In the academic year 2012–2013, If I Can't Dance offers the course Occupation Evacuation Transmission to students of the Dutch Art Institute. The project is conceived by Ian White in collaboration with Emma Hedditch and Jimmy Robert, and coordinated by Tanja Baudoin. Guest tutors are Yael Davids, Emma Hedditch, Jimmy Robert, Matthew Lutz-Kinoy and Teresa María Díaz Nerio.

Monthly meetings with the students focus on giving meaning to appropriation from the perspective of individual and collective practice and within the frame of If I Can't Dance's research into Appropriation and Dedication. The project works on developing a vocabulary for making work together.

Course outline:
Appropriation is the claiming of one thing for the purpose of another. It is a play between invisibility and making seen, hovering between a special kind of nothing and something quite specific. Broadly, we could think of it as the application of any kind of copying in artistic practice. But of course, this already raises a whole set of questions: What do we choose to appropriate? Why? What do we know about the thing chosen? What do we want to know about it? Does it too have a resistance, an agency? What of it remains? What kind of copying takes place? What are the implications here for an idea of authorship? Are these questions dependent upon each other? Are the answers to them dependent upon who, or what, and where is being addressed? Appropriation in practice and theory is often discussed in relation to a specifically North American art history. What is our relation to this history? Is that a question about our relationship to one another? How or what is ours?

Using the resources that our own work and that of others provides, Occupation Evacuation Transmission assumes the model of a research group to explore ways in which such questions might be answered through a performance-based mode of enquiry. It is conceived as a cumulative process that is lead by questions rather than devised from answers. It seeks to generate itself and establish an insistent collection that is both of and for use, in and of time; of works, or materials, or strategies that might be both presented and subject to new kinds of application. Perhaps it asks an even broader question about the nature of performance itself, as the product or the producer of something like an architecture of recognition and transmission.

Initially, each workshop will combine something to be appropriated (drawn from a variety of different types of material including our own work) with a strategy of appropriation and a theoretical context e.g. artworks, images, objects, films, text, movement subject to interpretation, translation, copying, re-presentation, remediation, decolonisation etc. The accumulation of these experiences then shape the direction of project and provide a framework for a public presentation in June 2013.

Biographies
Ian White is an artist, working mainly in performance. Since 2007 he is the Facilitator of the LUX Associate Artists Programme and from 2001-11 was Adjunct Film Curator for the Whitechapel Gallery, London. Independent curatorial projects include Kinomuseum, Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, 2007; The Secret Public (Associate Curator; Kunstverein Munich & touring, 2006/7), The Artists Cinema (Coordinator; Frieze Art Fair, London, 2005/6) and Emily Wardill at De Appel (2010), with a co-authored publication, We Are Behind (De Appel/Bookworks, 2010). His artistic practice includes collaborations with Jimmy Robert (Art Now, Tate Britain, 2004; STUK, Leuven & De Appel Amsterdam & touring, 2007 on; Jeu de Paume, Paris, 2012) and Emily Roysdon (Chisenhale Gallery, London, 2010), a performance of Yvonne Rainer’s Trio A at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2009) and a solo show Ibiza Black Flags Democracy, daadgalerie, Berlin (2010) with a publication of the same title. He has recently given two seminar series in London: 6 or more kinds of theatre (no.w.here, Autumn 2010) and Performer, Audience, Mirror: Cinema, Theatre and the Idea of the Live (LUX, Autumn 2011) and his most recent solo performance Trauerspiel 1 took place at the Hebbel-Am-Ufer, Berlin.

Emma Hedditch. I want to begin our conversation immediately - to constitute an association, a representation of my interest in an identification with you and them, not to be seen as a static set of relations based only on the past associations or on an individual author or narrative. This being is the most accurate description of what role or part I think an 'I' could activate, here and now. For it is a social history and accumulative past that breaks into the present, not one that charts isolated instances, accounted for through abstract behaviour, summoning concrete institutions that back up, prop up what we might better articulate as a desired life.Jimmy Robert works with diverse media including photography, collages, objects, art books, short films and performance.

In his explorations into the relationship between images and objects, Jimmy Robert draws attention to the dynamics of different surfaces. Questions of identity and its representation are his main interest, and he uses a variety of references to literature, art and music to emphasise the fragility of the materials he uses. Influenced by the Nouveau Roman genre and particularly by the novels of Marguerite Duras, Robert chooses to blur the meaning of his works. This results in subtle transitions from space to surface, from an image to its concept and from a text to an idea. These transformations of space and content are always placed in relation to the artist’s own body. In his performances Robert’s body becomes a projection surface, where the tension between the portrayal and the content reveal the relationship between appropriation and alienation.