Please find the hour to hour programme below
Reservations: reservation-studiumgenerale@rietveldacademie.nl
Day Ticket: €15
Day Student Ticket: €10


As part of the annual conference-festival Studium Generale Rietveld Academie, If Can’t Dance has been invited to curate a symposium on Friday 21 March that responds to the guiding thematic of this years event, Voice ~ Creature of Transition.

Resonance and Transmission: from one voice to another brings together a new generation of feminist thinkers and contemporary artists to consider the voice in its relationship with speaker and receiver. The programme examines the transformation that occurs in the re-articulation of voice in text, in recording or by an ‘other’, to consider the intersections between history, politics and the act of speech.

Taking as a starting point the idea that each voice has a ‘uniqueness’ - a concept proposed by the Italian philosopher and feminist thinker Adriana Cavarero - the day will consider the following questions across the guests' various interests and projects: how do voices resonate not only in their sound but also over time, how are they transmitted from one body to another, and how can and do we speak for someone else?

At the start of the day Federica Bueti and Camilla Wills will pay homage to Hélène Cixous and her writing – which crosses the boundaries between genres, disciplines and genders – through a collaborative presentation that takes as its starting point Cixous homage to Clarice Lispector in Vivre LʼOrange/To Live the Orange (1979). The presentation will also be an exercise in mediumship – in breathing, listening, reading, singing and speaking with the voice of others. A screening of Sharon Hayes’ Ricerche: three (2013) considers the relationship between the individual voice and the collective through an interview between the artist and 35 students at an all women’s college in Western Massachusetts.

In the afternoon the artist Alex Martinis Roe will talk about her ongoing oral history research into the Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective, including her methodological relation to storytelling and ‘doing history’. Francesco Ventrella will deliver a lecture exploring the relationship between voices and intersubjectivity through the art critic and feminist Carla Lonzi’s book of artist interviews Autoritratto (1969), originally recorded on audiotapes.

The day will conclude with a screening of Wendelien van Oldenborgh’s film Bete & Deise (2012), which narrates an encounter between Bete Mendes and Deise Tigrona, two women in Rio de Janeiro who have each in their own way given meaning to the idea of a ‘public voice’. The screening will be followed by a conversation with the artist.

The symposium extends If I Can’t Dance’s thinking into its current Edition V – Appropriation and Dedication, continuing a trajectory of discursive programmes that question the productive friction between the notion of ‘making something your own’ as a potential subversive strategy and the inverse availability to be transformed by the objects we would attempt to possess. The symposium is a sequel to the Appropriation and Dedication Seminar held in January 2013 and the Summer Open Reading Group led by Alex Martinis Roe in June 2013. 


The symposium is curated by If I Can’t Dance’s Associate Curator Susan Gibb.


Programme
12.30 – Introduction – Frédérique Bergholtz and Susan Gibb
12.50 – Readings – Federica Bueti and Camilla Wills – To sing like an apple tree (sideshow)
13.50 – Screening – Sharon Hayes – Ricerche: three (2013)
14.30 – Break
14.45 – Artist Presentation – Alex Martinis Roe
15.30 – Lecture – Francesco Ventrella  – Carla Lonzi’s Artwriting: Voice, Resonance and Empathy 
16.15 – Conversation – Alex Martinis Roe and Francesco Ventrella
16.45 – Break
17.00 – Screening and Conversation – Wendelien van Oldenborgh – Bete & Deise (2012)
19.00 – End & drinks

The symposium Resonance and Transmission: from one voice to another has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body. The project is presented in the framework of Corpus, international network for performance practice. Corpus is supported by the Culture Programme of the European Union. The programme of If I Can’t Dance is supported by the Mondriaan Fund, the European Union and the municipality of Amsterdam.