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.

More Vision Forum in Östergötland

Vision Forum have been invited by Boel Zetterman and Vinterpalatset to participate in this year's last event. Per Hüttner has selected work that reflects on social conventions and strategies for laying them bare. It includes mostly videos and drawings that find alternatives to unreflected anthropomorphism, misguided criticality and over simplified relationships to art's audience. Invited artists from the Vision Forum network: Yoshinori Niwa, Speech and What Archive, Yane Calovski, Annalisa Sonzogni, Rita Nettelstad, Li Xiaofei, Natasha Rosling, Per Hüttner, Karin Kihlberg and Reuben Henry.

The exhibition is open to the public December 13-15 at Vinterpalatset (Brårums skola), Valdermarksvik, Östergötland, Sweden. For directions click here.

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.