2019, installation
presented by Laure Jaffuel
at Deschool, Amsterdam
De School is a former technical school and is really left like that. The idea of a club is not so different from a school: it’s just hundreds of kids being slightly too energetic. De School didn’t change much— they didn’t even erase the dicks kids drew on the walls.
The staged workshop during the Het Weekend at the De School included signing a safety contract, wearing uniformed shirts and producing tramp pieces.
TRAMP is a form of research, a staged workshop teaching the practice of tramp art as a way to resist the daily temptations of evil, by keeping your hands busy. The act of making is repetitive, it’s oppressive. Excessive labor that doesn’t allow you to go beyond the V-shaped form that you carve again & again & again. Multiple boregasms, a decked-out version of contact shame, it felt fucked up like somehow you had something to do with it.
School – from Latin schola – “place of instruction, intermission of work, leisure for learning; learned conversation, body of followers, sect,”
Both – carving and dancing – have spin-off products. Wood dust and human sweat. Problem-solving as a method of learning and as practice, they are work. Beginning with a problem, shared war-stories become communal knowledge through a process of intense diagnosis and breakdown. The practice of craft is a physical exercise and dance moves turn into ornamentation. Distinctive wood carved patterns and grip-like elements remained as remnants of a performance with material. When placed in dialogue with the club, these pieces became a physical way to experience the cycle of TRAMP. organized by: Tomasz Skibicki