SOMA Summer 2013 will take place from July 01st to August 09th, 2013. Application deadline: Online applications will be accepted until Monday April 01st, 2013. However, the size of the group is limited to twenty-five participants. The application review process will begin Friday March 01st, 2013.
Applications are available here
Though not exclusively, workshops and seminars this summer will focus on the re-performance of history. Through examination of performance and its mediation (photo, video, and other forms of documentation), the group will explore the ways in which narrative, appropriation, fact/fiction and other devices simultaneously question and shape ideological subject positions both within individual and mass consciousness. Conventions of storytelling, archival research and the role of memory will all figure into group discussion.
*All activities and visiting artists/curators below posted have been confirmed. Nevertheless any information is subject to change.
WEEK 01 – Mon Jul 01st to Fri Jul 05th
Group Critique: 12 hour group critique with Carla Herrera-Prats
These first two sessions allow participants to get familiar with each other. Everyone present a selection of works to the group for about fifteen minutes. We address the social, political and aesthetic implications raised by each project.
Off sideDF: 6 hour site specific workshop with Eduardo Abaroa The workshop takes place in tow different non-academic locations around Mexico City. By getting to know our surroundings and their history, we reflect and discuss on the concepts involving site-specificity and the possibilities of art to comment on specific cultural, political, social and geographical situations.
Miércoles de SOMA: Enrique Méndez de Hoyo
Studio Visit: Eduardo Abaroa
Individual critiques with: Eduardo Abaroa, Anthony Graves, Carla Herrera-Prats, Yoshua Okón, Luis Felipe Ortega, Raul Ortega, Tyler Rowland.
WEEK 02 – Mon Jul 08 th to Fri Jul 15th
Theaters of Memory: 9 hour seminar with Carmen Cebreros Urzaiz
Memories become embeded in spaces and objects, but memory is not only thought. Its activation relies in touch, contact and movement. How objects come to inhabit our lives, how they sit in our spaces, and which uses they acquire are all performed actions upon them. Houses that become museums are sets that invitate to invoke the presence of a character who invented him/herself through the images and objects he/she collected and the way they came to live together. The seminar will analyze strategies in artistic production where objects, spaces and their associations function as autobiographical strategies, or possibilities for a script —ultimately to be performed by somebody else.
Miércoles de SOMA: Adam Kleinman
Studio Visit: Yoshua Okón
Individual critiques with: Carmen Cerberos, Carla Herrera-Prats, Adam Kleinman, Maria Minera, Tyler Rowland, Paola Santoscoy, and Melanie Smith.
WEEK 03 – Mon Jul 15 th to Fri Jul 19th
Performance’s Incorporation: 9 hour critical theory seminar with Mariana Botey and Amy Sara Carroll
Thinking a politics of location, in this 9 hours seminar, we will explore performance’s incorporation or absorption into a range of inter-American conceptual –isms. To be clear: our focus on “incorporation,” with any luck, will allow us to circumvent, but also acknowledge (neo)liberal and humanistic accounts of identity and difference, to enjamb nationmarket performativities into our assessments of the aesthetics’s use and exchange value (in a manner that acknowledges the de- and neo-colonial). Departing from the story often told in U.S.-based Performance Studies, which narrowly falls back on identitarian narratives, we will work to eschew the fetishization of the body as a transparent signifier of the subject and/or intersubjectivity (because, ironically it doesn’t accord the medium the interiority or presence of mind to even think the conceptual). Simultaneously, we’ll strive to sidestep the terms forwarded in reductionist debates that posit a “relational” aesthetic unnecessarily in solely (Western) art historical terms (because multiple 1968s teach us to account for the tics of site specificity as well as the tick of periodization). In our discussions, reference materials, and exercises, we’ll turn to the messier realms of the interobjective, the body, the nation, the commodity/logo as objects/ready-mades that return as “critical fetishes” in post-cotemporary artivist, hybrid, socially engaged inter-mediated practices. And, to that end, our privileged ‘case study’ will be 1990s Mexico (its embrace and distanciation from orphaned moniker of ‘performance’), its now dispersed fragments (including SOMA and the “we” of Carroll/Botey doubled-voiced performance).
Miércoles de SOMA: Mariana Botey and Amy Sara Carroll
Studio Visit: Abraham Cruz Villegas
Individual critiques with: Magali Arriola, Mariana Botey, Amy Sara Carroll, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Irving Dominguez, Ricardo Dominguez, and Carla Herrera-Prats.
WEEK 04 – Mon Jul 22 nd to Fri Jul 25th
So what do I expect?: 9 hour seminar with Gerard Byrne
The seminar will focus on the ambitions and capacities of artistic practice to engage with questions beyond its own ontology, when located within the parameters of the gallery. Lead by an artist with a partisan interest in particular / peripheral aspects of the question, the orientation of the discussion will be directed to questions of temporality, and in particular the image of the past in the present tense of the gallery.
Miércoles de SOMA: Gerard Byrne
Special lecture: Vincent Normand
Studio Visit: Galia Eibenschutz
Individual critiques with: Eduardo Abaroa, Etienne Bernard, Gerard Byrne, Galia Eibenschutz, Anthony Graves, Carla Herrera-Prats, Yoshua Okón, Luis Felipe Ortega, and Raul Ortega.
WEEK 05 – Mon Jul 29 th to Fri Aug 01st
Re-Live, Re-Enact, Re-Perform: 9 hour seminar with Coco Fusco This seminar will focus on recent debates about artists delegating actions to others to create performance, artists reproducing works by others as performance, and artists re-enacting historical events as performance. We will consider works by Sharon Hayes, Marina Abramovic, Jeremy Deller and Santiago Sierra and we will discuss texts by Claire Bishop, Hal Foster, Shannon Jackson, Amelia Jones and others. Miércoles de SOMA: Coco FuscoStudio Visit: Enrique Mendez de Hoyo (on Friday August 02nd) Individual critiques with: Miguel Calderón, Helena Chávez, Bernard Etienne, Coco Fusco, Carla Herrera-Prats, Enrique Mendez de Hoyos, Víctor Palacios, Bárbara Perea
WEEK 06 – Mon Aug 05 th to Fri Aug 09th
Preparation for Open Studio
Last comments with: Vincent Normand
Miércoles de SOMA: SOMA SUMMER OPEN STUDIOS
The Open Studios will be coordinated by Vincent Normand – Wed. Aug. 07th
Visit on Friday: Jumex Collection and Teotihuacán.
