OA/AO Landscape with Bear

This OA/AO will host a book launch of the project Landscape with Bear and a conversation between archaeologist Miguel John Versluys, one of the participants of the project, and the curators of De Appel Curatorial Programme 2018-19. The event will be held at De Appel archive and the books will be distributed to the visitors. 

The publication documents the making of Landscape with Bear, a project that investigates what has come to be known as De Appel’s Collection (Unintended), an accumulation of objects – artworks, props, leftovers, and unidentified materials – that lies within the institution’s extensive Archive. This publication is one of the outcomes of the project, alongside the exhibition at De Appel and the performative-event at the Stedelijk Museum, which took place in May 2019. It registers the group meetings, each of which was documented in various forms: photographs, audio recordings and minutes. Extracts of these materials have been selected and edited to be included in the book in order to reflect on the methodology used. Every step of the process has been woven into one continuous landscape: the participants’ first face to face encounter with the objects, their initial reactions, first thoughts and desires for this project, mind maps, collective discussions, group work and individual presentations, floorplans, notes and drawings.

Miguel John Versluys is Professor of Classical and Mediterranean Archaeology at the Faculty of Archaeology at Leiden University. He is PI of the NWO VICI project Innovating objects (2016-2021), in the framework of which his essay concerning Landscape with Bear was written. John Versluys is one of the founders of the Leiden Material Agency Forum, an interdisciplinary podium initiated in 2014 for the study of material agency at the intersection of the disciplines of Art History, Archaeology and Anthropology. Throughout his academic career, he has been interested in working with artists as a means to better understand material culture in the past and present.

Landscape with Bear arises from a collaborative process with the contribution of all participants:
Alisa Blakeney 
Aram Lee
Aude Christel Mgba
Bruno Alves de Almeida
Cookies (Antonio Barone, Alice Grégoire, Federico Martelli and Clément Périssé)
Dita Birkenšteina
Fanfare (Lotte Van de Hoef and Freja Kir)
Jan Hüskes
Miguel John Versluys
Nikolay Alutin 
Shen Xin 
Sofía Dourron 
Tamar Shafrir 

See also
(OA/AO with Jacob Dwyer)
(OA/AO with Andrew Norman Wilson)
(OA/AO with Robin Waart)