KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
Dr. Ine Vanoeveren | Contemporary music and flute, Chair of research group CREATIE, Royal Conservatoire Antwerp
Dr. Matthias Heyman | Jazz music, Postdoctoral FWO Fellow, University of Antwerp
Roel Arkesteijn | Curator, research group Body & Material Reinvented, Royal Academy of Antwerp
Juliane Bischoff | Curator, Munich Documentation Center
ABSTRACTS
Dr. Ine Vanoeveren Day 1, 17/3, 11:15 - 12:00
Virtual Co-creation in the Time of a Pandemic
These are bizarre times for artists and performers: no more performances, no more exhibitions, no more audience. Or are there? In recent months, many of us have focused on virtual concerts, VR exhibitions and live streams on the Internet. But for every ‘like’ or ’thumbs up' on Facebook, there's also criticism. The field of tension and the dormant polemics surrounding technology and art for decades is currently in its heyday.
How can we usefully work artistically with (the technology available to us)? And how do we incorporate this new aesthetics within our higher art education?
During this lecture different methods and experiments around virtual co-creation will be discussed, ranging from 'silent broadcasting' to 'DIY broadcasting' and a few new compositions, specifically made for a virtual environment. These methods were tested and developed by researchers of the contemporary research group CREATIE, at the Royal Conservatory of Antwerp.
Dr. Matthias Heyman Day 1, 17/3, 14:45 - 15:30
Historical Recreation in Jazz and Popular Music: Some Reflections
The past century has seen the rise of an interest in the historical recreation of Western classical music. Specialist-performers have reconstructed music from the Medieval to Baroque eras on stage, in the studio, and in historical venues. Often, the goal was to perform the music in its assumed ‘correct’ historical context. This practice became known as historically informed performance (HIP). Recently, HIP has been adopted to later classical music, including ‘jazzy’ compositions such as Rhapsody in Blue.
Yet, HIP is not an established practice in jazz and popular music. Many repertory bands are dedicated to a historical repertoire, but few attempt a full-scale historical recreation. Indeed, note-for-note reproductions such as of Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue (1959) by Mostly Other People Do the Killing on their album Blue (2014), are exceptions. This begs the question: Does historical recreation have a place outside of classical music? My answer is an unequivocal yes.
This keynote draws from my research, past and current, to discuss some opportunities and challenges that arise from recreating jazz and popular music. For my Ph.D., I reconstructed live and studio performances from Duke Ellington’s early 1940s orchestra in a historically informed way, e.g., by using the appropriate instrumentation and recording set-up.
More recently, I studied the Analogues, an unconventional Beatles tribute band. Gone are the mop-top wigs and Pepper uniforms; their focus lies on recreating the post-1966 records which the Beatles never performed live. The Analogues use their own ‘mode’ of HIP by reconstructing the intricate studio techniques and arrangements live on stage, aiming for complete aural accuracy by using the same analog, vintage instrumentation as the Beatles, such as a Mellotron.
While I don’t contend that HIP should be used as a means to appropriate the past and present the only ‘authentic’ version of a performance, these examples demonstrate some of the possibilities historical recreation offers as a research method.
Roel Arkesteijn Day 2, 18/3, 11:15 - 12:00
Artistic Strategies to Transform Ecologies
‘A dialectic between land reclamation and mining usage must be established. The artist and the miner must become conscious of themselves as natural agents. (-) The world needs coal and highways, but we do not need the results of strip-mining or highway trusts. Economics, when abstracted from the world, is blind to natural processes. Art can become a resource, that mediates between the ecologist and the industrialist.’- Robert Smithson, 1971
Since the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, many visual artists developed artistic strategies to reclaim, re-purpose and redevelop territories which had been degraded by industrial use or otherwise inappropriate human activities; to foster ecological change; or to otherwise employ inventive methodologies to physically transform local ecologies. Whereas few of them are still widely recognized today, such as Robert Smithson, many of these artists are still largely unknown to a wider visual art audience, or have nowadays even fallen into oblivion. Especially many female artists working in this field, who often juxtapose feminist and ecological issues, have never received the recognition they deserve. Departing from my practice as a museum curator who has showcased many of these artists, I will introduce some of these (ecofeminist) artists and the methodologies which they developed. In the age of the Anthropocene, we’ll urgently need to rediscover these pioneering artists and their innovative work, which should follow suit among younger generations of artists.
Juliane Bischoff Day 2, 18/3, 14:45 - 15:30
To Lay Bare the Questions that have Been Hidden by the Answers (James Baldwin)
How can we mobilize knowledge about the past that can help us to understand our present? Whose perspectives and experiences are represented in collective memory – and what does it tell about the way we live together? Can art contribute to foster a dialogue among various voices?
The quote chosen as the title for the presentation served as a leitmotif for an exhibition at the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism, titled “Tell me about yesterday tomorrow”, which took place in 2019/20. It extended the existing historical exhibition through works of art by more than 40 international artists and offered multifaceted approaches to history and memory. Thereby, it not only sought to bridge past and present but to reflect on the ways history is narrated. Remembrance of the past is crucial to the future of our democracies. While the history of National Socialism recedes into historical distance it is at the same time instrumentalized by right wing parties. As there are fewer and fewer time witnesses cultural artefacts that mediate historical experiences become more important. How can we keep history relevant for current day and activate it for a younger generation within a post migrant society?
The presentation focuses on the exhibition but gives further insight into the work of the Documentation Centre as well as a prospect in regard to a new memorial site that is currently in development.
BIOGRAPHIES
Belgian flutist and Doctor of Musical Arts, Ine Vanoeveren (b. 1986), is specialized in the music of Brian Ferneyhough. She obtained a DMA in Contemporary Music Performance in the class of Prof. John Fonville, at the University of California, San Diego. Ine won awards at the Action Classics Competition, Benelux Fluitconcours and was rewarded with a Belgian American Educational Foundation grant in 2013 and the Kranichsteiner Stipendienpreise for Interpretation by the Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt in 2016.
She is currently teaching contemporary flute at the Conservatoire Royal de Liège, chair of CREATIE and professor for Creative Project and interdisciplinary work at the Royal Conservatoire Antwerp. Ine is a welcome guest speaker at international conferences and universities. In 2018, she published her first book, Tomorrow’s Music in Practice Today.
Matthias Heyman (University of Antwerp, Belgium) is Postdoctoral Fellow for the Research Foundation – Flanders. He currently conducts a project on cultural values in international jazz competitions. In 2018, he obtained his Ph.D. with a study of Ellington bassist Jimmie Blanton. As a bass player, he has worked with Toots Thielemans, Bert Joris, and the Brussels Jazz Orchestra, among others. Additionally, Matthias is a board member of IASPM Benelux and the lead organizer for its October 2021 conference in Antwerp. His work has appeared in journals such as Jazz Perspectives, Popular Music, and Rock Music Studies, and he has presented at several international conferences, including the Duke Ellington Study Group conferences, the Jazz Education Network conferences, and various Beatles conferences. Matthias is currently preparing a monograph on Blanton (Oxford UP) and a co-edited volume on the Beatles and humour (Bloomsbury).
Roel Arkesteijn is a curator and author interested in forms of artistic engagement and activism. Since 2008 he has been curator of contemporary art at Museum Het Domein in Sittard, where he draws attention to artists who deal with social or political issues, are interested in gender questions, function as bridge-builders between different cultures, or actively engage in ecological matters. Arkesteijn completed his studies in art history at Leiden University in 1999 with a thesis on the reception of Joseph Beuys in the Netherlands. Since that time he has worked as a curator at the Museum of Modern Art in Arnhem (now Museum Arnhem), the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam and at GEM, museum of contemporary art, in The Hague. In recent years Arkesteijn has regularly served as visiting lecturer at the Radboud Universiteit in Nijmegen, the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Karlsruhe and at the Higher Institute for Fine Arts (HISK) in Ghent. As a guest professor, he teaches a seminar on art and ecology at the art academy in Antwerp, and he serves as a scientific assistant at the research group Body & Material Reinvented.
Juliane Bischoff is a curator and works at the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism. Together with Nicolaus Schafhausen and Mirjam Zadoff she curated the exhibition Tell me about yesterday tomorrow (2019-2020). From 2016 to 2019 she worked at Kunsthalle Wien, Vienn, where she curated the exhibition Kate Newby. I can't nail the days down (2018); and co-curated group exhibitions and discursive events such as How to Live Together (2017) and Political Futures (2018). Other institutions she worked for include Kunsthalle Basel (2012), and Ludlow 38, Goethe-Institut New York (2015). She is editor of the publications Kate Newby. I can't nail the days down (Sternberg Press, 2019) and Ineke Hans. Was ist Loos? (Sternberg Press, 2017) and has contributed to catalogues such as Karsten Födinger. Nischenhain (Strzelecki Books 2020), Malte Zander. Languor (Sternberg Press, 2019), Stefan Reiterer. 75 Templates (Mark Pezinger Books 2019), Olena Newkryta. folding unfolding refolding (Sternberg Press, 2017) and 2015 (edit. by Vivien Trommer, MINI/Goethe-Institut Curatorial Residencies Ludlow 38, 2015).