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Jelica Jovanovic < Back Disappeared – appeared: selo – BOR – grad village – BOR – city Jelica Jovanovic Previous Next

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Tīna Pētersone < Back Present Perfect Continuous Tīna Pētersone Imagine you are an actor in some theatre play. You sit somewhere in the foreground of the stage, totally absorbed by the character you ’ re playing. Then, driven by some arbitrary impulse, you give a cursory glance around and realise that all set decoration has disappeared; even worse — you suddenly have found yourself in a completely different play. That ’ s how I feel about my recent weeks, trying to find a new orientation in time and space. On some sunny March morning I was running across a local park in South East London, not having the slightest idea that just twelve hours later I will run through it once again, though, by force, not a choice to leave everything — my flat, my friends, the life I have built there — to catch the last minute flight back home. Borders were shut the day after, and many of my friends were trapped where they are without a chance to leave. I got lucky. Since the day I arrived back home, I haven ’ t been outdoors for 762 hours and 53 minutes. Hours quickly turn into days, coalesce into weeks and surely will stretch into months. As the days go by and I’m still trying to adapt to the new reality, I cannot help but think about lines from ’ The Waste Land ’ by T. S. Elliot. He writes: ‘ The past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past ’ . [1] Suddenly new conditions have changed the meaning of beliefs that seemed solid: time passes faster in stillness, negative results bring success, rapid developments don ’ t translate into progress. In some strange way, I have learnt to live with the immobility and accept it as my ‘new normal’ now. Needless to say, I am fed up with the self-isolation and I terribly miss human interaction (as I reckon, most of us do), but I have grown to see being by myself as a valuable opportunity to work on various forms of self-care: self-discipline, self-initiative, self-reflection. A couple of days ago I watched a rousing TED conversation with an American author Elizabeth Gilbert, she seemed so sagacious and radiated an air of serenity. A sentence she said got me thinking: ‘Presence is a gift and challenge in this time. ’ [2] Indeed, these recent weeks have let me discover a new perspective on ‘ presence ’ and how multifaceted this concept is. Strangely, in contrast to many people, online house parties, live yoga classes, DJ-set live streams, Netflix communal watching and collective Zoom calls don ’ t cheer me up, rather deepen my longing for real-life experiences. Though, pondering upon the future, it has prompted me to ask — what are the facets of ‘presence’? How can we think of presence as a powerful quality for professional and personal development? Presence as the state of being present. What I appreciate the most about the prolonged seclusion is the time to think. Engross into things that truly matter and enjoy them wholeheartedly without distractions; fully embrace moments of aloneness and use them for introspection. The essence of an independent curator is a cosmopolitan one. Hopping between cities and countries comes along with a constant shift between realities and temporalities. To get a foot in the door of the highly competitive field of arts, one has to ‘master the art ofliving with a chronic instability’. [3] Although the pursuit of curator ’ s career teaches mental flexibility, it also forces to do everything ‘ in time-lapse’ — forbidding to delve deeper into a single activity and, instead, hastily jump onto the ‘next big thing’. The crisis has forced me to press a ‘pause’ button and push myself into a self-prescribed self-immersion therapy. Getting to the root, feeling the flow, letting inner consciousness lead the way. The highly praised, so-called, ‘superstar curators’ and ‘artist-entrepreneurs’ have implanted in us the harmful ideal to have something ‘going on’ all the time: let it be doing research, writing proposals, seeking for funding, visiting studios or negotiating with exhibition venues. I hope the moment of solitude will help us — curators, artists, creatives and society overall — to shed this destructive pressure and follow your own vision. Presence as the immediate proximity of a person or thing. Geographer Yi-Fu Tuan has rightly pointed out: ‘ What is there in a culture that is not a form of escape? ’ [4] Paradoxically, in times of crisis, while culture comforts us and helps to deal with everyday life, it is the first to experience financial cutbacks. Which seems even more duplicitous, considering that artists are the ones cultivating nation’s heritage and cultural scene. Our ability to build a more healthy and equitable art world lies in the power of joint effort. We have to learn to be more open and accepting to wider audiences, but first of all — build trust and cooperation among each other. In countries where the contemporary art discourse is still in a relatively early stage, there’s only a small circle of people who do art, curate art, observe art and write about art. I see this tiny ‘art bubble’ as very discouraging for constructive discussions and critical thought development within the local art scene. I ’ m tired of conversations that just state how bad the situation is, but don ’ t provide any solutions, just leave me with a bitter aftertaste. I think we can grow much more, both collectively and independently if we put an effort into nurturing and establishing networks. Be friendly, but keep a professional relationship. Support each other, but give honest feedback. Be responsive, but focus on our individual thing. Presence as personal appearance or bearing. Crises shape history, and I believe that we, curators, have power in our hands to shape it for better. We could say we are creators whose material is the work of others — but in any case, the role of a mediator is inescapable. If we go along with the infamous curator’s Harald Szeemann ’ s idea of ‘ artists as the best societal seismographs ’ [5] , curators, similarly to seismologists who study earthquakes and their waves, cross-examine ‘movers and shakers’ of the social and political climate. This unprecedented time has taught me to not to underestimate the power of change in the society. I often wish I had more courage to do what I wish to do and take part in shaping public thought. Once and for all it ’ s time to get rid of the paralysing fear of failure. Fear of being judged, being seen, being public. Instead, learn to be self-sufficient without a necessity to prove anything to anyone. We can make a difference. We are needed. Take time. Take as much as you need. But make good use of it. Tīna Pētersone is an independent curator and a writer based in London/Riga. [1] Eliot, T. S. (1999). The waste land: and other poems . London: Faber and Faber. [2] TED. (2020). It’s OK to feel overwhelmed. Here’s what to do next . Available at: https://youtu.be/oNBvC25bxQU . (Accessed: 21 Apr 2020). [3] Gielen, P., & McGregor, C. (2010). The murmuring of the artistic multitude: Global art, memory and post-Fordism. Amsterdam: Valiz. P. 38. [4] Sugar, R. (2019). The Great Escape . Available at: https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/8/7/20749177/escape-room-game . (Accessed: 11 Jan 2020). [5] Carolee, T. (2009). On Curating: Interviews with Ten International Curators . New York, NY: D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers. Previous Next

Curators: Biljana Ciric, Larys Frogier, Billy Tang < Back Newly commissioned project by RAM Jasphy Zheng: Stories from the Room 7 Nov 2020 Rockbund Art Museum is very pleased to announce our collaboration with Jasphy Zheng on Stories from the Room (Shanghai), 2020 , a newly commissioned project initiated by the artist and supported by RAM CURTAIN New Commissions Series . Invited by Larys Frogier, director of Rockbund Art Museum, Stories from the Room is an ongoing work conceived by Jasphy Zheng, who will present her two-year Stories from the Room project as a temporary installation hosted by the museum. Her project will be occupy the museum building during its temporary closure from 2020.11.07 to 2021.01.03. With the current situation of uncertainty, where we are subjected to varying degrees of isolation, the project is a process to connect various places and people together, beginning with the motivation to archive a growing collection of personal writing responding to lived experiences of the current ‘new normal’. Re-defining the engagement between artist, institution and the audience by going beyond the conventional exhibition structure, Stories from the Room will be extended through the As you go… roads under your feet towards the new future research platform initiated by independent curator Biljana Ciric, and the project will be presented across multiple countries including Japan, Australia, China, Kazakhstan, Serbia and Ethiopia. Initially staged at the CCA Kitakyushu early this year , Stories from the Room was first realized as a response to the outbreak of the pandemic. The project has since expanded as a concept beyond a traditional archival in collaboration with a community of contributors spanning different continents and regions. Through this dialogue, the archive encompasses many different forms and languages through each encounter with a different public space – many of these spaces have faced different degrees of opening and closure that have influenced how the audience is able to engage with her project. Participants have been encouraged to contribute daily to share personal observations, memories, and reflections, with each contributor having a dedicated folder as a permanent part of the archive. In this way, Zheng provides a vital conduit for a diverse collection of voices to convene together in order to express, challenge, or respond to the difficulties of our current situation. Through each iteration, the archive raises different questions, reflecting the divergent realities and experiences of people and places who contribute to the development of this project. In the moment of closure before the Rockbund Art Museum’s renovation, the artist has fabricated a series of delicately-made copper objects to occupy the space for Stories from the Room (Shanghai), 2020 . As custodians of the archive, we will continue the work of updating and regularly maintaining the archive as it grows through the iteration that occupies our space in Shanghai. Scattered across the floors of our empty museum building, the metallic objects add a sculptural dimension to the project for audiences to explore freely. This subtle interaction with the museum adds another layer to the project as slowly, long-lasting ties begin to emerge between our staff and the archive. We sincerely welcome you to join this journey, exploring questions related to the boundaries between public and privacy, distance and intimacy during these uncertain times. May we embrace the uncertainties and challenges together. Please note that we do not accept on-site registration, kindly make an appointment before your visit. Access is limited. For more information, please refer to the rules and information available at “Booking Registration” below. Stories from the Room (Shanghai), 2020 is produced with generous support from Longlati Foundation. Booking Registration To visit Stories from the Room (Shanghai), 2020 at the Rockbund Art Museum, contributors to the open call related to this project will need to book in advance through email. Booking requests are subjected to a first come first serve booking process. If unable to attend, these contributors will also receive the ability to transfer the invitation to another person to attend on their behalf. Contributors can contact via email jasphy.opencall@gmail.com for more details related to the reservation procedure. Please note that we do not accept on-site registration. Please contribute in advance and visit the archive in accordance to our guidelines after receiving this confirmation. Appointments are open to RAM members, sponsors and friends. For more information, please inquire 021-63216251. Answering time: Monday to Friday 11:00-18:00. Submission Information If you would like to participate in this ongoing project, please refer to guidance below: Write about your days, thoughts or feelings, at any length and in any language you prefer Ensure your submission includes a name, location and date Send your writings to jasphy.opencall@gmail.com Each contributor will have a dedicated folder in the archive and multiple submissions over time are welcomed Please note that we are unable to include contributions in the form of image only. This open call in collaboration with RAM is a two-year project with the deadline of December 30th, 2022. The archives in the space will continue to expand with successive iterations as the project is displayed around the world. Please note: contributors volunteer free of charge to contribute to this project with the understanding their writing will be visible to different public displays as an on-going project by the artist Jasphy Zheng. Therefore, participants confirm their consent for the reproduction and usage of the content submitted for the display at Rockbund Art Museum, but also including future usages elsewhere as part of a continuous archival project initiated by the artist. Contributors must ensure to avoid the disclosure of private information in the submission. Submissions will not be returned to the contributor and will remain as part of the artwork. Submitted writings will be organized into the archive at Rockbund Art Museum weekly. About the Artist Living between the US and China, Jasphy Zheng is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice most recently explores the inevitable failure of communication, both on an interpersonal and collective level. Using social installations, unannounced performances, sculptural objects, and artist’s books, Zheng constructs situations as public interventions that aim to raise awareness of our social and cultural environment, both in and out of the context of contemporary art. Zheng graduated with a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. Stories from the Room Project Plan Center for Contemporary Art Kitakyushu, Japan, 2020.05.18 – 2020.09.25 Rockbund Art Museum, China, 2020.11.07 – 2021.01.03 TarraWarra Museum of Art, Australia, 2020.08.30 – 2021.07.11 Ethiopia, October 2020 – ongoing Kazakhstan, End of 2020 – ongoing Serbia, End of 2020 – ongoing CURTAIN As you go… roads under your feet towards the new future Click to read Chinese version Previous Next

< Back On Not Hearing the Gunfire 20 Aug 2020 Su Wei In the wake of the COVID-19 epidemic, January of this year marked the beginning of social distancing which was to last for months. During these months, China’s cities, towns, and villages were subjected to a strict system of control initiated and implemented by its bureaucratic institution. This system monitored citizens’ life and activities on social media, with the help of so-called grid management, big data, and a large number of officials “sinking” into the local community. This approach, on top of the voluntary self-surveillance of the public, did help to effectively stem the spread of the virus. Nonetheless, at the same time, inter-personal relations built upon local neighborhoods and communities—which had already been tenuous and fast-disappearing—were destroyed in the process. The virus has confined people to their homes. In metropolises such as Beijing, such a singular state of affairs has turned the pandemic into an “information war”, as people are wrapped up in a world constructed by mobile phone screens. WeChat , a social media platform recently sanctioned by the U.S. government and long monitored by the Chinese government, has become the main channel for people to learn about the outside world and to express their complex emotions surrounding the pandemic. Because the platform itself can be both official (almost all official media has public WeChat blogs) and private, all the while being censored, public and private life become very closely intertwined in a bizarre and unsettling way. Covid-19 Nucleic Acid Detection in a University campus, photo credit: Su Wei This situation continues today, even while the pandemic has been declared to be completely under control in China. It is a moment in time when the world in your phone and your everyday life have truly collapsed into one another. Not only do you have to produce your “health certificate” on your phone whenever you go into a public place, but you also have to make conscious—even strenuous—efforts to discern valuable ideas and judgements from the more perilous ones when confronting messages and discussions on your phone from different friends and fields. Such discernment can be very difficult, even sometimes, schizophrenic. At the end of January, and almost at the same time the outbreak of the epidemic hit its peak, I officially resigned from my job as a senior curator at an art museum in Beijing, in the hopes of rediscovering the fields beyond the staged scenes of power struggle. For a long time, I couldn’t leave my mobile phone either, although I knew how one-sided and biased the observations through it can be, and how expressions made through it could not avoid being performative, let alone being mostly improvisational and opportunistic by nature. The art world has been squirming in pain after Chinese New Year. This pain first came from the capital world as well as the art market, and the online fair of Art Basel, Hong Kong matched this mood. The art world then brimmed over with discussions under the aegis of “art and pandemic”, with all kinds of undigested online creations and lecture series, each proposing new ways of thinking about our current context. To be fair, the art community has always shown a spirit of dissatisfaction with the status quo, albeit a spirit that is also sometimes rare, and has been consistently on the wane since the year 2000. Nevertheless, some of the recent creations and opinions continue to deeply reveal our misconceptions about contemporaneity, as well as how untenable this fragile, short-lived sense of the contemporary actually is. In other words, our sense of the contemporary cannot stand even the slightest interrogation, be it humanistic or that about the actual logic behind knowledge production. What really gave me a strong sense of crisis was the outbreak of the BLM campaign. It spread across Chinese social networks at a lesser speed and with weaker intensity than the civil protest movements did several years ago, including the Wall Street movement, Hong Kong’s Occupy Central and the yellow umbrella movements. To explain our lukewarm reaction to the campaign, we need more than the simple fact that local social media platforms, such as WeChat, have not played an important role in China’s social life for very long. Not sufficient, either, is the fact that Facebook and Twitter have been banned for a while. Rather, the steep decrease in the communication effect of the BLM campaign reflects a change in people’s mentality. The Chinese cultural scene caught in various discourses of state, individuals, nation, imperialism, market, freedom, etc. is inevitably falling apart, and the once shared feeling for the oppressed has been substituted by that of defending national interests. In China, people have long regarded the race issue as a product of the United States, ignoring its pervasive presence among themselves. Moreover, debates about justice and equality have faded into the background, along with those between the New Left and liberals back in the 1990s – those debates have now rendered themselves footnotes to nationalist contentions where racial issues are concerned. The racist “scenes” and “misunderstandings” we all experience abroad are often reduced—in an alienating way—to “common knowledge,” and are often dismissed as irrelevant, as if they “only happen to other people.” It so seems that the issue of race is much less important than that of class, which apparently concerns more Chinese people. The value of such names as Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner and George Floyd invariably seem to be of secondary importance here. Hong Kong during the Umbrella Movement, 2014, photo credit: Su Wei As the confrontation between China and The United States—which began last year—has recently been radically escalating, a division between the left and the right is gradually revealing itself in the cultural sphere. Such a schism, however, was otherwise disappearing in the context of the neoliberal economy. The professedly more critical left constantly draw upon the historical legacy of the “first thirty years“ (1949-1979) in their interpretations of today, whereas the liberals are having difficulty negotiating a space amidst the ideological struggle between China and the Western world. Both sides are engaged in a tightrope-walking practice, the dangers of which, however, are again obvious: one either skids to the nationalist left or hits the nihilist right. Meanwhile, at the public level, nationalism has reached its zenith with government support, while the recent military confrontation between China and the United States only further aggravates the situation. What is emerging in the cultural and public spheres imposes a strain on China’s art world. Admittedly, art inevitably exists in the world, but what better describes the situation is that the art community in China have been passively mobilized at this time – their motivation and self-awareness subsequently still subject to scrutiny. The nationalism and nihilism of the country as a whole have penetrated the art world on all fronts. Despite the fact that the Chinese art community does not often reveal their political stances—not an entirely conscious choice, though, since such practices can also be gestures of withdrawal—a certain collective unconscious is indeed being fashioned by the radical changes in the cultural and social realms. Globalization, though long proven to be problematic, remains the ultimate faith of many because it is so difficult to confront the local situation squarely – we find ourselves in desperate want of courage, motivation, and appeals when facing the local. Though there are yet more problems. When immersed in the world within their mobile phones, the Chinese art community (unsurprisingly) shows yet again, a certain ‘bluntness’—or rather an insensitivity to the reality. Private conversations on WeChat or its more secure alternatives (sometimes one must avoid Wechat censorship) are often characterized by opportunistic arguments that can constantly shift grounds from the left to the right. Such arguments can hardly leave space for future thoughts and are often no more than vehicles for one’s moral superiority, and obsessive confidence in one’s own knowledge. For the art practitioners who are already safely middle-class, and even part of the high society, they are equipped with a strong sense of reality as a result of their frequent travels between East and West: their friendships with Western art institutions; their expensive apartments and cars in major cities including Beijing and Shanghai; the education privilege their children would enjoy; and not least of all, the skyrocketing costs of artistic creation in recent years. Nevertheless, in the meantime, the truly complex battles in the real world have been telescoped, and the struggles of real people in faraway places are condensed into manageable sizes. Such a simplistic approach to reality also leads to an intentional oversight or partial sight when it comes to value judgements: they would hold fast to a value that they identify with, such as “freedom” in abstraction. Such is the art world in the cell phone. Self-proclaimed liberals spreading around excitable gossip about authoritarian governments. Some fantasize that they belong to the White middle-class and thus venerate the unfavorable coverage of China in the Western media. The more ambitious, on the other hand, fantasize that they are the country per se and earnestly devise all kinds of solutions to remedy the status quo. There are also many nationalists in the art world who embrace the “local” and “grassroots”, and regard them as localization enterprises – as a result, fully accepting the value system they entail. But there is no protest. I do not mean protest in the sense of the dissent. We do not even need to mention the risks it involves to be a dissenter. I mean instead, that we lack the kind of thinking produced right in the middle of the quagmire named reality, and that we lack, even more, the ability to look squarely into the clues that has helped fashion today’s reality. Perhaps the present art community in China should first learn how to go to the streets: to participate in movements, to debate with others in complex contexts, to create tools to resist police assaults, and to put down their cell phones. We can only point out, in a way that is rather pessimistic, that the art world in China teems with all varieties of performativity. The sense of the contemporary has not been fully internalized, yet one is already eager to demonstrate one’s superior knowledge. Such piecemeal knowledge, adulterated by various motivations and sophistication, are however not solid grounds for discussion. Behind such knowledge demonstrations are one’s appeal to power. One is adept at using one’s moral stance as a banner, or wielding it a weapon in attacking others. One sometimes does it with a loud battle cry, while at other times deliberately concealing one’s real stance. One can be good at posing as either politically correct or incorrect, depending on the situation, to enchant or to mislead younger art practitioners. One masquerades as a student in front of one’s seniors to gain resources, while acting as the authority in front of their younger peers to obtain power. All of these have been undermining the already rarefied atmosphere of art discussion. A Studio exhibition in Beijing, 2020, photo credit: Su Wei Some artists, however, chose to quietly rise against this absurd reality in the Chinese art world. Their agenda focuses on more physical participation, and seeks to carve out a space to think by giving away part of one’s self. Wu Wenguang, an independent documentary filmmaker, has been continuing his decade-long Folk Memory Project during the pandemic. The project titled “Passing Through,” registers the process in which Wu, in Yunnan, experiences a special period together with other filmmakers located elsewhere, with whom he has been working for a long time. The way they experience this together is called “online yoga”: they share their experience within a day, read poetry, or communicate other reading experiences and document their “time together” through film. Other artists, who may not have been well known in the Chinese art world, and who lacked exhibition opportunities, did not give up their artistic creation because of the pandemic or the pressure brought about by the survival pleas prevalent in the art world. Some of them work with a simple attitude and do not deliberately avoid real-life pressure. They polish their work in their own studios and through studio exhibitions initiated by artists themselves, thus finding a balance between art and reality. It is easier to experience a moderate sense of honesty, as well as palatable performativity, in such creations – especially when they are compared with certain works and exhibitions too eager to engage with reality. In addition, within the past few years there has been a number of artists and groups guided by left-wing ideas, who have used practices that intentionally provoke officialdom to give a voice to marginalized groups, and to find creative impetus in the private sector. Creations of such are promising, though they may still seem to lack a clear methodology and are not as satisfying in terms of artistic quality and creativity. Outside of the art world, the online community Douban ( www.douban.com ) presents the convergence of diverse experiences and reflections of young Chinese from China and around the world. The vibrance it promises seems a world apart from today’s feeble and arrogant art world. Some cultural figures are also taking action. The official media ThePaper took the bold initiative to host a column dedicated to the BLM campaign, in which all points of view (including those by researchers) are cited and set to contest one another. Other media platforms such as Jiemian and Economic Observer’s Book Review (which have long been known for their focus on contemporary cultural changes and marginalized groups in China), have also endeavored to stage valuable discussions despite the atmosphere of intense political pressure. These rare and precious actions salvage from the reality, a little space for the future. We cannot hear the gunfire from the battlefield, but we must understand that the gunfire is already everywhere. Su Wei is an art writer and curator based in Beijing. Previous Next

Alumni 2018 Lecture Series Participant Activities works within the realms of research, writing, discussion, publishing and exhibition making. Her practice reflects on the unstable overlap between material, social and political processes; especially as such relations develop over time. Andreoletti is currently a Postgrad fellow at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. < Mentors Educational Program Menu >

Program Participant Activities Tonight we invite you to encounter a collective archive of the 2022 What could/should curating do educational programme, which took place in Belgrade and other locations around the Post-Yugoslav region, between September and December this year. The departure point for this archive is a proposal by Biljana Ćirić, program curator and facilitator, to consider the means by which the discussions, events, inquiries and relationships developed during this time might be recorded or documented. Archiving is never neutral. Determinations are always made—by individuals, by collectives, by collecting institutions—about what knowledge is worth saving, the means by which knowledge is indexed, housed and cared for, who has access and on what terms. Within the framework of an alternative educational platform—with a loose and evolving curriculum, and no formalised method of assessment or grading—this exercise presents an opportunity to consider what alternative measures we might allow ourselves for the production of knowledge when freed from institutional modes of transmission and circulation. As such, these archives—both individually and collectively—do not simply record a series of shared (and at times differing) experiences. They include questions around how the embodied, linguistic, political, intimate, relational nature of experience and remembering, ranging in scope from the personal, to the national. Each contribution is informed by the “baggage” we carried with us, as a group of individuals from many different geographic and cultural contexts, many of whom had little relationship with Belgrade, Serbia or the Balkan region prior to this course. This “baggage” includes our different relationships to contemporary art’s infrastructures; our different fields of knowledge and networks of relationships; cultural and linguistic differences; differing relations to histories of colonialism, resource extraction and capitalist exploitation; and varying habits of thought, modes of making, inhabiting and formulating questions about the world. Through differing strategies of presentation and circulation, we hope to open up questions about what we have in common, as well as what separates us; what of ourselves is dispersed, and what is withheld. But the physical “archive” we share with you tonight is only a part of a wider set of relationships, experiences, idea exchanges, occasional encounters, gossip and experimenting. Tonight we celebrate the beauty and fragility of these moments. Be our guests at the two tables. Read silently. Read aloud. Whisper. Describe what you see. Share what you feel. Eat. Drink. Embrace. This archive is staged as something living, developing and transformational, ever evolving as our moments with you. Thank you for sharing this journey with us. We hope it’s not the end, but only a stop on the way. WC/SCD 2022 Adelina, Anastasia, Ginevra, Giuglia, Jelena, Karly, Lera, Sabine, Simon < Educational Program Participants >

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Events Lecture Series Participant Activities WCSCD 2025/2026 educational program lecture series Assembling Land: Rehearsals towards Placemaking Marina Christodoulidou Time September 19th 2025, 19:00 Venue: SKUP Novi Sad Delving into pressing themes surrounding Land —particularly its ownership and use— de Appel takes curatorial practice as a means of commoning. Land represents the frontline for critical issues such as environmental crises, land grabbing, settler colonialism, and the erosion of affordable housing, among others. In the present context of late capitalism, Land has been reduced to a mere commodity, stripped of its intrinsic value and communal significance. Yet, we witness a surge of political and social movements worldwide fervently advocating for equitable access to and restitution of land and its resources. Artists, often at the forefront of these struggles, are not merely participants but conspirators, exploring and embodying new paradigms of shared ownership and reimagining the commons. Curatorial projects referenced during the talk engage with co-ownership, both as a structure and a concept, by learning from the diverse experiences, practices, and perspectives of/with lumbung. It further questions how crises of land and housing engage with an art institution, and asks: how could we co-own a place? How might an art institution practice co-ownership, both practically and poetically? In principle, de Appel anchors its inquiries in curatorial work: How can we curate exhibitions today in relation to concerns about land and urban crises? How might art institutions contribute to social housing movements and struggle against land grabbing and individual ownership? Following the presentation, there will be a screening of the collaborative film The Broken Pitcher (2022), which situates such questions in relation to a case of a home foreclosure, and by extension, debt and property, while exploring potentials for changing the script by interacting with it. Marina Christodoulidou is mentor of WCSCD educational program 2025/2026 and she the lecture is organized as part of educational program public encounters in collaboration with SKUP and Sok Cooperative The public lecture by Marina Christoulidou is supported by the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Belgrade. Lecture will be in English Marina Christodoulidou is a curator and researcher based in Amsterdam. Her practice traverses curatorial formats, often taking shape as discursive exhibitions, film, writing, and spatial interventions. During her participation in the 2023 de Appel Curatorial Programme, together with her cohort, she engaged in collective working methods that explored curating as a collaborative, situated practice. Their shared inquiry culminated in Hope is a Discipline , an ongoing curatorial research project named after the words of Mariame Kaba, who frames hope as a practice of communal labor. The research began with a series of gatherings at Broedplaats LELY in Amsterdam (October 6 – November 23, 2023) and continued at LMCC Arts Center in New York City (July 29 – September 29, 2024), with future iterations to follow. In October 2024, the cohort launched a vinyl record documenting the process and its encounters, published by de Appel Amsterdam. Marina continues her affiliation with de Appel as a curatorial fellow, working across various projects and initiatives, and as tutor of de Appel’s COOP study program at the Dutch Art Institute (DAI), alongside artist Noor Abuarafeh. Now in its third consecutive year, the COOP study group is framed under Rehearsals towards Placemaking , with public offerings by each year’s cohort as part of the DAI Summit, which travels across geographies—from Morocco to Cyprus and beyond. As part of the grounding of de Appel’s new home at Temple in De Pijp, Amsterdam, Marina’s collaborative project The Broken Pitcher was presented during the housewarming events in Spring 2024. Among other ongoing collaborations with de Appel’s team is Our People are Our Mountains , initiated in partnership with the 50th Jakarta Biennial. The project spans exhibitions, workshops, and performances in both Jakarta and Amsterdam, inviting artists to activate personal and collective transmissions in Fall 2024. At de Appel, participating artists and collectives shared instructions with the public and with their counterparts in Jakarta. This initiative centers on an act of transmission and trust—artists convey their creative directives to peers in Jakarta, who in turn interpret, enact, or respond to the instructions in place. While it includes exhibitionary elements, the project is fundamentally a collective, process-based endeavor, dependent on activation beyond the confines of presentation formats. In the upcoming exhibition calendar, December 2025 marks a new iteration of The Broken Pitcher (2020–), a long-term collaborative project that re-enacts an eviction story shaped by the colonial history of debt. For this occasion, Marina is working closely with artists involved in the original project, as well as newly commissioned collaborators, to draw from narratives rooted in the Dutch landscape. The work has previously been presented in public squares across Cyprus, as well as at Thkio Ppalies (Nicosia), Beirut Art Center, GfZK (Leipzig), and Lenbachhaus (Munich), among others. < Mentors Educational Program How to Apply >