Strategies of Occupation (Ad)

Strategies of Occupation: Grabbing Land, and the Political Agency of the Artist
Thursday, November 29, 2007 – 2:00 to 5:00 p.m.
The New School
66 West 12th Street, #510
New York City
Admission: $8, free for all students, New School faculty, staff and alumni with valid ID

The exhibition “Land Grab” at Apexart gallery in New York, on view from November 7 through
December 22, presents an anthology of “grabbing” or claiming territory in current art practices.
Extending that inquiry, this accompanying workshop discusses the specificities and significance of
such occupations, shedding light on the artist as political agent.


The artistic positions considered here are not concerned with extra real estate or
anti-institutionalism. They contest a larger reality—the prolonged condition of emergency, for instance; the
global state of war and Orwellian group-think. Curators, theorists and artists (many participating
in the exhibition) will introduce their own strategies of occupation or ways of documenting and
criticizing them. The participants are also invited to analyze the positions taken up in the
exhibition: What does re-inscription of land stand for, as formulated in today’s art? What means do we
have, physical and intellectual, to occupy “land,” and how can this act be understood in a
post-colonial age? In a market-driven democracy, is occupation possible beyond capitalist desire? Who
is the ally, who is the audience? Finally: how can we define revolutionary subjectivity, the
power and potential to change the existing global order today, and what is its relation to “land”?


At the end of the workshop, a declaration will be created concerning the agency of the artist as
“land grabber,” a new definition of occupation, and a list of critical strategies of real,
utopian, or precarious occupation. This written or drawn work, together with transcribed parts of
the recorded discussion, will inform the matrix of a planned publication on strategies of (land)
occupation in the arts.

Facilitators:
Lillian Fellmann, Zurich, co-curator of “Land Grab”
Sarah Lookofsky, New York, co-curator of “Land Grab”

Participants:
Amy Balkin, artist, This Is the Public Domain, Los Angeles
Eteam (Franziska Lamprecht, Hajoe Moderegger), New York/Germany
Andrea Geyer, artist, New York
Jens Haaning, artist, Denmark
John Hawke, artist, New York
Albert Heta, Kosovo (invited)
Sergio Munoz Sarmiento, Clandestine Construction Company International
Vyjayanthi Rao, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, The New School for Social Research, New York
Martin Rosengaard, wooloo.org, Berlin
Felicity Scott, historian of modern and contemporary architecture and urbanism, Columbia
University, New York
Nato Thompson, curator, Department of Land and Space Reclamation (DLSR) (invited)

* This event is co-organized by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School and
presented as part of the center’s program cycle on “agency.”

Enthusiasm (II)

Let poets be poets artists artists
academics academics

what you say you want to be
the person you want

to be there is a shortage
of coal in Vertov's world

but five year plans must go on
there are shotages and

then there are shortages the
empty boxes strewn around

that yard would appear to any
one else potentialities but

the things we write to each other
are beyond wishing

or hope Pushkin writes no
thing has led to so much hopelessness

as the fact there once was hope
in Vertov's *Enthusiasm*

they are taking the steeples down
cleaning out the churches

smoke stacks in the background once
signs of progress seem

sinister I like the way
the soundtrack changes

from shot to shot like
we could finally see with our ears

your problem you say
is with "the image"

and I have given up
on being anything.

What Weight Raised (Quote)

Our body with its weight strives toward its own place. Weight makes not downward only, but to its own place also. The fire mounts upward, a stone sinks downward.... My weight is my love; by that am I carried, whithersoever I be carried. We are inflamed by thy gift and are carried upward: we wax hot within, and we go on.
~ Augustine, quoted in Jean-Francois Lyotard's *The Confession of Augustine*