A day in the life of Thomas – Notes of the becoming exhibition

As part of their long-term collaboration with the Stedelijk Museum Public Program the Curatorial Programme of de Appel arts centre presents an afternoon with performances, film screenings and debates in conjunction with the exhibition Spell to Spelling ** Spelling to Spell (part of the Curatorial Programme Final Project). The program, A day in the life of Thomas – Notes of the becoming exhibition, will reflect on one day of the crystallographer Mr. Thomas where he has a chance to look into the process of the making of the exhibition Spell to Spelling ** Spelling to Spell. Guest-speakers and artists are: David Bernstein (US), Francisco Camacho (CO), Joanna Ebenstein (US), Alberto De Michele (IT), Laurens de Rooy (NL), Christian Fogarolli (IT), Ola Lanko (UA), Martin La Roche (CL), Robertas Narkus (LT).

Language: English
Admission: museum entrance price + € 2,50
Reservations: Necessary, via reservations [​at​] stedelijk.nl
Tickets: Limited tickets at the door, book your fast-line ticket via the Stedelijk website

The programme presents the meeting of Thomas with artists, space gardeners, butchers and curators involved in different ways in the process of creating the show. It aims to bring light to the backstage of the exhibition Spell to Spelling ** Spelling to Spell. Shaped in the form of a travelogue, with the found notes written by Thomas, the afternoon allows the public to travel through the program as if it’s a journey over land: reaching different coasts, landing in some, and quickly leaving others because of heavy storms. Islands lacking resources become a place for contemplation, as a research for the starving itself. Different forces such as the wind and the sun are naturally part of the crew, as well as the parrot lying on the right shoulder of the grumpy captain. But what if suddenly there would be no place to land and the journey itself would become the desirable moment?

The program is not a presentation of the exhibition which opens at de Appel arts centre on May 22. Background and metamorphosis are placed in foreground of the event. What happens before the exhibition is usually invisible to all, but not to Thomas: most of the turning points, searches, contradictions and findings are witnessed by him.

PARTICIPANTS

David Bernstein (1988, San Antonio, Texas) performs, writes, and makes objects. He explores thinging (a reciprocal process of thinking, making things, thinking through things, and using things as lenses to look at other things). He often works in collaboration with Jurgis Paškevičius and Géraldine Geffriaud as the collaborative pun jugedamos. Bernstein writes stories, poems, and press releases. Sometimes his writings and objects meet, they sit in the living room and talk to one another, finding a cozy way to tell a good story.

Francisco Camacho (CO) (born in 1979 in Bogota, Colombia, lives and works in Amsterdam, the Netherlands) seeks ways in which his work can exist within official social channels. His projects have been the result of long investigations and collaborations with the local context, inhabitants and lawyers to allow his discourse to be examined by other structures of society. In New Mexico, Francisco Camacho investigated the reasons why the inhabitants of a village decided to change its name Truth or Consequences in the 50’s; with Group Marriage, an on-going project as part of the Amsterdam Spinoza Manifestation (2009), he petitions the Dutch parliament to open civil marriage to groups of citizens who would marry each other.

Joanna Ebenstein (US) is a New York based artist, event producer, curator and independent scholar. She is the creative director of the new Morbid Anatomy Museum in Brooklyn, and founder of the Morbid Anatomy Blog and Library. She is co-author of Walter Potter’s Curious World of Taxidermy, with Dr. Pat Morris; co-editor of The Morbid Anatomy Anthology; and contributor to Medical Museums: Past, Present, Future (edited by Samuel J M M Alberti and Elizabeth Hallam, 2013) She acted as curatorial consultant on the Wellcome Collection’s “Exquisite Bodies” exhibition (2009) and has also worked with such institutions as The Wellcome Collection, The New York Academy of Medicine, The Dittrick Museum and The Vrolik Museum. Her photography and writing have been exhibited and published internationally, and she lectures regularly at a variety of popular and academic venues.

Alberto De Michele (IT). I was born and raised in a town not far from Venice till the age of ten, when my parents separated and I accompanied my mother to the Netherlands, where she was originally from. During school holidays I went back to Italy, where I was introduced to the world of my father, who surrounded himself with gambling addicts and criminals. At first this environment became a playground to me and eventually a real-life movie I could step in and out of. Every subject asks for a different approach and I always try to find an appropriate form for the artwork that corresponds to the logic of the subject and what I want to tell about it. That may lead to an installation one time and to a film, a book, a sculpture or a photo the next.

Laurens de Rooy (NL) is curator of Museum Vrolik, the anatomical Museum of the Academic Medical Center in Amsterdam (since 2008). As a medical historian he is specialized in the history of anatomical collections from the 19th and early 20th century. He studied biology with a specialization in the history of science and museology. In 2009 he received his PhD in the history of medicine. Together with photographer Hans van den Bogaard het published the book Forces of Form, about the collections of Museum Vrolik. He teaches the history of medicine to medical students. In 2012 he organized and arranged the new permanent exhibition of Museum Vrolik.

Christian Fogarolli (IT) is an Italian artist born in 1983. His research is characterized by a strong interest in the nature of identity, particularly investigated through different perspectives, such as the archival research. He works with different media, such as environmental installations, photography, sculpture, video. The work shows connections with theories and scientific disciplines, that often and unconsciously, have used the art to progress and become science. He showed his research into exhibitions as dOCUMENTA(13) with the exclusive presentation of the project Lost Identities in the Worldly House Archive (2012); 54 Biennial of Venice (2011); Artissima at Lingotto of Torino (2013); Civic Gallery, Trento (2014); Le Mur at La Maison Rouge in Paris (2014).

Ola Lanko (UA) studied sociology at the National University in Kiev and photography at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague and the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. She took her degree in 2012 from the photography department at the Rietveld Academy. For her final project, Ola received the Steenbergen Grant, an annual award for graduating photography students. Since 2010, she has shown at exhibitions and been working on her own projects. Ola uses a systematic and analytical way of thinking together with a playful visual language as her method to work with photography and explore it as a medium. Ola believes that to get the most out of the visual information surrounding us, one must develop a qualitative approach for the process of vision, take a critical stance towards images and be conscious of the place occupied by photography in our life.

Martin La Roche (CL) studied Visual Arts at the University of Chile. He has been part of the Santa Victoria’s Studio and assisted for many years at the Huara Huara ceramic studio where he tried to learn the pottery wheel’s craft. His work explores the possibility of doing research in non-directional time. His multidisciplinary projects take the form of installations, books, the reinterpretation of a 13th century Japanese manual for building gardens, drawings, clouds videos, numeric palindromes (like 957837227338759), collections of objects, etc. At this time he is working within the framework of the White Elephant Bibliotheke, a collaborative network at the Jan Van Eyck Academie (Maastricht, The Netherlands) that aims to build a library based on book research and co-writing.

Robertas Narkus (LT) describes his practice as the “management of chance in an economy of circumstance”. He brings together the ordinary and the absurd to explore notions of uncertainty, chance and symbolic capital through unexpected collaborations. Narkus is pursuing a MFA degree at the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam and he is the founder of the Institute of Pataphysics in Vilnius.

CREDITS

This Public Program is co-curated by Chiara Ianeselli, Inga Lace and Rani Lavie who are participants of the Curatorial Programme 2014-15.
The Curatorial Programme is a 10-month long training programme for young, international curators, which has been organized by de Appel arts centre since 1994. This year, the final project of the Curatorial Programme consists of two exhibitions: Spell to Spelling ** Spelling to Spell and Your Time Is Not My Time, on view from 23 May until 28 June, 2015.

The exhibition Spell to Spelling ** Spelling to Spell and the event are organized in close collaboration with the Vrolik Museum and the Amsterdam Weekend of Anatomy.

The curators would like to extend a special thank you to all the artists participating, Britte Sloothaak on behalf of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Laurens de Rooy, the Vrolik Museum, Joanna Ebenstein, Anke Bangma, Ingeborg Eggink, and the Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen, Leiden.