Notes: 22.04.2021 Assembly

Museum of Care projects, a new proposal for how to curate Museum of Care. Some thoughts about it here.

00:19:05 Mark : John, I’m not seeing the pdf in chat. Tx
00:19:19 Mark : *link
00:20:16 Yash Lad: I downloaded it on my laptop and and shared again — @Mark can you see it?
00:24:36 John Fass: file posted again for those who joined late
00:25:37 Oihane: I cannot see any pdf or link either
00:31:08 John Fass: I have to go folks, so sorry. You can email me at johndotfassatgmaildotcom if you want the PDF.
00:32:09 Clare: Totally agree about using discord to decide on what will be discussed at next assembly. Who will do the rearranging of discord?
00:32:12 Yash Lad: @Simona — I’ve learnt a few more Discord tricks lately, happy to add to your presentation slides if it helps!
00:41:58 Simona F: https://discord.gg/cquZbpDr
00:44:13 Vassily Pigounidès: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fhgExRmhsjR1v-VsXlWBs1pwW62v-pfpIk6C7PoFqYU/edit?usp=sharing
00:45:21 Rachel Donald: I gotta bounce everyone! Have fun.
00:47:05 nika dubrovsky: https://museum.care/room/reading-group/
00:47:09 Vassily Pigounidès: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1h1rkoLUuwIzTX9vyKr1K2LWB7gBl5BCQ?usp=sharing
00:47:33 nika dubrovsky: Stephen Snelders author of the “The Devil’s Anarchy”
00:48:23 Gabi Zinha: what should be every two weeks sorry?
00:48:46 Charlie: @gabi – reading group
00:48:47 Oihane: The reading group
00:49:05 Gabi Zinha: oh like once a month?
00:49:15 Ellen Judd: I could help on Sahlins.
00:49:23 Simona F: it’s already every 2 weeks
00:49:31 Oihane: Twice a month I think gabi
00:51:10 nika dubrovsky: I also think twice a month
00:51:35 Vassily Pigounidès: Thanks Ellen that sounds great
00:52:34 Yash Lad: Great Adam Curtis documentary, based on a term that Alexeri Yurchak coined: Hypernormalisation – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3J6rU3NUMM0
01:02:46 Yash Lad: ah it’s his bday today, talk about coincidence! need to wish him
01:04:19 Yash Lad: Thanks all! Need to head now, but I will see you soon 🙂
01:05:07 Clare: Can you say what Oleg said Dennis?
01:05:23 Gabi Zinha: yeah
01:05:30 m heriv: The Escuadron 421 are 7 members, correction.
01:05:38 Tanya V: Gracias por hablando español! Can you translate Dennis?
01:09:15 Tanya V: Is it possible to have a representative of the Zapatistas come to the our meeting? And we can chat about a collaboration?
01:09:49 Steve Bachelor (he/his/him): ^^^^^
01:09:55 Dennis: that won’t happen…
01:10:00 Tanya V: porque
01:10:12 Dennis: they tend to be anonymous
01:10:15 Dennis: you can send invitation
01:10:19 Dennis: but i think the deadline passed? not sure
01:10:42 Tanya V: They still can be anonymous. But just an idea.
01:11:07 m heriv: That is not how the protocol works, the instructions have been rather clear through the communiques.
01:11:51 Tanya V: Sorry I like to break rules haha. And make it more casual …. Just a thought.
01:12:16 m heriv: Good luck, then!
01:12:34 Gabi Zinha: yeah zoom
01:14:37 ANDRIS BRINKMANIS: Dear All, I would need to leave but as a teacher and representative of NABA in Milan, Italy I would love to explain during one of the next meetings a project developed by Visual Arts and Curatorial Studies students in collaboration with me, called Critical Studies Department – which is a “fake” department of the school fully managed by students – an online resource for organizing meetings, presentations, working sessions, reading groups, visual workshops etc. with the aim to facilitate a study process, but also exchange between students. We experimented with different forms of working collectively and trying to develop strategies that then could also work offline. I will send more info and I hope we will be able to contribute. I would be also interested to contribute personally. Hoping to meet you all soon, Greetings. Andris
01:20:03 Anca Dimofte: https://museum.care/room/collective-documentary/
01:21:53 m heriv: Nice to see you all, good afternoon/evening. Take care!
01:23:54 Simona F: maj 20 or 27?
01:24:13 Anca Dimofte: 27 is close to bank holiday here
01:26:32 Simona F: 29 reading
01:28:21 Sevda Farokhi: let’s keep the reading group meeting as it is
01:29:32 Gabi Zinha: ok! i must do the dishes guy
01:29:36 Gabi Zinha: guys
01:30:10 Clare: thanks Charlie
01:30:12 Mark : Gotta go. I second what Charlie says about the amazing work of this horizontal group of irreducible dancers (Simona)

Notes from Assembly

by Simona Ferlini

The goal of our April 22th meeting was to take stock of what we have been until now, and discuss what we want to be and to do for the future. The main points of the discussion were:

  1. Museum of Care 3.0: how did we get here and a proposal for a system of “guest curators” for the MoC
  2. Review of some experiences of virtual museums and how we could use them
  3. Proposal to rearrange our Discord server
  4. Next reading group meetings – and planning for next meetings
  5. Some “rooms” we have up and running:
    1. Visual Assemblies project.
    2. Fighting Club.
    3. How to Make Decisions
Museum of Care 3.0: how did we get here and a proposal for a system of “guest curators”.

Nika started it with a short introduction on how the Museum of Care is born from Carnival4David and our collective will to keep the playful, free and caring spirit of it (see https://museum.care/history-of-museum-of-care/ ). She then made her proposal to have a system of “guest curators” to take care of the Museum in the future (see Museum of Care (3.0). She suggests having as a first group of curators: an editorial board of student-run popular journal dedicated to critiques of the modern university. Their 4 members are now under trial in Russia, charged under Article 151.2 of Russian law (”involvement of youth in activities that can be harmful to them”). Their professor Greg Yudin was facilitating the Museum of Care reading group about David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs last week.

Decision taken:

  • The Assembly agrees to have the group suggested by Nika as curators for the next two months (May and June). 
  • In our Assembly of May the 27th we’ll further discuss the technicalities of this proposal.
Review of some experiences of virtual museums and how we could use them

Clive made a proposal for a virtual Museum of Care: what could visiting a museum and being guided around become it in a virtual space? Could we imagine what it would be like to visit a museum if you were a fox, or a tree? What museums could become in a virtual space: a very basic architecture, that can be changed by people who are given access to the various rooms and via the rooms. In such a museum, how do you reach the rooms? How do you expand on what is within the rooms and give people the tools to expand on what is within the rooms? What crazy sort of conceptual mess you can create out of what’s currently there? This is what Museum of Care could look and feel, but imagining it needs to appeal to everybody in lots of different ways, and for lots of different rooms.

John showed us a bit of research made by a former student of his, Rizan (who couldn’t attend) on museums putting their rooms online (see pdf). The interesting part of it is where people have created tools or platforms so that other people can do creative and interesting things and get a much less passive experience of the museum. He then showed a project made by a group of Chinese students who created rooms in mozilla hubs to put online collections of Chinese objects found in Euro-american museums, in a way that allows you to interact with the objects that are shown on the screen – what’s fascinating in it is the idea it’s this idea that we can build instruments that other people can use and we can start to hack and punk some  of the technology so that it does weird and unusual things.

Decision taken: Clive will organise an across the table meeting in a small group, and then come back and give the findings to the larger group to comment and expand.

Proposal to rearrange our Discord server

Simona made some very practical suggestions on how to organize from now on. We want a totally free Museum, one where you can enter rooms and projects or get out of them whenever you want. To this effect, though, people need to know where to jump in when they want to: what’s going on, who is working at what … to this effect, we need a shared calendar and a place where to discuss and agree, at least in between our meetings. This place could be Discord (emails are very impractical), but we need to reorganize our Discord server and make it more usable –she made a second Discord server, “Have fun” to make experiments with the changes she suggests.

Decision taken: give it a try to “Have fun” server

Museum of Care reading group.

29 April, 2021 ‘Manners, Deference, and Private Property’ in Possibilities, pp. 24-30 (available here) and Mikhail Bakhtin’s ‘Introduction’ in Rabelais and His World, pp. 1-12 (available here). Facilitator(s) for this session: Simona.

13 May, 2021 – ‘Beyond the Monastic Self’ (available here). Facilitator(s) for this session: Tj.

27 May, 2021 –  ‘Army of Altruists’ (available here). Facilitator(s) for this session: Nicholas.

Some “rooms” we have up and running:  

Visual Assemblies project

Visual Assembly Project – developing as part of the collective effort to build bridges, help and facilitate Zapatiste’s visit to Europe in the summer of 2021. 

Elizabeth Travelslight spoke about the weekly sessions and research being conducted by i-a-f-s.org in San Francisco for the past months. 

Participants of V-A Lab from i-a-f-s.org invented what Malevich called an “additional element”: a catalog of theatrical characters and costumes that could be used to facilitate a public space during the production of the visual images. 

Nika described a developing collaboration with comrades from Madrid preparing cultural events for Zapatista’s arrival in Europe. The Visual Assembly will be offered as one of the communication bridges to establish a dialogue with Zapatistas. 

Oleg explained the current logistical situation about Zapatista’s visit. 

Visual Assembly invites everyone to participate since it is a public action requiring almost no resources: a square, crayons and assembly participants in a zoom. 

Fighting Club: 

Nika talked about how Steve Bachelor initiated the idea of “intellectual fights” between characters from different historical eras and suggested a fight between David Graeber and Thomas Hobbes. Based on this idea, Steve Keen started work on a fight between David Graeber and 

Fighting Club invited to take part in the London based theater performans the Church of Burning money on 23.07.2021

How to Make Decisions

Anka described the interviews that have already been done over the past months. Work has begun on processing the interviews. Perhaps there will be an anthology.