From August 2022 to January 2023, Varia Library and Rotterdam Electronica Depot hold Read & Repair events on the last Saturday of every month. We invite you to visit our space, make yourself comfortable, read or repair some things together, and share thoughts and ideas. For these events a vegetarian lunch will be served in the hour between workshops.
For this month, we will be exploring the theme Poetry and Finance.
READ
Date: Saturday, 24th September 2022
Time: 11:00-13:00 CEST
Location: Varia (Gouwstraat 3, Rotterdam)
LUNCH
13:00 - 14:00 we share a free, catered lunch. Please email us if you have any dietary restrictions at readandrepair@varia.zone.
REPAIR
Date: Saturday, 24th September 2022
Time: 14:00-16:00 CEST
Location: Varia (Gouwstraat 3, Rotterdam)
To have a better idea of how many people to expect, please let us know at readandrepair@varia.zone if you are attending one or all of the sections of Read & Repair. For this Repair, we kindly ask participants to bring any plastic bags they have lying around their house, a hair dryer and an iron. Varia will also provide a few of these items.
READ
The Read will be guided by Sara Hamadeh.
The starting point of this session is the concept of insolvency, referring to not only the refusal to pay the costs of economic crisis, but also as rejection of the symbolic debt embodied in the cultural and psychic normalization of daily life. The reading session is aimed at discussing and exploring, collectively, the different processes through which today’s techno-linguistic machine shapes and operates our social body. Concerned with financial abstraction, language automation, and written code as means of inscribing pragmatic futurities, the selected texts navigate through the complications of contemporary crises, from financial collapses to border-nation failures and cyber warfare.
Sara Hamadeh is an artist, researcher, and cook based in the Netherlands. A jack of all trades, Hamadeh has worked as an archivist, musician, film editor, media archeologist, producer, and professional cook over the past years, laying out a patterned practice that continuously evokes fictions as methodologies to navigate and work through the conditions of crises, from financial collapses to (cyber)warfare. Recently, her work has been focused on food as a vehicle and provocation for notions of grief, militarism, and historical violence. She is currently a tutor at the Willem de Kooning Academy, Rotterdam.
REPAIR
The Repair will be guided by Toon Fibbe.
To trade in wind, windtrade, or in dutch; windhandel - became a common way to refer to stock market trading during the first international stock market crisis in 1720. The new stockmarket seemed like hot air to people - windhandel perfectly referenced its game of gamble and empty promises while simultaneously referring to the wind necessary for the boats to sail that made the colonial trade possible - after all that was what was invested in.
As this new and fundamentally abstract financial system began to take hold of the world so did the attempts to find images, language and metaphors that could grapple precisely with its abstractions. Taking cues from the books, images and plays that dealt with the windhandel we will collectively make inflatable sculptures, air dancers and wind chimes while thinking about the ways in which finance’s infrastructures have infiltrated even the most intimate realms of our lives, hoping that perhaps this time the wind will offer us a more collective, new type of speculative imagination.
The driving force of Toon Fibbe’s practice lies in the thinking, writing, acting and enacting of characters - this activity spawns objects, texts, videos and performances. By departing from the perspective of historical characters he converts the abstractions of finance into unexpected theatrical images, dripping sculptures and installations in which finance begins to scream, bankers walk on heels and derivatives start to bleed.
Fibbe studied at the Rietveld Academy and the Piet Zwart Institute. He participated in residency programs such as VanEyck Academie, Deltaworkers New Orleans, Kunsthuis Syb. Recent exhibitions, performances and screenings have been included in WIELS Brussels, W139 Amsterdam, MuHKA Antwerp, MAMA Rotterdam, M Leuven.
Our August 2022 to January 2023 programme is funded by Gemeente Rotterdam.