Below you can find the schedule of the Disobedient Art School Gathering taking place 17 and 18 December at Casco Art Institute; please notice there are two parallel sessions.
Saturday, 17 December
10.00 – 10.30 Walk-in
10.30 – 11.00 Welcome in plenary
11.00 – 13.00 Book bending with Nuraini Juliastuti
The workshop is dedicated to those who want to explore the complex dimensions of access and politics of knowledge. The workshop will be divided into two sessions.
In the first session, using the morality discourse around copyright and piracy as a starting point, we will be invited to engage in a conversation around piracy, illegality, and illicit but licit. The discussion will be directed to reflect on the meanings of the wealth of knowledge (or the illusion of wealth), rare, difficult reading materials.
In the second session, we will be invited to think about how to access a certain knowledge material differently, while thinking and reading about the impossibilities and possibilities of writing and giving spaces for other voices. The second session focuses on the employment of various tactile strategies to obtain knowledge: copying, translating, rewriting, scanning. The session will conclude with manually binding all the materials in the format of a book.
11.00 – 13.00 Speculating Other Worlds: a visionary fiction workshop with Ying Que. The Capitalist Patriarchal Colonial (CPC) world we live in today dictates the stories under which our life has been structured. It is our task as artists and activists to imagine and prefigure alternative worlds. Some are here already now, some were here long ago, and others have yet to come into being. This workshop draws from critical fabulation and speculative and visionary fiction as tools for social change and societal transformation. After an introductory presentation, you will be guided to draw from your own experience and engage in telling stories about other worlds in which dominant power dynamics and patterns are challenged. What worlds can we dream up together that reflect and transform the world we live in? What stories can move us beyond this CPC life in ruins, heal our wounds, and inspire us to action in our everyday lives?
13.00 – 14.30 Lunch
14.30 – 15.00 In-between session
15.00 – 18.00 Cooking through the len(til)s-lens: perspectives on food sovereignty with La Cocina (Lore Gablier – Alejandro Ramírez).
The lentil, the humble legume, is said to have inspired early astronomers to call their convex disk-shaped optical glass a lens. In homage to this playful etymology, La Cocina proposes to use lentils as a discursive, speculative and practical lens to explore what food sovereignty might mean in relation to how we feed ourselves. One of the oldest crops ever cultivated, the lentil is known for its resilience and culinary versatility, but also for its botanical properties, in particular its ability to fix atmospheric nitrogen, thus restoring the fertility of soils. Paradoxically, nitrogen-rich soils are also at the centre of the storm in the Netherlands today. During the workshop, we will alternate cooking and tasting sessions, as well as group discussions inspired by a selection of materials compiled for this occasion, including stories, maps and excerpts from a filmed interview with Jan Dorr, who is currently working for the province of North Holland on the nitrogen crisis. Join us for a journey into the myriad flavours of Aoi mame, Dahl, Linsen, Masura pappu, Chirisanagalu, Lenticchia, Lenteja, Pothundhambala, lentille or Lens culinaris.
15.00 – 18.00 Body-Territory: sensing and affirming the continuum between bodies and territories with Teresa Borasino and David Limaverde
We will turn to the concept of Cuerpo-Territorio (Body-Territory) emerging in Abya Yala, to explore the indivisibility between bodies and territories through somatic and imagination exercises. Cuerpo-Territory is a thinking / feeling tool put forward in Abya Yala by communitarian feminists Lorena Cabnal , Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, among others. This tool offers us a portal to understand the continuum between bodies and territories, as keepers of memories, wisdom and resilience as well as fields of oppression and resistance.
18.00 – 18.45 Closing
Sunday, 18 December
10.00 – 10.30 Walk-in
10.30 – 11.00 Welcome in plenary
11.00 – 13.00 Disobedient Street Performance workshop (Part 1) with Starlings: Mitchy Mallorca Saturay, Betina Abi Habib and Gizem Üstüner
Starlings are migratory birds that met in an activist kitchen 3 years ago. They served guests for five months, meaning to cook up a revolution. In 2019, they began to work with puppets and street theatre performances, to mark International Migrants Day on December 18. Since then, they are exploring different creative forms to address migrant stories while being on the streets together several times a year.
This December 18, Starlings invites you to join their 4th performance for International Migrants Day, to discuss together how to be disobedient in the streets and narrate our struggles by using the power of puppetry. The workshop does not require any professional skills, yet welcomes all amateur enthusiasts.
11.00 – 13.00 Without words: a journey through sound, memories and sensation with Dizzi Geetha
Without words we can understand each other through music, it is a language we all speak. Music is energy, the vibration says it all; “thinking” is not necessary for a while, it’s about feeling!
This society makes us stuck in our minds forcing certain structures and rules on us. During this workshop, we will let go of these frames as much as possible and connect to our body and senses. It’s a way to feel where there are blockages that are linked to memories. We will translate these memories into sound. It’s not about making music that is beautiful, there is no right or wrong. We will go inside for a while and our ego can stay outside!
13.00 – 14.00 Lunch
14.00 – 14.30 In-between session
14.30 – 17.30 Disobedient Street Performance workshop (Part 2) with Starlings: Mitchy Mallorca Saturay, Betina Abi Habib and Gizem Üstüner
“A City Without Walls” is the slogan of Utrecht’s 900 year anniversary.
In reality, there are many walls, visible or not. What are the walls we, migrants, are facing in our lives? How do we break, resist, overcome, climb through these walls? How do we want to move if we did not have any? In this workshop we will recognize these walls and explore how we resist them in voice, movement and crafts.
14.30 – 17.30 Travelling between worlds: a somatic workshop to reclaim our capacity to imagine and recall memories with Pau(la) Chaves Bonilla
Inspired by the migrant experience of feeling out of place, disoriented or dislocated, this workshop attempts at perceiving these so called ‘disadvantages’ as liminal practices that can expand and bring new insights into how we experience reality.
We will unpack and celebrate how lineages of BIPOC fugitivity have used imagination as a tool for resistance and liberation. This will be a time to research these notions from an embodied experience, allowing the rational mind to get some rest and tune into sensorial and intuitive modes of perception. I will be sharing some embodied/performance practices with the intention to unwind and release shame stuck in ourselves and tune-in with our capacity for divination, intuition, gut feeling, inspiration, imagination, magic and manifestation.
17.30 – 19.00 Closing with a street performance for International Migrants Day
19.00 – 20.00 Soup for the ones who want to hang out