Framer Framed

25 Jun 2021
13:00 - 15:00

Online Roundtable: Live Together Otherwise

The program Now water can flow or it can crash, my friend consists of a series of online/offline roundtable discussions, interactive workshops, screenings and lectures to explore notions of art, archive, and activism in the context of East Asia and beyond. After May programs that connected the democratic struggles and fluid activism of Taiwan, Hong Kong, and South Korea, we now continue with our June program. First up: an online roundtable exploring creative ways to live together in times of crisis.

Online Roundtable

Date: June 25th, 13:00 – 15:00
Moderator: Reinaart Vanhoe
Panelists: Members from Dinghaiqiao Mutual-Aid Society and Soeng Joeng Toi (SJT)

Register
The event is FREE and has limited spots. Please register to join the workshops via Eventbrite. The language is English.

How do we live together when we are faced with restrictions, if not oppression, and especially in the time of crises? How to act like water to create or find the gaps in the control systems to address social issues? Would mutual-aid provide some possibilities in these situations? How to collegially organise ourselves together while still leaving space for openness and publicness? In this roundtable, the members of two independent platforms in China will share their experiences and reflections on the questions above.

Contributors

Reinaart Vanhoe is an artist, author and teacher. He studied contemporary art in Belgium and the Netherlands. He is an alumni of the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. His art practice spans a wide range of media ranging from drawings, photographs, videos and installations.

Dinghaiqiao Mutual-aid Society (DMaS), initiated in 2015, is located in a historical working-class neighbourhood with a vibrant migrant population in Shanghai. It is a self-organised collective, sharing a shanty town space for living, learning, proposing, reflecting, organising and creatively working together. By repositioning the labor of art and knowledge, it pursues the potential for alternative relational imaginations of the society through the practice of mutual-aid.

 Soeng Joeng Toi (SJT) is a platform-dependent and synergic project initiated in 2016, officially founded in 2017. It stems from the needs of artists for mutual perception/practice space, and this requirement has been tested in the “Banyan Travel Agency” project.

Background of the Series

How to live life in a time of intense insecurity? A pandemic time, with a climate crisis looming and with populism, systematic racism worldwide on the rise? What can we learn from art practices and recent social movements hailing from East Asia to imagine a more sustainable future from our own situated context? The title of this program, taken from Hong Kong American martial artist Bruce Lee’s philosophy, reminds us that resilience and care come from fluidity, flexibility, and tenacity. In a turbulent time, we need even more so friends close and afar to make alliances for a journey in building a better world.

Together with artists, collectives, activists, and scholars, this new series digs into the question: what role do cultural practitioners play in social movements in East Asia? How do they transgress nation-based boundaries and join the flows with others? How can we archive actions that are always in flux, and so often, on the verge of destruction, disappearance, and alteration by the ruling powers? What symbolic and material techniques do artists mobilise to address ethics of resilience? And how can such artistic practices be restored so that we can learn from them?

In the coming months, we invite you to explore the various forms and creative potentials of resistance, remembrance; of fluidity, porosity, non-oppositionality, and care. Through this program, we advocate for a better world where we attend to our interconnectedness, where we float freely yet at the same time hold each other firmly, like water—formless and shapeless, maybe, but also more resilient.

Credits

This series is a collaboration of Framer Framed and ASCA/University of Amsterdam.

Research Team: Emily Shin-Jie Lee, Jiyoung Kim, Yvette Lok Yee Wong, Zoénie Liwen Deng
Visual identity & Graphic Design: Simo Tse
Facilitator: Jeroen de Kloet

Agenda

Network

Soeng Joeng Toi

Independent platform

Reinaart Vanhoe

Artist