Dirty Deeds Part 1: Imagining the New World

1.10 – 11.11.2020

So here it is the new year and we are really looking forward to jamming with you in probably the most sci-fi dystopian times imaginable, forget netflix, just watch whats going on out there.
As Dickens said in a Tale of Two Cities, It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…. so its most definitely the time toget down to some dirty business.

To hyperlate the mandate of the Dirty Art Department since the beginning, moving forward from what was an applied art department, taking the ethos from Situationist International ‘the only valid form of art is the revolution’ and finding contemporary ways of ‘picking up the brick and throwing it’, dirty business means how we are going to create the world we want to live in, both in the real, the symbolic and the poetic. So we ask you to develop your practices individually, collectively or in some other new configuration of existence with the thrust of considering how is your work an active agent for the creation of the new world? Of course this is both a modernist utopian commitment and ambiguously open as a statement, but lets be careful of too many Po Mo meanderings, keep the Love, and be boldly ready to create the new even though it is surely easy to fail and humility will have to become our friend. In the quest of such lofty aims, the year will be broken into the following four section running each a half semester:

1. Imagining the New World (or Punctum Remotum Punctum Proximum Punctum with a Utopian twist)
2. Making the New World ( Pot, politics and more)
3. Living the New World (Kicking it in reality)
4. Sharing the New World (….)

So we start now with the prequel to the new world, how to imagine, or even how to get ourselves into the pre-condition of how to imagine a world we would want to inhabit. This means a reconsideration of the ‘we’ , post-sexist, post racist, post individualist, post colonial, post anthopocentric, post able ….. plants, animals, stones, to a reconsideration of the ‘I’ as a contruct or de construct beyond the identity, the individual…, our relationship to mortality … post religion, beyond the void… and finally to life and the way to live. If you ‘ne travaillez jamais’ what do you do? Hmm maybe Ballroom all day.

This first half semester under the guise of ‘Imagining the New World’ gives you the inputs and space to locate yourself as a part of a process of a new cosmological process. So if we can understand social reality as a soup of subjective realities, we have both the right to negotiate our own haircuts and the condition of the hairdressers salon.

You will present the results of the semesters woth at the mid term ckeck on the 10 – 11 November 2020.

This is Punctum Remotum, Punctum Proximum, Punctum with a Utopian Twist

Ah p.s. check out Haircuts by Children and Other Evidence for a New Social Contract

http://www.darrenodonnell.ca/haircuts-by-children/

images: Ettore Sottsass: The Planet as a Festival and Superstudio