Seminar/Conference

Dora Garcia: Segunda Vez Open Seminar

ATTENTION!!! BECAUSE OF BAD WEATHER AND DELAYED FLIGHT, THE PROGRAM IN OSLO THURSDAY 23 NOVEMBER IS POSTPONED TO 14.00 THURSDAY 23 NOVEMBER.

The project has been supported by Kunstnerisk utviklingsarbeid og forskning (KUF) and Program for kunstnerisk utviklingsarbeid (PKU)/Programme for Artistic Research.

INTRODUCTION by Dora Garcia

After two years of research, production of several short films and a feature film, two cahiers documenting the progress of the research, a book, and an internet site (segundavezsegundavez.com), the project Segunda Vez will close with an open seminar to be held in the cities of Trondheim and Oslo, hosted by Trondheim Kunstmuseum and Oslo National Academy of the Arts.

During those two years, assistant researchers Victoria Durnak and Nora Joung, fellow researchers Inés Katzenstein and Ana Longoni, myself, and a large group of partners, companions and friends, have reflected on the work of the multifaceted intellectual Oscar Masotta (Buenos Aires, 1930, Barcelona 1979). The work of Oscar Masotta has functioned for us as a crossroad of myths, disciplines, knowledges, historical circumstances, stories, fictional and real characters. It has been an incredibly rich encounter where we have transitioned between performance art, psychoanalysis, and politics. In this encounter we have followed the threads of metafiction and repetition, as core strategies of what we know now under the very hybrid umbrella term of performance which today might include what Masotta named happening and its opposite: antihappening and art of information media.

In this final open seminar, we will present performances, lectures, dialogues, debates, and screenings. Some focus on Masotta, his time, and his work. Others are works and reflections that have been generated along the research, stimulated by conversations and encounters. We will (hopefully, fingers crossed) present the final publication, the book "Segunda Vez" designed by Aslak Gurholt and distributed by Torpedo Books. We will screen as well a rough cut in-progress version of the feature film "Segunda Vez", produced by Auguste Orts.

The seminar is open and free, however those interested in attending the seminar please be so kind to inscribe by sending an email to the following address:

for TRONDHEIM: segundavezsegundavez@gmail.com
for OSLO: please inscribe

You are welcome to attend the Trondheim station, the Oslo station, or both.

Programme Trondheim, 21-22 November

Trondheim Kunstmuseum, Bispegata 7b, 7013 Trondheim

With: Mette Edvardsen, Per Oskar Leu and Halvor Rønning, Olga Martí, Ana Longoni, Dora García, Saskia Holmkvist, Victoria Durnak and Nora Joung, with an introduction by Johan Börjesson, director of Trondheim Kunstmuseum.

21 November

• 12.30 – Introduction by Johan Börjesson, director of Kunstmuseum Trondheim and Dora García professor of contemporary art at The Academy of Fine Art in Oslo and leader of the research project Segunda Vez

• 1 pm – Ana Longoni

• 2.30 pm – Nora Joung

• 3 pm – Break

• 3.30 pm – Mette Edvardsen

22 November

• 9.30 - Coffee

• 10 am Victoria Durnak

• 11 am Olga Martí

• 12 pm - Break

• 12.30 pm - Saskia Holmkvist

• 2 pm - Per-Oskar Leu and Halvor Rønning

Contents

Ana Longoni: Masotta and Greco: two heterotopic trajectories
We explore here the itineraries of two crucial and long-forgotten names of the Argentine Avant-garde in the 60’s: Alberto Greco and Oscar Masotta. These two bold driving-forces of ideas and actions in the experimental movement, who shared the same amazing disruptive capacity for creating anti-spaces in Art, Theory and Life, still vibrate today with an unclassi-fiable force.

Nora Joung: Some speculations on Cynicism and Oscar Masotta
Performance and video lecture. We will touch on how the popular understanding of the word cynicism has changed, and how the artist's role has changed. A speculation on Oscar Masotta. An outsider, someone always in good company and yet a solitary figure. Perpetually studious, but also sententious. A person doing the jester's job, gaining access to the inner circles of intelligentsia. A skill-monster, a mimicker, a learner by-doing, a restless thinker. A real cynic.

Mette Edvardsen: I dance from left to right
Choreography as writing, writing in time and space. A look onto this larger notion of the written, not necessarily language, but also not an opposite to language – and not per se identified with the visual. Mette Edvardsen will speak about a series of her own works, showing some excerpts from them live, as a way to address the topic of language, and how Edvardsen has been working with language in her pieces.

Saskia Holmkvist: Dog is Dog
Dog is Dog looks at how translated language can make situations look similar by using the correct words. But we all know that this is not always the case as a word can connote differ-ently depending on where it is situated. The title of the performance Dog is Dog derives from an example by linguist Saussure describing words and ultimately language as arbitrary and where Dog is Dog can be 2 very different dogs, in 2 very different environments but could of course just as well be very similar.

Victoria Durnak: True Detective
Artist talk. Victoria Durnak examines the role of the modern «everyday detective» and talk about how she found a neighbor’s Instagram account earlier this year. Based solely on the online updates from her life, they formed an intimate relationship. In Trondheim, Durnak will share the story about how this one-way communication led to an identity crisis – and eventually to an act of despair.

Per-Oskar Leu and Halvor Rønning: Happily Divorced, video collage and performance.
If the people of the United States are trapped in a destructive relationship with a manipulative bully, could the story of President Trump's first wife Ivana perhaps provide some clues on how to break free? Happily Divorced looks into the form of emotional abuse known as Gas-lighting. Leu and Rønning’s project includes adaptations of Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 stage play Gas Light – the fictional drama from which the psychological term is derived – presented alongside documentary footage featuring Ivana. The screening will be broken up by live readings from Ivana’s self-help literature and semi-autobiographical novels.

Programme Oslo 23-24 November

Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Fossveien 24, 0551 Oslo, Scene 6, på plan 1

With: Inés Katzenstein, Ana Longoni, Rike Frank, Eva González Sancho, Aaron Schuster, Cloe Masotta, Emiliano Battista, Dora García, with an introduction by Stine Hebert, dean of The Academy of Fine Art in Oslo.

23 November

• 10 am – Coffee

• 10.30 am – Welcome by Stine Hebert, dean of The Academy of Fine Art in Oslo, and Trond Lossius, Head of Artistic Research and Fellowship Programme. Introduction by Dora García, professor of contemporary art at The Academy of Fine Art in Oslo and leader of the research project Segunda Vez

• 11 am – Inés Katzenstein

• 12.30 pm – Break

• 2 pm – Cloe Masotta

• 3 pm – Emiliano Battista

• 4 pm – Coffee break

• 5 pm – Dora García in conversation with Inés Katzenstein

24 November

• 10 am – Coffee

• 10.30 am – Ana Longoni

• 12 am – Eva González Sancho

• 1 pm – Break

• 2 pm – Rike Frank

• 3 pm – Aaron Schuster

• 4 pm – Coffee break

• 5 pm – projection of a rough cut in-progress version of the film "Segunda Vez", by Dora García, 90 min.

Contents

Inés Katzenstein: Masotta, The happening as political exorcism
Katzenstein analyses To Induce the Spirit of the Image, one of the most polemical and sensa-tionalist happenings created by Masotta en 1966, trying to understand it as a crux between the different backgrounds and heterogeneous interests of its author: Argentine artistic and literary traditions, sociopolitical feelings related to the proscription of Peronism, and the origin of psychoanalysis.

Cloe Masotta: From Happening to Cinema in the Argentina of 60’s and first 70’s
The cinematographic exploration of some filmmakers from the 60s and 70s such as Hugo Silva, Alberto Fischerman or Ricardo Becher, among others, coincides with certain forms of artistic avant-garde, for example that one from Oscar Masotta, in collaboration with Rob-erto Jacoby, Raúl Escari and Eduardo Costa with whom he founded the group “Arte de los medios”.

Emiliano Battista: Masotta and the Left
A running thread of Oscar Masotta’s work is his polemic with left-wing intellectuals, not because Masotta comes from the right, but because he does not buy into the structures and oppositions that frame their approach to art. In the introduction to Sex and Betrayal in Rob-erto Arlt, he targets the “well-intentioned spirits on the left” who accept and champion the “social content,” meaning the social reality, that Arlt’s novels depict, while condemning their “political content,” meaning Arlt’s focus, not on class and the class-struggle, but on the individual fate of his characters.

Dora García in conversation with Inés Katzenstein: El Instituto Torcuato Di Tella and the Argentinian Avant-Garde
"La Manzana Loca" (The crazy apple) was the name given to a group of buildings in the ur-ban center of Buenos Aires in the 60's, the most significant of them being the Institute Torcuato di Tella, which under the mentorship of art critic Jorge Romero Brest brought, financed and promoted an international style in the contemporary art of those years: Marta Minujín, León Ferrari, Oscar Bony and Oscar Masotta are some of the names who were part of this. What did it mean then and what does it mean now?

Ana Longoni, Oscar Masotta: Theory as Action. An assessment of the exhibition project
After four years of collective research work, an exhibition about Masotta’s intellectual itin-erary was opened last April in MUAC (Contemporary Art University Museum), in Mexico. In her role as curator, Ana Longoni will devote this lecture to a review of the challenges, di-lemmas and achievements of this revisitation to Masotta and his time, and his intense ca-pacity to still provoke and question our certainties.

Eva González-Sancho: Simply, again: Cycles, re-enactments, repetitions, and rhythms
Analysing exhibition formats capable of including, displaying and producing durational and time-based artworks. The notion of repetition in visual arts, and the reasons and implica-tions of re-enacting exhibitions, activating dormant projects and re-visiting iconic artworks. Eva González-Sancho will specifically focus in the projects developed within the OSLO PILOT experience, past, present, and future.

Rike Frank: Charlotte Posenenske, Drehflügel / Revolving Vane (1967/ 68/ 2017)
In 1968 the artist Charlotte Posenenske writes: “The things I make are changea-ble, as simple as possible, reproducible. // They are components of the space because they are similar to building elements, // they can always be rearranged into new combinations // or positions, // thereby altering space. // I leave this alteration to the consumer, who thereby again and again // participates in the production process.” (Offenbach, February 11, 1968).

The same year she gave up art making, Posenenske dedicated herself to study sociology, and published in 1979 together with Burkhard Brunn a study on analyt-ical work assessment, standard time and work values.
In my talk, I will borrow Posenenske’s “Revolving Vane” (1967/68) as a momen-tary analogy to identify markers that by carrying a proposal of alteration, of re-arranging time and space, signal a social function of exhibiting – or as Dora asks: Is it true, as they say in psychoanalysis, that the second time is always the first time?

Aaron Schuster: All the World's a Whorehouse: Art and Revolution in Genet and Lacan
What is the relationship between artistic revolutions and political revolutions, and what role can and should art play in the revolution? I will look at how Jean Genet addresses these questions, focusing in particular on his play The Balcony, which tells the story of the failure of revolution and the rise to power of buffoonish living caricatures of authorities.