Line up: Dr. Halbe Kuipers, Extra Extra
Open: 10:00 - 22:00 hrs
Tickets: € 0
Summer program of theory, creation and pleasure
Program:
10.00 – 13.00 @ Ventilator cinema - OT301
Atelier - CONVALESCING – thought, a matter of health? a proposition
Dr. Halbe Kuipers (UvA)
15.00 – 18.00 @ Ventilator cinema - OT301
Workshops
20.00 – late @ Ventilator cinema - OT301 & streets of Amsterdam
Audio walk - What comforts you at night.
Extra Extra
Program details:
10.00 – 13.00
CONVALESCING – thought, a matter of health? a proposition
Atelier
Dr. Halbe Kuipers (UvA)
In the preface of Human, All Too Human (1908 [1878]), Friedrich Nietzsche advances a remarkable practical conception of convalescence. He speaks of just lying in the sun, of seeing the patches of sunlight on the wall during winter, of spinning out patience sitting sadly still… All this, for Nietzsche, is part of a process to become healthy, by which he means getting ‘healthier’. Convalescing is not only one of the most important elements of Nietzsche work, besides his doctrines of perspectivism, the will to power, and the eternal recurrence of the same, but it might just be that which all his work strives to: to become healthy is for Nietzsche a “fundamental cure for all pessimism”, which indeed incorporates all the other elements of his philosophy.
In this proposition, I will first try to unfold the different dimensions to Nietzsche’s conception of convalescence. This involves first a survey of the practical examples he gives and a seeing of their nature; then it involves its understanding in terms of a process, a process of getting healthier; thirdly, it involves a perspectival dimension wherein this process is, as Nietzsche says, always ‘for me’ – a ‘me’ that is always the creation of this very process rather than a presupposed ‘I’ or ‘Self’; finally, it involves grasping how this is for Nietzsche nothing but the work of ‘free spirits’, which brings me to the essential qualities of convalescing: gratefulness and modesty.
To make the proposition itself an exercise of practical wisdom, I then want to follow with a very simple question that follows Nietzsche’s line that there are some convalescents “who allow no day to pass without hanging a little song of praise on the hem of its departing robe.” My question in following is simple, what then is a day? What makes a day? Or rather, in Nietzschean fashion, which day? Can there be multiple days in a day, and how? With these questions, and accompanying examples, I want to open the floor to study the conception of a day as a process of convalescing.
15.00 – 18.00
Theatre of Drag: Healing, Action and Telenovela
Clara Saito (Jacuzzi)
The workshop invites people to participate in exploring themes such as dissociation, transformation, multiplicity of being/ characters and being a body and spirit in constant flexibility, which I believe is also a political way to experience the world. It is also an exploration of how we can bring together theory and practice, thought and action, the body and mind, and use performance and theater as a transformative and political way of expressing and acting upon struggles, but all of it in drag.
The project is informed by the Theatre of the Oppressed, a community-based technique developed by Augusto Boal, which uses improvisation exercises to help oppressed communities in Brazil find solutions to internal problems through active participation. The workshop includes creating characters, writing scripts, gathering social media content, performing for each other, and having discussions about the struggles the participants face in everyday life. The plan is to mix different tools and collect footage from the creation process and sketches to use in a final screening and live performance exhibition.
20.00 – late
What comforts you at night.
Audio walk
Extra Extra
Extra Extra magazine invites six artists to reflect and respond on the question “What comforts you at night?”. The artists’ audio recording of their reflections as podcasts will be available to the “Fuck Healing (?): The Insomniac Dreamers” audience to listen via their personal phones whilst flaneuring through the night streets and parks of Amsterdam city. The audio content and the spatial engagement with the dark contours of the city invite new encounters to the environment and relations to comfort by night. With audio contributions form the artists Fiep van Bodegom, Dea Kulumbegashvili, Abdelkader Benali, Philip Huff, Natasha Hoare and Fatos Ustek.
More info on the Fuck Healing (?) website