Proud to announce to be one of the ten Fellows who got a 2018/2019 research position at BAK, basis voor actuele kunst in Utrecht. I am going to develop a curriculum of #CommunityLearnings and developing test sites to enact trainings for the “Not Yet.” #TrainingForTheNotYet

The other Fellows are: writer, researcher, and curator Katayoun Arian; anthropologist, curator, and activist Jessica de Abreu; artist, activist, and womanist Patricia Kaersenhout; artist, writer, and curator Charl Landvreugd, and artist and educator Haseeb Ahmed; curator and educator Thiago de Paula Souza; artist Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh; researcher and theorist Lukáš Likavčan; and artist, educator, and researcher Mick Wilson.

Since 2017, BAK conducts a post-academic program in the form of the BAK Fellowship, offering ten research positions per year (September–June) to Netherlands and internationally based practitioners involved in contemporary arts, theory, and activisms. The Fellowship Program develops talent and critical practice in concert with the public experimental projects of BAK, advancing the notion of art as a public sphere and a political space. The BAK Fellowships is low-residential, with possible residency accommodation for one practitioner otherwise unable to travel back and forth for meetings due to political conditions and/or incommensurable circumstances. The Fellows regularly gather at BAK for intensive, collective seminars and workshops with visiting artists, scholars, and other cultural practitioners.


FELLOWSHIP RESEARCH TRAJECTORY (JEANNE VAN HEESWIJK)

Training for the “Not Yet” develops a curriculum of community learnings through theoretical frameworks, performative workshops, creating “learning objects,” and developing test sites to enact trainings for the “not yet.”

How to collectively shape the places we live and engage in deep cultural exchanges among different communities? How to influence the processes of design, regulations, policy making, and take responsibility? These are political questions of how people live in the city. How to construct something according to desires whilst transcending the individual and attaining the collective needs? To do this requires open, conflicting, and radically inclusive processes, learning from multiple methodologies that amplify and connect the various ways in which communities practice acts of resistance and create alternative forms of participation and negotiation in response to the political, social, economic, and emotional conditions of the city. By bringing collective exercises together, it is possible to build the foundation for a preparatory training program for entering into new relationality with one another, to become accountable to caring, and to engage in different forms of solidarity.