Given the travel restrictions, the Sommerakademie Paul Klee program 2020 STATECRAFT was planned anew. This website assembles new material on behalf of our nine current residents, all of them contributing from afar. For one, the platform tests the use of online formats which are bound to play a growing role in the near future. For another, it insists on really-existing material surroundings, wherever SPK residents happen to be stranded in the wake of the pandemic. It thereby makes the most of a painful situation for everyone involved - whether in terms of content, collaboration, or the use of shared resources.
Please visit: https://pivots2021.sommerakademie-paul-klee.ch
Given the difficult circumstances, the Sommerakademie Paul Klee is postponing the summer program in Bern, and will be continuing conversations in virtual form over the weeks to come. Now, in terms of immediate programming, we have restricted the public component to two online events, which both continue to address last year’s curatorial theme of STATECRAFT within the context of Contemporary Art:
→ July 22:
5 p.m. CET
Zoom Link
Meeting-ID: 946 0121 8061
Online lecture by Will Stronge
followed by Q&A and conversation
The world of work is in transition. Demographic and technological transformations, exacerbated by the Covid pandemic, are being met with new policy proposals, like a shorter working week or a Universal Basic Income. In particular the crisis of work and posited responses point to a break-down of the traditional divisions between leisure and work, employed and unemployed, worker and pensioner. They also underline the particular tensions and conflicts around freedom and inequality that capitalist societies produce. Will Stronge will present the questions that the future of work poses to our habitual ways of being and thinking and will outline what strategies, demands and proposals should be put to the fore.
→ August 5:
6 p.m. CET
Zoom-Link
Meeting-ID: 936 4919 4783
“Remote Viewing”
Experiment in online formatting
with residents 2019/20 and Tirdad Zolghadr, artistic director Sommerakademie Paul Klee
Residents of the Sommerakademie engage in a remote viewing experiment, testing the potentials of online formats which are bound to play a growing role in the way we work and engage with one another in the near future. On account of momentary travel restrictions, we as a Sommerakademie can no longer pursue our conversations by the banks of the Aare River. But we can take advantage of our geographic disparity in other ways, wherever we happen to be stranded during the ongoing pandemic.
Taking up to 15 minutes each – either live on location, or by way of recent footage – residents address a physical space within their immediate material surroundings that speaks to the ongoing discussion at the Sommerakademie: What role do national boundaries still play? How do international debt economies and new legal instruments define the rapport between Contemporary Art and statecraft more recently? How can one create the conditions of production that might make a sustained discussion possible - across space as well as time? From divestment to institution building to propaganda: Which strategic means have been successfully deployed by artists and curators, and which ones continue to make strategic, aesthetic and political sense today?
Will Stronge
Will Stronge is co-director of Autonomy, an independent think tank focusing on issues relating to the future of work. He is the co-author, with Helen Hester, of the forthcoming primer Post-Work: what it is, why it matters and how we get there (Bloomsbury, 2021).