses on this question through projects to maximise the strategic potential of services, technologies, places and organisations. Their team’s current projects include designing a new global art institution, consulting on the strategic relationships of design and finance for a leading investment bank, and creating new platforms and infrastructure for a luxury car brand in anticipation of a world of different vehicle technologies and ownership models. Alongside Rival, both the founding partners are on the faculty of the New Normal programme at the Strelka Institute, Moscow, and teach at the Royal College of Art, London.
Jaya Klara Brekke
Jaya Klara Brekke writes, does research and speaks on the political economy of blockchain and consensus protocols, focusing on questions of authority, politics and power in decentralized systems. She is based between Durham University, UK, where she is writing a PhD titled Distributing Chains, Three Strategies for Thinking Blockchain Politically; London where she spends much of her time with the InfoSec research group at UCL Computer sciences department; and Vienna as collaborator of RIAT, Institute for Future Crypto-economics and is the author of the Satoshi Oath and B9Lab ethical training module for blockchain developers.