Open School #6
WIELS welcomes you to the sixth iteration of Open School, where the current artists in residence let you in on their work, processes and reflections. These presentations are accompanied by a series of lectures exploring possible perspectives on a recurring theme: Sovereignty.
Free access
Discover the detailed programme below
Open School
Through past editions, WIELS has invited several researchers, authors, artists and academics from diverse fields to tackle the notion of "sovereignty" and its derivatives in the form of lectures, conversations and performances. With the origins being an ideal of the Enlightenment – as laid out in, for instance, Thomas Hobbes’s treatise Leviathan (1651) – this monumental topic has since been uprooted, claimed and dissected by people facing injustice, oppression or misrecognition, framing it as either an unapologetically progressive and leftist, or a neo-conservative and nationalistic concept.
The WIELS residency programme hosts every semester up to 9 artists from various origins, locations and positions. Open School is the opportunity to meet the current residents in WIELS, see their work through talks, presentations and performances, and discuss their processes in their studio.
Whether it be artistic, aesthetic, corporeal, ideal or empirical, Open School aims to illuminate varied and idiosyncratic approaches to sovereignty and build a platform for sustainable discourse.
PROGRAMME
13:00-17:00 | Studio 1, +1
Ongoing workshop by Laivi Suurväli
14:00-15:30 | Auditorium (-1)
Artist talk by Céline Vahsen (EN)
Performance by Désiré Sawadogo
Presentation by Thomas Bremerstent (EN)
Artist talk by Emilio de Azevedo (EN/FR)
16:00-17:00 | Auditorium (-1)
Lecture by Josep Rafanell i Orra: Face aux effondrements: quelques réflexions cosmoanarchistes (FR)
More information below
17:00-17:30 | Studio 4, +2
Talk by Lieven Lahaye (NL/EN)
17:30-18:00 | Studio 8, +3
Film screenings by Andro Eradze (EN)
At the Same Time (work in progress), 2023, 2K, 6’ 37”
Raised in the Dust, 2022, 4K, 8’ 2”
Nightvision, Limited access, 2021, Full HD, 2’ 53”
18:00-18:20 | Studio 3, +1
Talk by Thomas Swinkels (EN)
18:30-19:00 | Auditorium, -1
Recap on Open School by Mona Filleul & guests Désirée Cerocién, Flo *Souad Benaddi, Nino André (FR)
18:30-21:00 | Mezzanine/bookshop
Bar
Studio discussions
Outside the programme, you can meet some of the residents in their studios. Check their exact availabilities during the event.
Céline Vahsen, Thomas Swinkels, Lieven Lahaye, Thomas Bremerstent, Désiré Sawadogo, Andro Eradze, Emilio de Azevedo
Josep Rafanell i Orra: Face aux effondrements: quelques réflexions cosmoanarchistes
16:00-17:00 | Auditorium (-1)
In French
We are experiencing a myriad of collapses: of living environments, of institutions, of the very idea of a social subject at the grounds of the political scene. The representations of catastrophes take over, we are buried by the abundance of its imagery in the suffocating world-wide webs.
But this proposal begs to differ: It is above all a matter of situating our experiences. To take space again. However, no community means no room against the administered space of disaster. And no community without passages between worlds.
It is then up to calling for an anachronism: The return of communal forms of life, the experience of our interdependencies, our own autonomy. Against the suffocation of the political spheres of representation and its identities, the advocates of cosmic pluralism will return, united in their awareness of their own vulnerability.
And it is here that the anarchic abyss of life reappears. Without the linear scansion of the defected history of progress. Without first principles and origins. Without the tyrannical organisation of the social world. Resurgences and insurgencies that confront the infirmity of a modernity in its terminal stage.
Anarchism will no longer be social. It will be either cosmological, or it will not be. It will be made of co-presences, of reciprocities, in the entanglement between beings, who distinct habitable living environments.
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Josep Rafanell i Orra is a psychologist and writer. He has been working for more than 30 years in institutions of healthcare. He is author of En finir avec le capitalisme thérapeutique. Soin, politique et communauté, Éditions de La Découverte, 2011, republished by Éditions Météores in 2022 and of Fragmenter le monde, Éditions Divergences, 2017. He participated in Cahiers d'enquêtes politiques, Les Éditions des mondes à faire, 2016 and coordinated Itinérances, Éditions Divergences, 2018. He leads Les Communaux, a constellation of interventions working to reappropriate our relationships to our living environments.