De kronieken van talent
2022. Wanneer heb je talent? Je kunt het bovendien pas hebben als het bestaat, maar dat valt niet te bewijzen. In de kunsten is talent een woord dat als poortwachter op de verdeling van middelen toeziet. Het is de kwalificatie die voortdurend vervliegt en precies om die reden voortdurend bevestigd moet worden. Wat is dat ‘talent’ toch waar we het over hebben en bestaat zoiets wel? In dit artikel analyseert en deconstrueert auteur Eef Veldkamp – tevens lichtelijk gefrustreerd kunstenaar – een zevental alledaagse gebruiken van talent. Lees verder op Mister Motley
HYPER SOUVENIRS
Hyper Souvenirs (2020-present) is an organisation that develops souvenirs, not for you casual Côte d'Azur-holidays, but for global events. Time is always ticking, and consciousness only stumbles after it, so we need objects that help us think what we tend to forget, or even want to forget. Souvenirs are small "tokens" that help us to think something bigger, for example that nice holiday at the Maldives, or even Grandma who couldn't go because she can't walk that well anymore. We then look back at a shell cast in epoxy resin, a photo of Berlin in a key chain, or send that Grandma a postcard in which we describe the environment. In short, we use objects as souvenirs to think bigger things, and to get 'to' them. These larger things, such as the climate, are what philosopher Timothy Morton calls "hyperobjects". These kinds of things are so large we cannot pinpoint them, while we also continuously experience them. We can 'think' these hyperobjects through what Morton calls "subscendence." If transcendence is the superlative of things, so that the scale becomes so large that we can no longer see it with our eyes, then subcendence is the "entrant" that makes hyperobjects smaller and more approachable. The ideal form for doing so is souvenirs. www.hypersouvenirs.com
CARRY IT WITH YOU
"Carry it With You" part of Hyper Souvenirs, 2020. is a series of keychains (ø30mm, PVC) based on virus diagrams. Cognitively we are very capable at remembering and even re-feeling positive memories. However, biologically we are similarly able to remember bad memories, but we can't re-flee them, allowing us to pursue life once more against all knowledge. However, this rushes us beyond what has passed even though much is to be learned from these experiences, such as COVID-19. Structures like souvenirs help us te recognise bad past experiences on a personal level. www.hypersouvenirs.com
HYPER SOUVENIRS
MAKE NATURE SCARY AGAIN
Make Nature Scary Again (2021) is a guided audio tour through nature for those who hate nature. Starting with an intriguing thought by Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek who notes that nature is not a balanced, well ordered, 'designed' totality but a series of unimaginable catastrophies the guide takes the tour-taker through a set of 16 abstract locations questioning these such as legacy, trash, essence of being and so forth. it can be freely borrowed up to 24 hours through www.hypersouvenirs.com. Read the preview copy here
HYPER SOUVENIRS
PROTEST SUPPLIES STORE
The Protest Supplies Store (PSS) is an artist-run organisation erected in 2017. The PSS develops subversive protest utilities and offers those - non-profit - in an online web shop, and on occasion in pop-up stores.
The store has a growing range of products which respond and correspond to different forms of protest, either as an alternative method to protest or as an supportive structure. the PSS's aim is to unlock new domains for protest; to emancipate the discourse into the contemporary - adapting to new issues and new ways of engagement in our politically complex contemporary world. The term 'protest' delineates one of the most important means of political engagement and stems from the linguistic expression of "witnessing, declaring publicly" and almost always takes place in the public space. "The public space is designed, organised and maintained by the government, and that government and its policy is precisely against which most protests are organised." (Eef Veldkamp) This makes the public domain important for protest, but at the same time problematic: it encapsulates protest within a realm completely designated by current-affairs politics. www.protestsuppliesstore.co.uk
PROTEST KLEURBOEK VOOR KINDEREN
"Protest Kleurboek voor Kinderen" part of Protest Supplies Store. 2021. Many of our beliefs and assumptions stem from how we come to know the world as children. From different stories we learn how we met, what is good and bad and sometimes even what our dreams can look like. Many well-known stories, such as Sleeping Beauty and Snow White also carry many encompassing stories: a prince waking a princess without asking permission, or the romanticization of colonialism in Pocahontas' story. Based on this thought, the Protest Supplies Store issued an open call to artists and asked them to draw a colouring images in which a well-known children's story is subverted by adapting the narrative that of the respective children's story. This resulted in a colouring book containing 19 colouring images that cover a wide range of contemporary issues, making those discussable for children between 8-13 years old. The aim is to offer a new narrative: that we can change the world and that the own development of the ideas of future generations is essential in this. www.protestsuppliesstore.co.uk
GEMEENTELIJKE WENSPUT HAARLEM
THE POLITICS OF NON-FLAMMABILITY
The Politics of Non-Flammability: from the perspective of a fire extinguisher questioning its own existence (2019) is a short narrated investigation spoken by a fire extinguisher questioning the condition of its own existence by looking at the political implications of its function. In its search, a context is drawn between two pre-Socratic philosophers. One, Parmenides of Elea, centralised ‘being’ and ‘non-being’, and the other, Heraclitus of Ephesus, criticised that ‘ice-cold’ ontology by introducing fire: the element of change. The fire extinguisher, a pawn of the Parmenidean order, argues that the politics of non-flammability has been build upon the notion of ‘choking fire’ and thus change itself, to prevent its own omni-present destruction which the fire extinguisher explains through the example of burning flags. Order the book through Bol.com here. Clip of the total film registration. 00:15:36 of 00:38:33.
CONNECTION LOST
Connection Lost is the common denominator for multiple project. First 2015's 'Connection Lost', an empty silent news studio in a barren environment. It alienates the studio from it's news and so draws attention to the aesthetic preconditions in which the news broadcast exists.
The second, an academic work called 'The Television News Studio as Starship' (2018), focusses on the decor from which reports on everyday life are broadcast which is anything but ordinary and yet it is often just assumed and presupposed. Being a room-in-a-room, the television news studio is completely shut off from outside ‘earthly’ elements. As the empty area between two sheets of glass that insulate both the space before and beyond. Within this insulate the studio has to simulate the outside elements in order to be tangible. Dozens of lights float just meters above the ceiling of the scannable – that which is seen on screen – flushing it with light and even with which it still remains too dark. The colour of that light, measured in temperature, made as close as possible to the colour of natural sunlight – ‘neutral’ white – and yet it is always reduced to the RGB spectrum. It is always just too warm or too cold. All those high-wattage lights, screens and electric appliances require climate-control air conditioning to prevent the studio from overheating – there are no real windows to open to vent the place. The objects one encounters in the news studio, made of the very same materials as any other object, have an otherworldliness to them for the reason the news studio is a space unlike any others. They surpass normal functionality; the news desk is not just a place to work behind. They are laminated with a malleability which transcends the constraints of materiality; and in that transcendence allows (or forces) the outside world to flow into it. Now if we relate this peculiarly curious-looking place to what it works with – “true ‘raw’ news” – we might indeed wonder what the aesthetic significations of this fully simulated area are on the news objects which flow through it? The news studio, after all, is completely made and controlled. Its aesthetics are technologies, but what are those meant to do?
FLOURISH
Flourish (2015) Metal, plastic and water. Flourish are eye washes placed at the entrance and exit of exhibitions so that visitors can wash their eyes before and/or after seeing art.
UNION FOR TRANSGRESSION
Union for Transgression (VvT) (2015-2017): Transgression is a philosophical theme that offers a counterforce to the 'life drive'. The life drive and its counterpart, according to Freud, both have a cultural constitution. The life drive strives to maintain (and reproduce) life in our cultural constitution. It not only makes us eat and reproduce, but it also makes us conform to that which has mandate and hegemony on the means to support our live: for example how we acquire food and when we can and cannot reproduce. The death drive on the other hand tries to 'transcend' the factors sustaining live - its actor is transgression. "Transgression enables man to transcend all that is ephemeral and contingent into its decline and thus brings us to bring about something beyond - a next step in the cycle of life". Within the cultural constitution of life, everything that tries to break with the systems and structures of life (such as the law, ethics or governmental politics) has to be seen as 'forbidden' - dangerous, destructive. "Transgression is thus the act towards the forbidden" at least when it is measured according to our society.
The Union for Transgression tries to reinstitute the position of transgression in our lives: for it is also the only power that allows us to step beyond the status quo and introduce something deviant such as radical different forms of living-together. As a union it supports transgressive ideas and practices that work towards to-be societies of radical difference. Through different public programs, such as walks, competitions and a magazine the Union dares people to think and act beyond everything that is familiar to them. www.vakbondvoortransgressie.org
