Re•Abandoned Practices Institute
Remotely from Chicago 2020
July 27 – August 14
This 3-week summer intensive online course constructs itself as a weave of practices of performance, writing, installation, and documentation, with projects in varying degrees of individual and collaborative engagement.
This course is hosted by The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and is available for credit and non-credit enrollment with a reduced tuition rate for non-credit participants available. Learn more here. For more information, contact Matthew Goulish mgoulish@saic.edu.
The course will operate between remote shared platforms and technologies for the sake of public safety. The instructors will deconstruct those platforms in order to imagine and actualize the creative possibilities within them. Teachers and visiting scholars will lecture on related subjects.
The course will meet synchronously in the time window of 9:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. CST, with screen time never exceeding four hours, and frequently far less than that. We will make accommodations for participants who cannot attend every hour synchronously.
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Re•Abandoned Practices will research and enact practices that have been disregarded in the wake of progress, relegated to the archives of history. The course does not propose that we share a mutual past, but rather that we might mutually discover a shared strategy of thinking about varied pasts, a strategy of reimagining and reenacting the different abandoned practices that at some time in some place defined the ordinary.
In this opportune moment, this course will ask a new set of questions. Do we accept that we must abandon the practices that we have rediscovered as provisional, to return to an unsustainable, unethical normal? Must we sacrifice reduced air travel, pedestrian streets, and the resurrected drive-in movie?
We have seen the public return of the plague doctor mask, and the private democratization of access. We witness the annihilation of scale in the frame of the screen, the microscopic virus appearing equal beside the planetary nebula. What constitutes practice now, individual and collective? What does isolation subtract from creativity, and what does it add? What renewed practices become endangered?
Instructors
Matthew Goulish: Writing
Lin Hixson: Performance
Mark Jeffery: Performance
2020 Visiting Lecturers
Jorge Lucero, Artist and Associate Professor of Art Education in the School of Art + Design at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
Kélina Gotman, Writer and Associate Professor in Theatre and Performance Studies at King’s College London.
Visiting Curator
Cortney Lederer, CNL Projects, ART-IN-PLACE with Terrain Exhibitions.
Partner Organization
Public Media Institute & Co-Prosperity Sphere
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Kélina Gotman is Reader (Associate Professor) in Theatre and Performance Studies at King’s College London, and author of Choreomania: Dance and Disorder (Oxford Studies in Dance Theory, Oxford University Press, 2018), Essays on Theatre and Change: Towards a Poetics Of (Routledge, 2018), co-editor of Foucault’s Theatres (Manchester University Press, 2019), and editor of the forthcoming three-volume Theories of Performance (Bloomsbury, 2021). She writes widely on the cultural and critical studies of science, disciplines and institutions, dance history and theory, performance, translation, critical cultures of writing, and interdisciplinary approaches to movement and the history of thought. She has collaborated widely on dance, theatre and post-opera productions across Europe and North America, and consults regularly for galleries and performance projects. In summer 2019, she was Friedrich Hölderlin Guest Professor in Comparative Dramaturgy at the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, and has held visiting, honorary or guest positions among others at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University, Bard College, the Eugene Lang College for Liberal Arts at The New School, and the Slade School of Fine Art at University College London. She is currently developing a body of work around practices of truthful speech. https://www.kcl.ac.uk/people/kelina-gotman
Jorge Lucero is a Mexican-American artist who currently serves as Associate Professor of Art Education in the School of Art + Design at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Jorge is the editor of the book Mere and Easy: Collage as a Critical Practice in Pedagogy and co-editor (with Laura Shaeffer) of The Compound Yellow Manual of Prompts, Provocations, Permissions & Parameters for Everyday Practice. He is the author of Teacher as Artist-in-Residence: The most radical form of expression to ever exist (published in partnership with the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and 33 teachers from DC, Maryland, and Virginia) and the forthcoming, STUDYCOLLECTION: Repository for conviviality. Currently, Jorge is the co-editor of the scholarly journal Visual Arts Research and previously served as the Instructional Resource Editor for
the journal Art Education. He’s an assistant editor for the Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy. His most recent project Conceptual Art & Teaching is a platform through which the intersections of contemporary art and education are examined—and generated from—for the sake of a more fully integrated teaching-as-art practice.
https://www.jorgelucero.com/
Cortney Lederer is an arts consultant, project manager and educator. From 2011–14 she served as the Director of Exhibitions and Residencies at the Chicago Artists Coalition (CAC), where she designed and managed its two residency programs: BOLT Residency and HATCH Projects. As of June 2014, Cortney launched CNL Projects (CNL) to provide project-based consulting to organizations with a specialization in curating, project management, program design and development. Cortney launched the initiative PROMPT, an artist dinner series intended to create
space to build community, share stories, resources and skills. CNL recently partnered with Terrain Exhibitions to launch, ART-IN-PLACE inviting artists to exhibit an original work of art outside their home or from a window visible to the public between May 20- June 20, 2020. This collective action provides artists and community members in Chicagoland neighborhoods (and beyond) with a sense of hope and connectivity through the experience of public art during an unprecedented moment of isolation. Cortney is faculty in the Arts Administration and Policy department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
https://www.cnlprojects.org/
The Co-Prosperity Sphere is an experimental cultural center located in the neighborhood of Bridgeport and home office of Public Media Institute. The space showcases work by artists, performers and cultural workers of all stripes and hosts between 30-40 events and exhibitions annually, serving over 20,000 individuals each year. Public Media Institute is a community based art & culture organization with a mission to create, incubate and sustain innovative and equitable cultural programming through the production of socially engaged projects, festivals, spaces, exhibitions, and media. The Institute publishes several periodicals like Lumpen Magazine, Materiel Magazine, and Mash Tun Journal. Abandoned Practices this year is collaborating with Co-Prosperity, Public Media Institute and Lumpen Radio for a special event.
http://coprosperity.org/
http://www.publicmediainstitute.com/
http://lumpenradio.com/