Performing Therapy

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Performing Therapy
Keynotes by
Nina Möntmann
Malin Arnell
Valentina Desideri
Moderated by
Annika Lundgren
Performance by
Yak Kallop
The third seminar in Performing
Resistance, a research project
by Annika Lundgren.
10.00
Departure by bus to undisclosed venue
10.45Coffee
11.00
Introduction by Annika Lundgren
11.15
Keynote by Nina Möntmann
12.00Lunch
13.00
Keynote by Malin Arnell
13.45
Keynote by Valentina Desideri
(via Skype)
14.30
Walking and talking in groups
15.30
Coffee and moderated discussion
17.00
Departure by bus back to Gothenburg,
we take the scenic route
17.45
Arrival at Skogen in Gothenburg
with welcome drinks
18.00
Introduction to Skogen and the
Resistance Archive with summary
of the seminar
18.30Dinner
19.30
Performance by Yak Kallop
20.30
Bar and socializing
Performing Therapy is the third seminar within the
framework of Annika Lundgren’s research Performing
Resistance, and will attempt to investigate how
therapeutic approaches can be a tool of, or a component
in, political resistance in a neo-liberal era.
The aim of Performing Resistance
is on the one hand to examine the
relationship between political art,
academicism and activism, and
on the other to locate and realize
the potential of political resistance
within the art academy. Previous
seminars have been dedicated to
looking at those perspectives on
a comprehensive level, charting
their scope through discussions
on the relationship between
inside/outside, thinking/doing,
antagonism/cooperation, and
citizenship/activism. The project
will now proceed to investigate
a number of specific strategies
employed within contemporary
art practices and academia.
Art and therapy are historically
linked through the concept of art
therapy, understood as a creative
method of expression that has
been used as a therapeutic
technique taking the dual roles
of diagnosis and cure. From this
perspective art therapy is linked
both to the genre Outsider Art
and to the idea of the—frequently
psychologically challenged—artist
genius.
Contrary to this traditional
function, however, therapy may be
used to identify and analyze social
and political hierarchies and
power structures or as a method
of de-programming us from the
rhetorics of neo-liberalism, curing
us from understanding ourselves
as passive consumers, regaining
our status as active citizens.
The seminar hopes to bring about
new reflections on the nature and
potential of therapy as resistance,
as this has been touched upon
by artists, philosophers and
psychiatrists but methods
have not yet been significantly
developed.
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Nina Möntmann — A Fluid Game: The
Dematerialization of Society and its Art Objects
The lecture examines the
immaterial character of
digitalization and virtuality as
a formative feature of current
societal realities against the
background of an art historical
discussion of the phenomenon
of dematerialization in concept
art as it was analyzed in 1968
by Lucy Lippard. Under different
circumstances than in the 1970s
today art finds itself again as
part of an interdependence
structure together with politics
and dematerialization. As an
example for a contemporary
work, Nina will introduce Tyler
Coburn’s piece U, which is based
upon an imaginary Gestalt therapy
session for a group of surveillance
monitors, designed to recalibrate
the employees for their task.
Nina Möntmann is a curator,
writer and Professor of Art
Theory and the History of Ideas
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at the Royal Institute of Art in
Stockholm. Her curated projects
include Fluidity (co-curated,
Kunstverein in Hamburg 2016);
Harun Farocki's A New Product
(Deichtorhallen Hamburg, 2012);
If we can't get it together. Artists
rethinking the (mal)functions of
community (The Power Plant,
Toronto, 2008); The Jerusalem
Show: Jerusalem Syndrome
(together with Jack Persekian),
2009; the Armenian Pavillion
for the 52nd Venice Biennial.
Recent publications include the
edited volumes Brave New Work.
A Reader on Harun Farocki’s film
A New Product (Cologne, Verlag
der Buchhandlung Walther König,
2014); Scandalous. A Reader on Art
& Ethics (Berlin, Sternberg Press,
2013); New Communities (Toronto,
Public Books/The Power Plant,
2009) and Art and Its Institutions
(London, Black Dog Publishing,
2006).
Malin Arnell
Through this lecture Malin Arnell
will engage in questions on the
abilities of bodies, orientations,
agential dis-/continuity,
choreographic entanglements,
political emancipation and nonpurposeful actions, by sharing
aspects of the project TO THIS END,
IT IS NOT ENOUGH, carried out in
Berlin, 2009.
Malin Arnell is an interdisciplinary
artist, researcher and educator
living and working in Brooklyn,
Berlin and Stockholm. Arnell is a
frequent collaborator with other
artists, activists and writers.
Through her practice, she explores
key issues for participating
in social environments by
emphasizing matter, doing,
and actions, focusing on the
experiences around/in/through/of
the body (my body, their body, our
body), through the incorporation of
affectivity between relationalities,
territories, and power. She was a
founding member of the feminist
performance group High Heel
Sisters (2002-2007) and she
co-founded YES! Association/
Föreningen JA! (2005-ongoing).
She completed an MFA in Visual
Arts at Konstfack (University
College of Art, Crafts and
Design), Stockholm (2003) and
was a Participant in the Studio
Program at the Whitney Museum
Independent Study Program, New
York (2009-2010). She is a PhD
candidate in Choreography at the
University of Dance and Circus
(Stockholm University of the Arts),
and was a visiting scholar in the
Department of Performance
Studies at the Tisch School of the
Arts, New York University (20122015).
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Valentina Desideri
Departing from her practices
of fake therapy and political
therapy, Valentina will speculate
on healing as a political process.
She considers healing as
something we do, a praxis—like
any treatment we might do when
something is not right—and
politics as the way we organize
life together. Both are practices
and as such they are performed.
Art here has perhaps a role to
play, by questioning their already
existing forms and by inventing
new ones.
Yak Kallop — Ego Boy Going Chronos
Valentina Desideri is an artist
currently based in Amsterdam.
She concocts her own conditions
of living, knowing and making. She
trained in contemporary dance
at the Laban Centre in London;
she did a MA in Fine Arts at the
Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam;
she does Fake Therapy and
Political Therapy; she coorganizes Performing Arts Forum
in France; she speculates with
Prof. Stefano Harney, she engages
in Poethical Readings with Prof.
Denise Ferreira da Silva; she is a
reader, and she writes.
Direction, scenography,
costumes, script
Yak Kallop
Original music
Kali Malone
Actors
Erik Bryngelsson
Karl Sjölund
Marianna Millais
Though this be madness, yet there is
method in ‘t. – Polonius
The late king of Denmark appears
to his son Hamlet in the form of a
ghost, revealing to him the truth
of his death, that it was in fact
Claudius - who has since married
Hamlet’s mother, the queen - that
murdered him. The ghost gives
Hamlet the task to avenge his
murder, a feat to which he is
not the master. This is the tragic
framework of Shakespeare’s play. In Yak Kallop's version the starting
point is the strange occurrence
that takes place in the third act,
namely the play within the play,
directed and aptly named "The
Mousetrap" by Hamlet himself.
The play plays a key role in
Hamlet’s quest to reveal his uncle
as the perpetrator of the crime,
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it, says Hamlet, "is the Thing
wherein, I'll catch the conscience
of the King".
Here, the theatre machine
is morphed into an external
investigative device, a polygraph
to prove the guilt of the new King
Claudius, proof that Hamlet need
in order to fulfill the demand of
the ghost and the destiny laid
upon him to "Revenge his foul and
most unnatural murder".
The psychoanalyst Otto Rank
considered the mouse-trap to be a
portrayal of the child’s witnessing
the parental coital scene, a
repressed memory containing a
mixture of desire and guilt that’s
brought to light, or rather, played
out. The neurotic writer, Hamlet,
lets the actor of the play within
the play live out this originary
traumatic encounter that he can’t
act out in reality. “Reality is for
those who cannot sustain the
dream.”
The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan
analyzed the role of the mousetrap not only in relation to the role
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of mad Hamlet and the actor, but
also to the spectator. In actuality,
the murderer exposed in the
mouse-trap is not homologous
to the real uncle in the tragedy of
Hamlet, but is rather homologous
to Hamlet himself. Lacan states
the following: "What, when all
is said and done, does Hamlet
cause to be represented there on
the stage? It is himself, carrying
out the crime in question, this
character whose desire […] cannot
be roused to accomplish the will
of the ghost, of the fantôme of his
father, and what it is a matter of
embodying passes by way of his
image which is really specular
here, his image is not in the
situation, the mode of carrying out
his vengeance, but of assuming
first of all the crime that must be
avenged."
Lacans point could be interpreted
as saying that it is in fact Hamlet
himself that conjures the crime
through the effective machine
of the theatre and its power
to create in the spectator a
sense of identification. The
revenge therefore comes prior
to the crime: before the play
scene, there was no crime, no
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perpetrator, only an objectless
desire for revenge.
In Ego Boy Going Chronos, the play
within the play serves as the axis
through which Yak Kallop places
you, the audience, in the position
of the uncle, the perpetrator,
the not yet guilty party of the
allegorical, senseless and rotten
shadow world of our kingdom.
Yak Kallop is a performing arts
collective based in Stockholm
working primarily with theatrical
means as a probe into the
historically grounded limits and
thresholds of representations of
political action. Having previously
attempted to sarcastically
“overthrow” the political scene
through indirect actions, under
the name “Psychic Warfare”, Yak
Kallop has abandoned any such
attempts and instead, flashlights
at hand, tries to excavate the
traces left by a vanished political
subject. What kind of expressive
space needs to be produced in
order for some non-actualized
potential to break through the
endless symbolic noise that
clouds any intuitive, reflective
judgement of the present?
Yak Kallop originated through
the collaboration with Valand
academy and Skogen, but has
also produced scenography
with Mattias Alkberg and is also
working on a long term project
focusing on witch trials from
different periods.
Utilising the practice of just
intonation manifested on electric
guitars and the buchla modular
synthesizer, Kali Malone organises
sound in a stream of machinelike compositional operations;
resulting in prismatically
oscillating spectral monoliths
and the permutation of static
and moving time. Kali Malone
is an american musician and
composer based in Stockholm
since 2012. In addition to her solo
work she is also part of the music
constellations Hästköttskandalen,
Sorrowing Christ, Swap Babies
and has released music with
Fylkingen Records, XKatedral,
OMA333, Bleak Environment and
Ascetic House.
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Some questions we hope to address
within Performing Therapy:
—— How does the employment of therapeutic
strategies as a tool for political resistance
affect the relationship between power and
resistance?
—— Who is the target/recipient of the therapy—the
resisted enemy or the resisting self?
—— How does therapeutic concepts such as closure,
healing and forgiveness relate to resistance?
—— What are the benefits of therapy as a form of
resistance as compared to other strategies?
Performing Resistance is a research
project by Annika Lundgren, with
support of the research board at Valand
Academy and the independent cultural
platform Skogen. The project concerns
itself with discussing the relationship
between inside and outside, between
thinking and doing and between
antagonism and cooperation.
performingresistance.org