LIVE MUSIC! The Big Road Blues Band presents and plays songs by Joe Hill /
Joel Emanuel Hägglund at 16 Beaver group
Get a Grip! – Two-part interactive reportage and book release
02.14.12 6-9 pm & 02.18.12 5.30-8.30 pm
Contents:
1. Introduction
2. Feb 14 – The Psychologist, the Psychoanalyst, the Psychiatrist, the
Interpreter/Guide, the Architect, the Urbanist, the Curator, the
Coordinator, Joe Hill, the Rebel Girl and the Artists.
3. Feb 18 a strategic meeting dressed up as a pot-luck.
4. Suggested reading / extract from the book
”agorafobi/agorafobia/agoraphobia”
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The book is donated to OWS library
1. Introduction
What: A two-day interactive reportage and book release: An interview as
presentation, a dialog between participants, ongoing discussion, a Joe
Hill sing-a-long with The Big Road Blues Band, a strategic meeting dressed
up as a pot-luck dinner and a reading in three different languages.
Where: 16 Beaver Street, 4th Floor
When: Tuesday 14 February 6-9 pm and Saturday 18 February 5.30 8.30 pm
Who: Free and open to all
Get a grip! – a book release and two-day interactive reportage from inner
landscapes and cityscapes that exceed our ability to grasp the big
picture.
This is a two-parter, with the second night responding in some ways to the
first, so the hope is that people could be able to come to both sessions
(but of course anyone is welcome to either meeting, so dont worry). In
the simplest terms, two artists (ackg) conducted research and interviews
that then became a book, then invited two other artists to facilitate a
workshop as collaborative method of presenting this book.
The second set of artists, who once worked as Malmoe Free University for Women
they return together but no longer as the same institution formulated some
plans and responses based on their prior experiences participating in
events at Beaver and organizing a day-long workshop here in 2009 (We Won!
A Feminist Utopia–we hope we are still winning). So both evenings
promise to be a structured experiment in using this text as a starting
place to report from and then initiate further group dialogue and
questioning, more of a book becoming in the time and space of these
meetings than a normal book launch.
The intersecting trajectories of inquiry between ongoing conversations at
Beaver and in ackgs research is obvious; we appreciate their extensive
project exploring the economization of culture and social relations.
Questioning the relationship between neoliberalism, the built environment,
spatial practices, the demise of social democracy, professionalization,
etc. is, in part, an effort to explore the sameness and dissonance between
geographic, cultural, and disciplinary contexts in their specificity. We
are happy that a similar attention to specificity brings to us in New York
an intense situation of sharing, singing, and strategizing over two
meetings.
These meetings are organized and facilitated by four Swedish artists from
two different generations: Anna Kindgren and Carina Gunnars (akcg), and
Lisa Nyberg and Johanna Gustavsson.
Feb 18th workshop
We invited Rachel Schragis who is a 25-year-old New York City-based artist, educator and activist who created a flow-chart visualization of the Declaration of the OWS to come and talk about how the flow-chart is beeing used
They take as a starting point akcgs trilingual book-as-art-project in Swedish,
Brazilian Portuguese and English, “agorafobi/agorafobia/agoraphobia”. In
their book, akcg use a series of interviews–with a psychologist, a psychoanalyst,
a psychiatrist an interpreter/guide, a coordinator, an architect, an urbanist and
two curators to trace how an emphasis on economics over other fields has
changed who we are on a deeper level. The book is a journey through an
inner landscape and a cityscape that has gone beyond the horizon of our
ability to grasp the big picture. In a world that is called global, with
an endless stream of so-called information, many of us feel that we have
lost the ground on which we stand. The financial quake is cracking up both
souls and bonds. The book is an attempt to get a grip again by asking
people questions, listening to their answers and to find new alliances and
connections over the seas and up the mountains; Sweden, Chile, Norway,
Brazil.
For this situation, ackg asked artists Johanna Gustavsson and Lisa Nyberg
to respond to the book. Gustavsson and Nyberg ran the collaborative
pedagogical project Malmö Free University for Women between 2006-2011
and are now working on the subject of radical pedagogy.
anna kindgren and carina gunnars have collaborated in various
constellations for many years. Between 20002006 in the project love and
devotion with artists Ingrid Eriksson and Karin Johnson and since 2006 in
a duo as akcg. They are investigating how inner and outer landcapes and
structures correspond.
http://radikalpedagogik.blogspot.com/p/in-english.html
Made possible with the support of IASPIS.
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2. Feb 14, 6-9 pm, – The Psychologist, the Psychoanalyst, the
Psychiatrist, the Interpreter/Guide, the Coordinator, the Architect, the
Urbanist, the Curators, Joe Hill, the Rebel Girl and the Artists.
A short welcome and introduction by the four artist-initiators.
akcg about the book, why it was written and how they as artists have taken
an interest in the power of words. How they resisted television and faced
the dismantling of the welfare state. Looking back is not always
nostalgia. Here Joe Hill plays an important role.
A dialog between Gustavsson & Nyberg and akcg(anna kindgren och carina
gunnars), starting around some key terms in the book: ambivalence and
confusion. From dialog to discussion.
We will collect questions and statements to use as the base for next meeting.
LIVE MUSIC! The Big Road Blues Band presents and plays songs by Joe Hill.
3. Feb 18, 5.30-8.30 pm A strategic meeting dressed up as a pot-luck
dinner. Talk, listen, cry and laugh at the same time!
Pot-luck dinner, please bring food to share.
Invited guests read sections of the book in three languages.
Discussion, dissecting the questions, singing and eating.
4. Suggested reading / extract from the book
“agorafobi/agorafobia/agoraphobia”
The Psychologist
Excerpt from the book agorafobi/agorafobia/agoraphobia p 209 224, by
akcg(anna kindgren and carina gunnars), 2011, Grus förlag
For formatting reasons this text is best read as a pdf:
http://db.tt/cUeCHSjA
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16 Beaver Group
16 Beaver Street, 4th fl.
New York, NY 10004
for directions/subscriptions/info visit:
http://www.16beavergroup.org
TRAINS:
4,5 — Bowling Green
2,3 — Wall Street
J,Z – Broad Street
R — Whitehall
1 — South Ferry