Event 1 / 16 Beaver Group / Workshop at the US Social Forum in Detroit, Michigan / June 24, 2010*

*click here to see 16 Beaver Group's
communication for the event

For the first event, AND AND AND has invited the New York-based 16 Beaver Group. For the AND AND AND series, 16 Beaver Group will be taking part in and organizing a discussion on June 24, 2010 at the US Social Forum (USSF) taking place in Detroit, Michigan. The event is intended to put into question the role of art in relation to the multitude of social movements and political struggles taking place today.

Time: Thursday June 24, 2010 - 1:00 - 5:00 pm
City: Detroit
Country: USA
Location: 42° 19' 38.6508" N, 83° 2' 53.5776" W
Address: 1 Washington Blvd, Cobo Hall, Room DO-02A

The event is free with USSF registration ($10)
http://www.16beavergroup.org | http://www.ussf2010.org/ | http://www.documenta.de/

http://www.documenta.de/

The disintegration of the Socialist countries and the Soviet Union produced massive transformations which are still underway. Candy colored revolutions interspersed with increasingly manufactured conflicts are the most extreme manifestations of the struggles and disagreements which remain an intrinsic part of those processes. In each of these countries, the attempts to re-articulate new histories and futures, often based on a national identity, have implicated culture as a central part of that battleground. Such projections also have implicated the changing of curriculums, changing conditions for the production / reception of artistic practices and sometimes the construction of new institutions for art.

Given the larger questions concerning these transformations, as well as the specific focus of this year's summer seminars, AND AND AND has proposed to organize a roundtable discussion at the Center for Contemporary Experimental Art (NPAK) in Yerevan. The discussion will involve artists and organizers within the Armenian context, who have attempted over the last few decades to construct institutions for contemporary artistic practice, ranging from contemporary art centers to schools, biennials, or less formal associations. The questions will hover around the role that such institutions play or are attempting to play within these larger transformations and struggles.

Where is the place of contemporary art today? What can an art school or a contemporary art center best do in a place such as Yerevan, Armenia - given its histories, the specific concerns and struggles present today, as well as its shared place in regional and global processes?

Time: Tuesday August 17, 2010 - 6:00 - 8:00 pm
City: Yerevan
Country: Armenia
Location: 40° 10' 32.1600" N, 44° 31' 4.4400"E
Address: Armenian Center for Contemporary Experimental Art, 1/3 Pavstos Biuzand Blvd.

http://www.naac.am | http://www.aica.am | http://www.accea.info | http://www.documenta.de

*click here to see the statement by TTGG & Pedro Lasch announcing their collaboration

Time: September 11, 2010.
City: New Orleans, Liverpool, Kabul, Budapest, others to be announced.
Country: U.S.A., U.K., Afghanistan, Hungary, others to be announced.
Address: See specific city or town

http://www.twintowersgoglobal.org | http://www.documenta.de

http://ruinsofourtimes.wordpress.com | http://www.documenta.de

Lu Cafausu is a mysterious small building, an architectural remnant that the artists have elected as a source of metaphors and narratives. It is “an imaginary place that really exists” around which the presence of death is floating. Any day, the small building can in fact be demolished to accommodate more parking space for cars, or can also fall apart due to its precariousness. It could also be turned and frozen into a monument. Because of this feeling of the presence of death, Lu Cafausu is an ideal place for a new celebration. “La Festa dei Vivi” is for those who, in order to give sense to life, reflect upon death; their own, "first and foremost."

Time: Tuesday November 2, 2010 - 10 am
City: San Cesario di Lecce
Country: Italy
Location: 40°18'1"N 18°9'43"E
Address: via C.F. Barbieri, 52

http://lucafausu.tk | http://www.documenta.de

The invitation which was distributed to local activists and individuals involved in the cultural sphere read:

Over the last two decades the number of large scale international art exhibitions have increased four-fold. With this steady proliferation, the form itself has attracted critical interest as well as scrutiny. Short of opening up an academic department devoted to such inquiries in art schools or schools of economics, there is a growing interest in understanding how these large scale exhibitions connect to, disturb, channel, soften or crystallize conflicts within various social, political, and economic processes. What is the function of large scale art events? What (if anything) can be done with them? Can a reflection on these events and exhibitions serve as the doorway for entering and exploring some of the double binds and impasses of artistic production today? Can such a discussion open up a space for considering art's relation to broader economic, ecological, social, and political challenges? We would like to propose to use the city of Istanbul, with its multiplicity of historical and contemporary tensions, and two overlapping colloquia, one on 'Art and Desire' and the second 'Remembering Istanbul: A Conference on the history of the Istanbul Biennial,' as the context for such a conversation. This event will be an effort at a more distributed and horizontal public conversation. Although efforts will be made to invite specific individuals, there will be no keynote speakers.

Time: Tuesday November 25, 2010 - 6:30 pm
City: Istanbul
Country: Turkey
Location: 41°1'54.79"N 28°58'46.23"E
Address: Hayriye Caddesi 12, Galatasaray, Beyoglu

http://resistanbul.wordpress.com/ | http://direnistanbul.wordpress.com/ | http://www.documenta.de

The event is inspired by discussions on Avenue Habib Bourguiba after the January 14th Revolution, in which citizens discuss and debate in informal circles, spontaneously, their political positions, their ideals, and their ideas concerning the reorganization of life in this moment in Tunisia. It has been asked, can there be a revolutionary art without revolutionary times? Oumayma Khaled would like to reverse this question and ask the discussants, can one undergo a revolutionary process without that process also impacting the art that is being produced? Amidst the historic changes impacting North Africa, the Mediterranean and Middle East Regions, one wonders how a political redistribution of sensibilities and modes of doing impacts those who work within the realm of art. What kinds of concerns, subjects, works emerge or are called for in this revolutionary moment? On May 24, 2011, at the artist initiated independent cultural space Aykart, a group of individuals will meet to begin addressing these questions. All those who are interested are encouraged to attend.

Date: May 24, 2011, 5 pm
City: Tunis
Country: Tunisia
Location: +36° 48' 48.72", +10° 10' 4.72"
Address:Aykart: 1 Rue Mikhail Noaima El Omrane (Bab el Asal) 1005 Tunis

http://www.aykart.com/ | http://www.documenta.de

Event 9 /
Twin Towers Go Global & Pedro Lasch /
Second Anniversary Report: The Open Call / September 11, 2011*

*click here to see the full report by Pedro Lasch and the results of the TTGG competition

For the AND AND AND series, Lasch is creating three special 9/11 anniversary reports (2010, 2011, 2012), all of them related to the Twin Towers Go Global (TTGG) initiative. This Second Report focuses on the TTGG's recent “Open Call”, a competition where people were invited to imagine the Twin Towers rebuilt around the world. Almost sixty proposals were submitted between July 31 and September 2, 2011. Five winners were selected by a specialized jury, and another five through an international public vote. The ten finalists were initially announced at the opening reception of Lasch's Phantom Limbs exhibition in New York (September 7 – October 9, 2011), and they are now shared through this international public announcement: 1. Roman Reyna for Dallas, 2. Margaret Donovan, 3. Kyong Park, 4. Mirwais Hotak, 5. Gareth Roberts, 6. Bosch Fawstin, 7. Joyce Green, 8. Joe Compean, 9. Al-Ahram Weekly's 'Ossama', 10. Silvia Maglioni & Graeme Thomson. All of these proposals are featured in detail in the report.

Find the full report by Lasch and the results of the TTGG competition by clicking here.

Date: September 11, 2011
City: New York, New Orleans, Paris, Liverpool, Baghdad, Budapest, among many others.
Country: U.S.A., U.K., Hungary, Iraq, among many others.
Address:Anywhere

http://www.twintowersgoglobal.org | http://www.documenta.de

Event 10 /
Solidarity with Occupy Wall Street / New York / Occupation began September 17, 2011 – ongoing *

*click here to read the statement to OWS General Assembly and Affinity Groups

They initiated a workshop designed to arrive at creative solutions to theft, following incidents that had recently increased in the area. Their project was originally developed for raising questions of power and agency within different social settings by applying the resources of their respective creative practices — dance, visual art, teaching, community organizing and activism. In this case, they set out to lead a workshop that draws upon concepts and strategies of the global anti-prison movement, which questions prisons and policing as reasonable methods for dealing with harm and violence.

As with all of the AND AND AND events,' the communication' of the work is not separate from the realized action; it is, part of it. Please click here to read the full text.

Date: June 27 – 30, 2011
City: Houston
Country: USA
Location: 29° 43' 54.52" N, 95° 21' 53.19" W
Address: Project Row Houses, 2521 Holman St

Argentina before 2001 was a laboratory of neoliberal capitalism, an early example of the barbarism which was produced by adjustments, spending cuts and privatizations. The country plunged into a dark burrow as a result of its submission to the decisions of international lending organizations and the pressure of the markets (with the complicity of local agents). The Argentine experiment exemplified what “a country must not do” as its people suffered (and are still suffering) the consequences of these policies. Today, 10 years later, the country is re-introduced into the world as “an example of how a country can get out of the crisis.” As a big paradox of this mirror effect, all those measures which are applied right now in the entire world are exactly the same measures Argentina took immediately before the social economic crash.

The CRISIS & REPRESENTATION experiment plays a social readymade in a contextual displacement: it happens around the gardens and buildings which surround the public park Parque Centenario. The biggest assembly of all the neighborhoods (asamblea interbarrial) took place in this park in 2001. Today, the park is full of fences, and on the site where the assembly took place, there is a mix of flea market / popular fair and young cultural underground spaces (for cooking, drinking, playing music, etc.). The “party” of consumerism and precarious commerce continues as a mirror space of crisis and recovery. Taking “mirror” as a metaphorical and conceptual key, the whole project is organized and developed according to physical optical phenomena: the refraction, reflection and interferences as analogies of social processes to build up collective memory and identity.

The project will be launched as a mediumship experience in recent memory, invoking those rebel spirits from the former assembly (now converted into a flea market). It then continues, between dinosaurs around the galleries of the Natural Science Museum celebrating the fall of the Tyrannosaurus, with an anthropophagic picnic-talk, searching communal interpretations of the transformations in the discourses and narratives. Then back again in the park gardens, in a little soccer field, an improvised football match-debate: the militant sport game where “everyone plays in the same team.” The walk finishes at sunset with a stellar performance, in the telescope of the Astronomical Observatory, which allows the enjoyment of both faces of the Moon (and Jupiter) looking up to the new constellation which grows from the oldest cosmogonies of the marxian re-evolution. To read the pdf, please click here.

Date: December 19 and 20, 2011
City: Buenos Aires
Country: Argentina
Location: 34º 36' 24''S 58º 26' 9'' O
Address: Parque Centenario

dOCUMENTA (13) is not responsible for the views or factual claims expressed by the artists and artworks it presents.

** “Since the social crisis of December 19 and 20, 2001, all the parks and other public spaces in Buenos Aires began to be enclosed with fences and security cameras. The guards blow their whistles to control and kick people out of the parks. The action consisted in distributing hundreds of whistles among the people, blowing them at the same time as the security guards and thus creating an urban sound intervention against repression and for the free use of public spaces.” (Frederico Zukerfeld and Loreto Garin Guzmán)

http://crisisrepresentacion.wordpress.com | http://www.documenta.de

The group writes:

“Our focus is on Monsanto’s role in transforming and damaging the ecologies, economies, and social relations of this region. Proceedings will unfold in several stages, and as the deliberation process builds, it will add to the accumulating record of harms perpetrated by this corporation against human and non-human bodies, food, biological processes, weeds, neighborhoods, farmers, alternative forms of knowledge, and finally the environment from which all these entities emerge.

Through this project, we challenge rigid categories of legal protection, and seek an ethics that protects life itself from coercion. We invoke the form of a trial to produce a comprehensive public understanding of harms, and to determine responsibility for those harms. Existing judiciary frameworks are inadequate to the scale and nature of the ongoing damages perpetrated by Monsanto, which, under current law, is granted the rights of a legitimate “person,” while human non-citizens and non-human agents in our biosphere are not recognized. Existing law produces exclusive notions of legitimacy and harm that ignore and damage entities that do not favor a reductive calculus of profit.

Our proposition is to consider all living things as potential plaintiffs in an accounting of Monsanto’s crimes. We submit to public review impacts that are experienced materially and culturally, in the past, the present and extending into our shared future. By expanding notions of legal standing and of legitimate harm, we assert our interdependence. The urgent question is: what will it take to safeguard the interlocked nature of the world against criminally reckless corporate priority?"

The first hearing will take place at:

Date: Saturday, January 28, 2012, 11 am
City: Carbondale IL; Chicago IL; Iowa City IA; others TBA
Country: USA
Location: 37° 43′ 35.11″ N, 89° 13′ 12.97″ W
Address: Lesar Law Building Courtroom, Carbondale