2022-23

To approach a definition: the score is a notational device that connects the material of a discipline—ranging from music, dance, and performance to architecture, linguistics, mathematics, physics—and its systems of knowledge to a language that produces description, transmission, and signification, in order to be read, enacted, or executed in whatever form desirable.

What does the score represent? In what ways can it enact the live moment, and may the chronology traditionally embedded in that relationship be reversed, with the score preceding a moment of liveness?

...the score is not necessarily the site of documentation as representation. Granted, the score may change or adapt according to a live enactment and thus be considered as partially documentary to a moment of liveness. Also the language of the score, however (il)legible and/or abstract, does reference its live enactment. Yet it is never fully representative of the live event; as I will argue, its linguistic, temporal, and material qualities lie primarily within the moment of enactment. Nor is the score the site of originality from which to (re)enact. Its increasing status as a commodity, as a materialization of ephemerality, is thus essentially ironic: it does not represent the work, nor does it make the work static through notation. Rather, its merit seems to be the destabilization of both the notion of original and evidentiary documentation...

...The interpreter becomes as much the “author” of the score or composition as the composer, if not more so, and the prevalent dialectics of origin(al) and result should be abandoned.

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Urban cannibalism fits the ways in which our urban societies contribute to destroying our planet much better than metabolism, which in itself is nothing more than flows into and out of cities. Urban cannibalism offers us many opportunities to look for tendencies that defy such cannibalism; seedlings, walking, art pour l’ art, conviviality, anticapitalist escapes - as we believe that proposing these thematics will make ‘scoring’ more comprehensible for the students & tutors alike.

"Of course, the world is rapidly urbanizing, with the United Nations estimating that two-thirds of the global population will live in cities by 2050—2.5 billion new urbanites, by that count. For a century or more, the city has seemed like a vision of the future to much of the world, which keeps inventing new scales of metropolis: bigger than 5 million people, bigger than 10, bigger than 20. Climate change won’t likely slow that pattern by much, but it will make the great migrations it reflects more perilous, with many millions of the world’s ambitious flooding into cities whose calendars are dotted with days of deadly heat, gathering in those new megalopolises like moths to a flame.”

by the Brazilian poet and polemicist Oswald de Andrade.

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The Manifesto Antropófago (Cannibal Manifesto) 1928

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Walking in art goes back historically to the nineteenth century, where it finds its way into literature in the guise of the (male) flâneur. French writer Charles Baudelaire identified the flâneur as the »painter of modern life«. His slow and aimless wanderings were seen as a protest against consumerism in the newly developed shopping malls.
In the 1950s, the Situationist International group of artists and intellectuals methodically used walking in the city for psychogeographic field research. With subversive strolling practices – Dérive – they playfully reconquered the capitalistically shaped urban space. In 1976, sociologist Lucius Burckhardt developed the socalled Strollology at the University of Kassel.
The strategies of perception and appropriation of walking applied in this context are of undiminished topicality and influence not only urban research and urban planning, but indeed also art in a variety of different ways. A number of artists shifted their work to nature and outdoor spaces in the 1960s and 1970s as a critique of the constricting structures imposed by institutional galleries and museums.

The genre of Walking Art that formed in this process is historically defined as an art form occupied by a few, mostly male artists, with roots in Minimalism, Land Art, and Conceptual Art. Their walking focused on a direct human experience of the environment and a deceleration of urban life. It articulated the notion of a space that is structurally linked to the movement of the subject. Against the backdrop of a dominant culture, Walking Art sought to increase awareness of the coexistence of humans and nature.
In the twenty-first century, the act of walking has gained new importance as a social phenomenon as well as an artistic practice.

The group exhibition “WALK!“ highlights the facets of walking in current art production. Six chapters – Drifting, Observing, Not Walking, Storytelling, Walking, and Producing – explore the physical and mental landscapes from the perspective of walking. “WALK!“ provides an overview of this hitherto largely overlooked discourse, pointing out connections to current geopolitical, politico-economic, global, and ecological issues.

'Walking presupposes that at every step the world changes in some aspect and also that something changes in us'

José Oswald de Souza Andrade (January 11, 1890 – October 22, 1954) was a Brazilian poet novelist and cultural critic and one of the founders of Brazilian modernism. Manifesto Antropófago (Anthropophagist Manifesto) was published in 1928. Its argument is that colonized countries, such as Brazil, should ingest the culture of the colonizer and digest it in its own way. The text is explicitly inspired in Michel de Montaigne, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and André Breton, and is composed through a procedure of "deglutition" of some of the most renowned manifestos of the Western culture, such as the Manifesto of the Communist Party and the Surrealist Manifesto. Andrade distinguishes Anthropophagy from cannibalism (low anthropophagy) on the grounds that the former is a ritualistic practice to be found among indigenous peoples in Brazil; in this ritual sense, Anthropophagy functions as a rite of incorporation of the world-view of the ingested enemy.

By turning Anthropophagy into the motto of a manifesto, Andrade operates an inversion through which he affirms as the leitmotiv of a cultural movement precisely those practices based on which several indigenous peoples were considered as barbarians deprived of culture. Anthropophagy becomes thus a way for the former colony to assert itself against European postcolonial cultural domination. The manifesto's iconic line is "Tupi or not Tupi: that is the question." The line is simultaneously a celebration of the Tupi, who had been at times accused of cannibalism, and an instance of the anthropophagical rite: It eats Shakespeare. Antropofagia, as a movement, has a significant impact in multiple domains of Brazilian culture, such as theater, music and cinema.

As the lights flicker on a warm August night, amidst vacant Athens' stillness, a modern bohemian man in his early thirties flirts with a woman he has just met at a phone-booth while strolling around the city's quiet night streets; without a past or a future waiting for something to happen in the heart of a big city.
Cheap Smokes is a film (co-)written & directed by Renos Haralambidis. Described as a film of 'masculine romanticism' it was a box-office failure back in 2002, but has become a true cult -movie over the years. Some consider it a farewell song to an Athens that no longer exists.

In the Iranian ghost-town Bad City, a place that reeks of death and loneliness, the townspeople are unaware they are being stalked by a lonesome vampire.
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is a 2014 American Persian-language horror Western film written and directed by Ana Lily Amirpour.
Director, regarding the mythology of the vampire, has stated that: "A vampire is so many things: serial killer, a romantic, a historian, a drug addict – they're sort of all these things in one."
The film's protagonist, The Girl, is a sort-of anti-hero vigilante with a taste for bad men. As a vampire, she is able to roam the streets at night without being concerned for her safety, subverting the implications of the film's title. She is the perpetrator, not the victim, and possesses agency and power that would not be typically reserved for her in an environment such as Bad City. In this way, the film has feminist leanings.

A nocturnal ballad, narrated by Lily Cole, Night Burns Like Cigarettes questions the way we consume the night and explores the many issues surrounding over-lit cities. Why does darkness make us human? Why do we fear it? Together we reclaim the night, the stars and the ineffable.
What do we do in the night-time? What intimacies and secrecies are buried within the mysterious state in which we spend half our lives? Profound, introspective, nebulous, “between the night and us is a love story”, and it’s explored in gentle and musing depth in Elizabeth Felson’s documentary, Night Burns Like Cigarettes.
Following the meditations of “night-walking” Professor Nick Dunn, Felson presents an examination of night that is cool, mysterious, awe-inspiring. Interviews and monologues are interspersed with long, languid guitar melodies from musician KWAYE, dancing silently in a graffitied underpass or atop a roof, his eerie and whimsical voice like a strange, prophetic nightingale in a landscape otherwise silent and asleep.
This monochrome moonlit doc explores our changing relationship with night-time. Changes, even as small as the shift to sodium bulbs in streetlamps, have rendered the cities brighter, slowly obscuring and burning the night into nonexistence; it has become simply an extension of the daytime, rather than its own active state of being.
Told in a succession of mini chapters and narrated through voice, body, observation and music, Night Burns Like Cigarettes offers a viewing that is thought-provoking, gentle and considered – but never sleepy.

Walking from Scores' is a hundred or so collection of non site-specific protocols, instructions and textual and graphic scores centred on walking, listening and playing sound in urban environment. It explores the relationship between art and the everyday, the dynamics of sound and listening in various environments and the (porous) frontiers between artists and audiences. It starts with two premises: an interest in walking envisaged as a relational practice and tactic enabling us to read and rewrite space; an interpretation of scores understood as open invitations and catalysers of action in the tradition of Fluxus event scores.

Hungry for....
A nightwalking score proposed and rendered on sight by Parel Strik & Naomi de Bruijn ; a script for a nocturnal wolf-pack roaming and devouring the city, feeding their hunger for -among others- sounds, smells, a sense of place, history, adventure and mystery & 'harvesting' ingredients to sustain their temporal collective existence.

Collectively as a wolf pack we wander through the night with our hunger and on the hunt. Looking inwards or outwards we try to locate the hunger and still it. From eating oneself to our surroundings and/or our pack.

Halfway the hunt we share the harvest.
What are we hungry for? Is the hunger stilled? Raising the question what is our collective hunger or (how) can we hunt for each other?

The night ends with sharing the ingredients of the hunger and harvest.

Hydrofeminism (bodies of water)

To drink a glass of water is to ingest the ghosts of bodies that haunt that water.

Hydrofeminism: Or, On Becoming a Body of Water
Astrida Neimani

We are all bodies of water.
To think embodiment as watery belies the understanding of bodies that we have inherited from the dominant Western metaphysical tradition. As watery, we experience ourselves less as isolated entities, and more as oceanic eddies: I am a singular, dynamic whorl dissolving in a complex, fluid circulation. The space between our selves and our others is at once as distant as the primeval sea, yet also closer than our own skin—the traces of those same oceanic beginnings still cycling through us, pausing as this bodily thing we call “mine.” Water is between bodies, but of bodies, before us and beyond us, yet also very presently this body, too. Deictics falter. Our comfortable categories of thought begin to erode. Water entangles our bodies in relations of gift, debt, theft, complicity, differentiation, relation.
What might becoming a body of water—ebbing, fluvial, dripping, coursing, traversing time and space, pooling as both matter and meaning—give to feminism, its theories, and its practices?
.... Despite the fact that we are all watery bodies, leaking into and sponging off of one another, we resist total dissolution, material annihilation. Or more aptly, we postpone it: ashes to ashes, water to water.
At what point is the past overtaken by the present? What marks the definitive shift from one species to a “new” one? Where does the host body end and the amniotic body begin? Our bodies are thresholds of both past and future. The precise material space-time of differentiation is only a matter of convenience, but any body still requires membranes to keep from being swept out to sea altogether.
There is always a risk of flooding.

And then, what about the fact that we're made of 70% water? And then the whole ocean reacts to the full moon, right? In a serious way. Everything's ticking around that moon and if we're 70% water I must be having some — at least homeopathic — relationship with the changing cycles of the moon...

...I'm worried that the ecology of the world is collapsing and that I won't have anywhere to be reborn because I actually believe, like, where is any of us going? Where have any of us ever gone? We've come back here in some form. Did you know that whales were once land roaming mammals? And then they crawled back into the ocean trying to find something to eat? And then eventually they got rid of their hands and legs.
I've been searching and searching for that little bit of my constitution that isn't of this place and I still haven't found it. Every atom of me, every element of me seems to resonate, seems to reflect the great world around me. So, I've come to the conclusion that this is God's best idea — that this manifest world is the frontier of his dream, or her dream in my opinion. So, that's just my point of view from where I can start to establish a new way to value the world that I'm a part of. Cause if I'm not heading off to paradise elsewhere when I die then I have more of a vested interest in observing a sustainable relationship with this place.
"It's a very indigenous idea that the Earth is a female, that the Earth menstruates, that the water of the world is the blood of a woman's body and that's what we crawled out of just in the same way that we crawled out of our mother's wombs. It's the most basic idea; any child could come up with it and it's so obvious. And yet we've been straining for these Sky Gods for a couple thousand years now....

...And I'm very interested in the feminization of the deities. I'm very interested in Jesus as a girl. I'm extremely interested in Allah as a woman...

...But nonetheless, Allah as a woman is a critical threshold and Buddha as a mother is another one because I truly believe that unless we move into feminine systems of governance we don't have a chance on this planet.

Future Feminism - Anonhi (2012)

Eco: home. Tone: tension.
We must learn to be at home in the quivering tension of the in- between. No other home is available. In-between nature and culture, in-between biology and philosophy, in-between the human and everything we ram ourselves up against, everything we desperately shield ourselves from, everything we throw ourselves into, wrecked and recklessly, watching, amazed, as our skins become thinner.

If we are all bodies of water, then we are differentiated not so much by the “what” as by the “how.” But what are the specific mechanisms of this differentiation?

Attention to the mechanics of watery embodiment reveals that in order to connect bodies, water must travel across only partially permeable membranes. In an ocular-centric culture, some of these membranes, like our human skin, give the illusion of impermeability.
Still, we perspire, urinate, ingest, ejaculate, menstruate, lactate, breathe, cry. We take in the world, selectively, and send it flooding back out again.

This selection is not a “choice” made by our subjective, human selves; it is rather always, as Nietzsche has taught us, an impersonal expression of phusis’ nuances—affirmative material energies striving toward increasingly differentiated forms.

In acknowledging this corporeally connected aqueous community, distinctions between human and nonhuman start to blur.
We live in a watery commons, where the human infant drinks the mother, the mother ingests the reservoir, the reservoir is replenished by the storm, the storm absorbs the ocean, the ocean sustains the fish, the fish are consumed by the whale.

The bequeathing of our water to an other is necessary for the custodianship of this commons.
But when and how does gift become theft, and sustainability usurpation?

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[ blue text = abstracts from Hydrofeminism ]

Small bodies of water by Nina Mingya Powels

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Home is many people and places and languages, some separated by oceans.
Nina Mingya Powles first learned to swim in Borneo - where her mother was born and her grandfather studied freshwater fish. There, the local swimming pool became her first body of water. Through her life there have been others that have meant different things, but have still been, in their own way, home: from the wild coastline of New Zealand to a pond in northwest London.
This collection of essays explores the bodies of water that separate and connect us, as well as everything from migration, food, family, earthquakes and the ancient lunisolar calendar to butterflies. In lyrical, powerful prose, Small Bodies of Water weaves together personal memories, dreams and nature writing. It reflects on a girlhood spent growing up between two cultures, and explores what it means to belong.

Stalker is a 1979 Soviet science fiction art film directed by Andrei Tarkovsky with a screenplay written by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, loosely based on their 1972 novel "Roadside Picnic". The film combines elements of science fiction with dramatic philosophical, psychological and theological themes.

The film tells the story of an expedition led by a figure known as the "Stalker", who takes his two clients—a melancholic writer seeking inspiration, and a professor seeking scientific discovery—to a mysterious restricted site known simply as the "Zone", where there supposedly exists a room which grants a person's innermost desires.

The film's mysterious Zone has drawn comparisons with the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone that was established in 1986 (seven years after the release of the film) in the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster, and some of the people employed to take care of the abandoned Chernobyl power plant referred to themselves as "stalkers".
Though the film does not specify the origin of the Zone, near the end, in a shot of the Stalker with his family outside the Zone, what appears to be a power plant is visible in the background.
Midway in the film, the Stalker has an interior monologue in which he quotes the entire section 76 of Lao Tse's Tao Te Ching, the text of which characterizes softness and pliancy as qualities of a newborn, hence, new life; hardness and strength, on the contrary, are qualities nearing death. ("Man, when he enters life, is soft and weak. When he dies he is hard and strong.")

oct. 12
night-walking Werkspoor

nov. 2
walking Jaarbeurs

Lady who was pregnant for 5 months for 5 years

Found in a very windy city, walking with the sun / following the sun to give us comfort!
The Pyrocene is a proposed geological epoch characterized by humans' use of fire, especially How the burning of fossil fuels impacts Earth.
The influence of the sun on our streets.

While we were in the shadows, we were facing new building constructions that are emphasizing their design on green integration and sustainability.

We departed from the heat island ‘Jaarbeursplein’ where the highest temperature ever recorded there was 55,5 degrees Celsius.
The hottest spot of the city is where the tallest buildings are located.

Feeling calmth in the city or calmth in the countryside.

We separate into two groups, one concerned with embodying a criminal attitude and another on ecology and the body.

Re-Nature
Mine shafts in regions of Maastricht for example, re-using the spaces of the mine shaft and filling them with water to recreate nature.
Extractivism
What about rebuilding nature by creating a manmade nature?
There are climate parables such as plastic panic. They can distract us from the real deal.
Darkness. Designed.

Hydrofeminism
Our bodies being able to create stones,
We are 70% water
Everything is us and we are part of everything (on co-existing and oneness)
Full moon fucks us up, but it also fucks up the tide.
The stone: is following a completely different timeline.
Deal with the mortality of the past; then we can continue.

Human body has a direct relationship with nature.
Why do we call the natural sources feminine or masculine?
Each generation blames the previous generation for the urgency that exists today.
How being sustainable means we give up our comfort?!

Being a CRIMINAL in the urban area
Need to know the blueprints of the buildings to know the weak points
Going through a construction site next to Jaarbeurs, the ADVERTISEMENTS on the outskirts are kinda absurd: “bringing nature back to urban area”, “welcome to Nowhere” whereas the visions and walk paths were blocked from entering.
Construction elevator went up, quite quietly.

Civil disobedience
Places are described as specific codes.

Consuming an infrastructure, escapism.
When you swim in the city canal, does it feel like you’re swimming in nature?

Ester dropped a secret message for a bypasser.
It was a photo of the building.

When we found the photo, Ester unintentionally communicated with us.

IN THE EVENT HALL
Entering one of the accessible halls:
we realize it is the determined hall for Comic Con. It is a huge space that made us wonder about its politics, usage of space and functionality. Navigating the space we pondered on vantagious access points, timing (e.g. for breaking and entering), disguising and blending with the Jaarbeurs ecosystem. The space looked frozen between stillness and activity, with a few workers slowly putting up small parts of the conference.
We began thinking about what crime we could do there as criminals.
Friso talked to someone preparing the snacks stall. He will earn a holiday from the coming ComiCon.
MOMENTS, COFFEE & TEA

IN THE BACKSPACE
Went into the staff/logistics/loading room and had free tea and coffee. A guy told us of a Bulgarian group that was living in one of the unused storage spaces.

There was this guy, who said we can come inside backstage.
He was happy to see us there. Though his supervisor and coworker looked at us, more suspiciously.

Friso: “We were criminals”. That was the first thing he said. The guy still smiled. I (Hohn) thought if the same thing happened in China, we could be in deep shit. Is this what “advanced country” is like?

And this dude, with glasses and beard and sideburns. A little belly of his might indicate that he’s one jolly fella. Even after he heard that we said we were criminals, trying to figure out “weak spots” of this mega-construction.

“I’ve been working here for 8 years.” He said. “We are looking for weak spots in this building,” said Friso. The logistic worker said: “Actually, I didn’t open the door for you, did you guys realize that?” (Wow, this guy just told us everything!) After that this guy also told us how to navigate to the surveillance room, the eyes of the facility.

Friso explained fully where we were coming from. HKU MAFA program.

“You can have free coffee,” the more suspicious employee said. “Oh wow!” Are we legit guests, instead of criminals now? Guess this is how they treat criminals!

The toilet in this workspace is quite huge, guess they have a rather big crew there. I (Hohn) wanted to work in this place!

Then we left the building, saw the sun again.

The head of security came after us when we left the building.
He was a tall, bulky/muscular guy and bald.
The head of security invasively grabbed Friso's shoulder and began interrogating him about our endeavors in the Jaarbeurs!
Had we just fulfilled our role as criminals?
We must have already turned the security 's attention onto us when we entered the logistics center and then asking around for the control/surveillance center must have been the tip of the iceberg!

I saw the security guy coming and took a photograph. My best work yet.
Also a pretty scary situation in a way of how unnecessary it seemed. Friso kept cool though. We succeeded in our criminal efforts. Well. I mean we got the information about the place and got away with it. I think that the security guy confronting us at the end counts as an unsuccessful attempt.

I found it interesting how we could be considered as a part of staff or “allowed to be in space” because we acted like it. I don’t think we would get followed by the security guy if we hadn't talked to the actual staff later.