Platform event 2023 @ Perdu

Recap: on May 10, four student-led research platforms held their annual public presentation event, at Perdu in Amsterdam.

Crip the Curriculum, Bread Oven, Material Monopolies & Motormond shared a fraction of their activities. Alec Mateo, previously organiser of platform Recipes for a Technological Undoing, was the host.

A transcript of Alec's presentation follows below, accompanied by photos by Jordi de Vetten:

Good afternoon everyone, thanks for joining us today here at Perdu to engage with the incredible work of student organizers at the Sandberg and Rietveld Institutes. My name is Alec Mateo, and I am an artist, writer, and also a recent graduate of Sandberg. During my time there, I was fortunate enough to take part in the organization of a platform through the Editorial Board of Intercurricular Programmes, just like today’s presenters, and now with some space between me and my time at Sandberg, I can say with confidence it was one of the most fruitful experiences I had at art school.

The Editorial Board of Intercurricular Programmes is a working group, instated in order to structurally support & stimulate experimental intercurricular and self-organized education. Through this initiative, students are given resources and assistance in the development of their own pedagogical efforts, developing workshops, lecture series, performances, and everything in between in the hopes of enriching the community of creative thinkers they find themselves in.

Together with fellow students Ladipo Famodu and Lauren Fong I took part in organizing Recipes for Technological Undoing, in which we sought to challenge the deterministic logics of technological development, with particular focus on the realm of automated systems and artificial intelligence. We organized lectures by exciting thinkers like Katherine McKittrick, and workshops on generative language models as well as deep fake technology. The topics we explored were fascinating, and reached far outside what I would have normally understood to be my practice, broadening the scope of my creative vocabulary and creating networks within which to explore those vocabularies.

Outside of the wealth of learnings generated through the content we explored, what I felt was an incredibly powerful experience afforded by the Editorial Board was the opportunity to engage in material negotiations with an institution. These negotiations are foundational to how a critical creative practitioner materializes their theoretical allegiances. Understanding the delicate work that goes into creating moments of learning and exploration,within (or alongside and at times in spite of) a bigger institution, allows for insights into what building imagined togethers could look like in a world so often dictated by neo-liberal violences. These are challenging negotiations so frequently punctuated by precarity. Getting the opportunity to begin parsing these negotiations alongside the development of a practice creates a healthy dialogue between one’s own work and the kinds of togethers that it can engender within the buildings it exists in. You begin to understand how your work moves people, and can begin making decisions on how best to contribute to the most joyful version of that movement.

Today's first presentation, Crip the Curriculum, is a platform organized by Harriet Foyster, Pernilla Philip, Alcide Breaux, Akash Sheshadri and Menko Dijksterhuis, dedicated to dismantling ableist structures by re-thinking methods of creating, communicating, and caring.

They will be starting the program with a workshop titled “Experimentation in the Age of Bio-Hacking: Navigating Ethical Boundaries” in which we will, with the guidance of Dariia Dantseva, have a hands-on experience while we engage in questions of ethical boundaries of self-experimentation and the possibilities of biohacking.

Next up, Bread Oven, made up of Quirine Kennedy, Yasemin Surek, Mara Thogersen, Elisabeth Vervecken and Finn Overdevest, is a platform that organizes community gatherings around a bread oven where people can bring their own dough and learn how to bake it and share meals together.

In this workshop Bread Oven they will talk about how to dry out a sourdough starter by spreading it over a large piece of fabric in order to dry it, store it, and then rehydrate it for later use, and how traveling with such a piece of dried fabric can be a way of circulating sourdough flora from one place to another.

Material Monopolies, run by Monique Todd, Weronika Wojda and Rick Geene is a forum for thinking through material/ity/ism via the aesthetic categories of excess & minimalism. They will read from The Dark Object by Katrina Palmer, as well as three self-authored texts, written for this occasion.

Motormond will today be re-presented by Musoke Nalwoga and Kenza Badi, who look back on their activites from 2020 and until now. They are the gallery in subversion, a project that developed as a reaction to the consequences of the BLM movement and aim to be a resource for BIPOC artists on the Amsterdam cultural scene.