Thank you and good luck, Speech and What Archive

One of Vision Forum’s original nodes, Speech and What Archive (SWA) is parting from us. After almost 5 years of mutual exchanges, discussions and other joyful meetings the group is leaving our network. We are eternally grateful for everything that we have learned together and that SWA has contributed. We remember many joyful moments to from the early experiments on the CNEAI boat to the latest performance at Arbis in Norrköping.

The group has worked around notions about what we can and cannot say, and by doing this questions the group as a collective decision-making body. An example is the Speech and What Archive Paper Room which is the paper trace and trail from various organized workshops worldwide and has become the support for conversations and micro events. It is not only a work but a material space for research defined without apparent hierarchies.It becomes the structure for new interventions and is constituted as a living archive which interacts with additional elements as the work progresses. The space is thus re-played or replaced as new materials are added to those already there. At the heart of it, we question modes of the appearance and dissemination of knowledge and transmission, the original, the re-make and re-see and re-interpret.

Vision Forum Autumn Meeting 2013

Vision Forum welcomes you to our annual Vision Forum Autumn meeting. This year, we will focus on experimental artistic interventions in the urban space. We are particularly happy that the program will coincide with a performance weekend in Norrköping at many institutions in and around the city which will include performances by Vision Forum members Les Vraoums, Grossi Maglioni and this year’s Norrköping Air residents Natasha Rosling, Johanna Adebäck and Anna Hess. The meeting will take place October 24th - 26th. Please find the program below. Most events are free of charge and open to the public (unless indicated otherwise).
 

October 24

8.45 - 16.00
Visit to Söderköping with Mattias Åkesson with contributions by Natasha Rosling and Johanna Adebäck, Lars Jonsson and city architect, Per Haupt. We will meet at 8.45 at Skvallertorget, Norrköping and return to Norrköping by 16.00. (Booking is required! Contact Mattias Åkesson: mattias.akesson (at) liu.se to join.) 

Acting the City

Vision Forum member and curator Susanne Ewerlöf is creating many projects withing the project Acting the City, the project looks at contemporary art practice in the city and draws inspiration from many of our previous projects (e.g. The Invisible Generation and Think Again) The project also includes work by and Norrköping Air residents Natasha Rosling, Johanna Adebäck and Anna Hess. Here are a few words from the official website.

"Today, Norrköping is one of the few Swedish cities that still has unused, hidden spaces within its downtown. Similar to many other Swedishcities, there are remnants of days gone by, historical reminders of visionary ideas, like the Swedish vision of Folkhemmet, to industrialareas, each lacking modern interpretation. Who’s in charge of our urban space and who shapes our city? Acting in the City is based on an idea of the city being a theatrical scene, where its citizens are actors and creators. Streets and squares are venues for events and meetings; actions or interactions are viewed as a role play. Group affiliation or disassociation is demonstrated by various attributes. Our choices, both conscious and unconscious ones, reflect our group belonging based on cultural background, class and gender, each being significant. Participating artists in Acting in the City each have their own unique background. They focus on questions of space and human behavior. The exhibition relates specific local occurences to those of other cities from around the world."

More info here.

Vision Forum Launches Swedish Residency Program

Vision Forum is proud to announce the launch of its residency program in Sweden - Norrköping Air. It is a two year experimental project in collaboration Verkstad and Linköpings universitet. The program will run summer 2013 and summer 2014 and is supported by with IASPIS, Norrköpings kommun and Östsam. This year's artists in residence are: Anna Hess, Natasha Rosling and Johanna Adebäck.

You can read more about it here or contact the program's director Aldis Ellertsdottir (aldis.ellertsdottir (at) gmail.com).

Speech and What Archive Part Two is Out

The second newspaper that documents Speech and What Archive's  activities is out now. The collage of texts and images starts like this:

"How can we make an account of what we-already- know and what we have-already-said? We look for, as Frances Ferguson says, ‘the aesthetic appreciation of what was never made to be appreciated’. As we mentioned in the first Speech and What Archive newspaper, Ferguson makes a distinction between affect (the production of further responses and consequences) and effect (the manifestation of the visible consequences of what one has already done). Even though we are in daily occurrences with things, and acts and processes that we name quotidian, when we see them in the context of speech, or perhaps more so, public discourse, we can be shocked or more deeply offended to see what we are already well acquainted with! What is embedded in language ‘speaks us’, yet it can be difficult to say again what was just said one moment before.

So in October 2011 the SWA group met together for one whole day in Paris to write down (together) what we had already thought and said. We gathered not to create something, not even transform, but to bring speech back. How did we do it?"

Find more info here.