sixtiessixties 20 — 21 April 2013 SWEET SIXTIES Avant-Gardes in the Shadows of the Cold War. Lectures & Conference. Speakers FRANCO BERARDI »BIFO« — Bologna OLGA BRYUKHOVETSKA — Kiev BORIS CHUKHOVICH — Montreal ClarE DAVIES — Cairo EKATERINA DEGOt — Moscow sixties YASMINA DEKKAR — London BRANISLAV DIMITRIJEVIĆ — Belgrade ALI Essafi — Casablanca LJILJANA KolEŠNIk — Zagreb PORTER MCCRAY — Berlin Josip Rastko Močnik — Ljubljana YEHUDA SAFRAN — New York CATARINA SIMÃO — Lisbon RAYYANE Tabet — Beirut mumok Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Museumsquartier — Vienna Sat, 20 April 2013, 11:00 am — 6:15 pm Sun, 21 April 2013, 11:00 am — 6:15 pm H osted by tranzit.at MF sweetsixties.org 1 tranzit.at sixties BE ENV NUTA! ласкаво просимо! WELCOME! ! بح رن приветствие! добродошао! Dobro Došao! DOBRODOŠEL! WILLKOMMEN! BEM-VIndo! sweet MISN S IO STATEMENT SWEET SIXTIES is a long-term trans-regional research initiative working between art, research, media and educational contexts in Europe, the Middle East, West and Central Asia and Northern Africa. Involving a particular group of experimentally-orientated arts and research groups as well as particular artists, researchers and media, Sweet 60s investigates hidden histories or underex- posed cultural junctions and exchange channels in the revolution- ary period of the 1960s. 2 3 sixties Forword MDN O ER ITIES TRANSMOGRIFIED. A Sweet Sixties Conference and Lecture Series In the 1960s, the landscapes and cities of protectorates and for- mer colonies from India to the Maghreb, from the Soviet Republics to the new states in the Southern hemisphere were replete with the spirit and forms of modernity; forms that transmogrify and then dissolve into the thin air of the vernacular. The star-maps that are used to survey these artificial worlds often serve to navigate the boundaries between private and public domains. The world is full of eerie displacements, gestures of the uncanny, and the constellation of the real exists in a plethora of doubled forms. Question marks, meanderings, rows of numbers, and persons of the line belong to the inventory at hand. Communi- sweet cation machines emerge and shut themselves up before they have the chance to become immaterial, disappear, and corrode in postmodernity. The air of the 60s echoes a spirit of emancipation. And the newly arising art-scapes are interspersed with double agents: diasporas bring their academies; the streams between Soviet, North and South American, Western European, Non-Aligned etc. are full of interlocutions, hidden pathways, and narratives of trade routes beyond the seemingly stable hegemonies of the blocks. The stories and spirits of a parallel avant-garde, whose silhouettes have yet to be found on the walls of the western canon, are the theme of this conference. Georg Schöllhammer 4 5 sixties Sat, 20/04/2013 Lecture Series 11:00 am 11:30 am Welcome Josip Rastko Močnik KLEMENS GRUBER Before the Coulours Exploded: 11:15 am Degree Zero of Symbolisation Introduction: Sweet Sixties GEORG SCHÖLLHAMMER I n 1966, Michel Foucault publis- artistic programme retroactively hed Les mots et les choses, proved to be the point of »Words and Things«; in his title, divergence: 1. Visual arts affir- »and« is meant as a disjunction: med the purity of the line and something is either a »thing« the drawing – engaging in what or it is a »word«. A year or two critics called »conceptualism«. sweet earlier, an artistic and intellec- 2. Poetry renounced rhetoric tual current in Slovenia-Yugos- and »secondary systems of sig- lavia proposed to read the nification«, favouring simple expression as a conjunction: constructions or, more radically, »words are things«. This simple stepping over into typographic programme triggered complex poetry. 3. Theory soon engaged effects. It broke with the in the elaboration of the »mate- humanism of the fifties; lay off riality of the signifier«. Historical temptations of anthropocen- destiny of the divergent varie- trism: Proclaiming that humans ties has been uneven: concep- are »things among other tualism was canonised; poetic things«, it practically resolved »reism« has been reduced to a the contradiction of hedonism historical digression; theory by identifying discipline with re-focused its »artistic« interest pleasure. However, recognising towards cultural forms of po- that »the world as the world pular resistance (punk-rock of things« has its own »orders«, etc.), and lived its short-termed proponents of »reism« were feast of a recontre manquée soon led to admit that those with the »masses«. things which are words have an order of their own, a linguistic order they started to grasp in the spirit of the epoch, i.e., in Saussurean-Jakobsonian terms and within semiotic horizon. This minimal theorisation of an 6 7 sixties Closing Conference 12:00 pm 2:00 pm FRANCO BERARDI »BIFO« YEHUDA SAFRAN Three possible points of view on the ‘60s. The Architectural Consequences of Political Thinking Culmination. The culmination belonging blocked the possibili- point of the modern experience ty of deploying the immanent i t is not often that we reflect on among us) as a way of compari- and of Futurism. possibility. And the world the great formal contributions son in an urban environment. Immanence. The develop- entered the convulsive phase of made by architects who have The optimism of those years can ment of the general intellect collapse and de-civilization we undertaken a political position. clearly be seen in their designs, as possibility for full emancipa- are now immersed in. For some reason, those on in their under takings, and tion from capitalist constraints the right have attracted a great in the quality of their thinking. sweet and exploitation. deal of interest, while the left End. The beginning of was – and is – unsung. Yehuda the end of the future, which sur- Safran focuses on several faced in the following decade. architects who were engaged The process of scholariza- with and shaped the communal tion – the deployment of the typology of the architecture of mass educational system – the communes in Israel in the is the most important marker of Sixties and earlier. Most of the full development of modern them were educated in Vienna civilization. It is also the imma- and Berlin and arrived in nence of the possibility of the Palestine with little experience. full deployment of the tendency Their names are less known towards the liberation of human than Eric Mendelsohn but life from the capitalist form of their contribution was no less the economy. important. The alliance between Yehuda Safran elaborates workers and students. on the relationship between The relation between forms of life and architecture as artists and engineers. the key insight concerning The starting of experimen- innovation in the aftermath of tation on the Net, and the WWII, against indifferent pro- infinite possibilities generated duction on a very large scale. 20/04/ 2013 — Lecture Series 12:30 pm by the meeting of psychedelic Discussion with Panellists He will introduce three Brazilian imagination and technology. architects: Villa Nouva Artigas, The paranoid legacy of 1:00 Lina Bobardi, and Paulo the century of revolution and Lunch Break Mendes da Rocha (who is still 8 9 sixties 2:30 pm 3:00 pm Pontecorvo) passed through CLARE DAVIES YASMINA DEKKAR this institution, which at the time was deemed second most Wonderful Things: Early Algerian Cinema important of its kind. Why has The Labor of Art Work. as a Site of International official historiography neglected Solidarity this intense moment of exchange between different In the mid-1920s, the institu- voices and filmic languages? tionalization of a state arts sec- Yasmina Dekkar explores the tor in Egypt began in earnest. constitution of Algerian cinema The same period was marked in 1957 and the inauguration by a turn towards the of the Cinemathèque d’Algiers »Egyptianization« of art and, in 1964 as a site of international ultimately, a backlash against solidarity. Algerian cinema is the dominance of cultural literally a ›cinéma de combat‹, policy-making and the new arts as it was born in 1957 during administration by foreign the struggle for independence nationals. In this context, the in the maquis. One of the sweet control of arts bureaucracy, founding figures acting as a and, specifically, Egyptian art- transmission agent was the ists’s rights to it, was under- French communist docu- stood as a political issue. Clare mentary filmmaker René Vaut- Davies argues that definitions ier, who had joined the of the artist’s role, art world liberation movement and estab- dynamics, and works of art in lished the first cinema school 20th-century Egypt benefit from for (native) Algerians by setting a consideration of the politics of up a documentary film unit in labor in the same period. She the maquis. offers a series of theses qualify- The Cinemathèque was ing the nature of an evolving founded two years after Algeria relationship between art and gained independence in 1964 labor based on a discussion of by Ahmed Hocine with the help specific developments in the of Henri Langlois, the founder state arts sector and a of the Cinemathèque of Paris. consideration of individual For more than forty years it was Ministère de l’information et de la Culture – Alger (ed.) (1974) Cinéma: Production Cinématographique 1957—1973. works of art. a place for open debate and Alger: Ministère de l’Information. critique of aesthetic, social and political issues, and a meeting- point for national and interna- tional filmmakers.a great many 20/04/ 2013 — Closing Conference 3:30 pm important Algerian and inter- Discussion with Panellists national filmmakers (including Beloufa, Allouache, Zinet, 4:00 pm Chahine, Godard, Herzog, and Coffee Break 10 11 sixties 4:30 pm trying to shoot films, not under 5:00 pm ALI ESSAFI his own name, but using RAYYANE TABET the approved names of his col- Portrait of the Artist in leagues and founded, along with Season’s Greetings: Dominated Country three other directors, the first An Annotated Postcard collective of independent film- makers.