STUDIO BONN. Discourse in the Bundeskunsthalle

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CONTRACTS FOR EARTH

Wednesday, 15 June 7 p.m.
live in the Forum and streamed on www.studiobonn.io
€10 / concessions €5 incl. VRS
Advance booking through Bonnticket
The event will be held in English and French.

with
JULIA WATSON
CATPC (Ced’Art Tamasala und Mathieu Kasiama with Renzo Martens)
YOUSSEF NASSEF

Chair: Kolja Reichert
In English and French with simultaneous translation

Within a mere two hundred years, the capitalist way of running the economy has revealed itself as unsustainable: it is destroying its own ecological and social foundations. Indigenous economies, on the other hand, have worked for millennia – and are increasingly being discussed as solutions for coping with climate change. Studio Bonn presents three models of global cooperation that combine sustainability and social justice.

The design expert Julia Watson, author of Lo-TEK. Design by Radical Indigenism, Taschen 2021, has researched indigenous architectures all over the world. To ensure that the transfer of knowledge does not lead to one-sided exploitation, she has developed a new business model: An oral smart contract, developed with experts in indigenous law, allows companies that use indigenous knowledge to share profits with the indigenous communities that originated it via blockchain. The initiative, named The Symbiocene, is currently being presented in the exhibition Our Time on Earth at the Barbican in London

The diplomat and computer scientist Youssef Nassef has coordinated resilience work in the United Nations system for 23 years, after having served as a diplomat and climate change negotiator for ten years before that. Disillusioned with the impact of the post industrial-revolution war on the biosphere, he and the new Bonn-based UN initiative Resilience Frontiers are using the knowledge of writers, film directors and data analysts to gear our attitudes, thoughts and actions towards the impending destruction of the planet.

On a former palm oil plantation in Lusanga, Congo, Ced’Art Tamasala and Mathieu Kasiama and the Congolese Plantation Workers’ Art League (Cercle d’art des travailleurs de plantation congolaise, CATPC) engage with the history of the colonial exploitation of palm oil and cocoa plantations. CATPC’s chocolate sculptures have been exhibited at the SculptureCenter in New York and elsewhere. The day before the Studio Bonn event, at Art Basel, CATPC and artist Renzo Martens will sell 300 NFTs of a Diviner’s Figure carved in 1931 during the Pende uprising against Belgian colonial rule and now preserved at the Virginia Museum of Art. The proceeds will be used to buy back land and revitalise cultural traditions and sustainable agriculture. In the documentary series Plantations and Museums, Tamasala and Mathieu explore the history of the sculpture and of cultural exploitation in general.

Abb.: Film still from White Cube, Renzo Martens. Copyright © Human Activities, 2020
CATPC members (from left) Olele Mulela Mabamba, Huguette Kilembi, Mbuku Kimpala, Jeremie Mabiala, Jean Kawata, Irene Kanga, Ced’art Tamasala and Matthieu Kasiama

STUDIO BONN. Listening to the Future

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WHO CONTROLS THE BUNDESKUNSTHALLE? CAST YOUR VOTE!
Blockchain vs. the state: Hito Steyerl has occupied the Bundeskunsthalle and is producing a new work there with the audience.
An evening about the future of the public, culture and its institutions.

Here you can register to vote: www.strikedao.com 

Wednesday, 16 March 2022, 7 p.m.
Live in the Forum (admission till 6.55 p.m.) & livestreamed
Tickets: €10 / conc. €5 incl. VRS via Bonnticket for participation in the forum

On July 15, 2021, the artist Hito Steyerl declared the Bundeskunsthalle occupied at STUDIO BONN. She had registered the address of the Bundeskunsthalle on the Ethereum blockchain and thus controlled it via NFT. (See the conversation with Hito Steyerl, Joseph Vogl and Ville Haimala here). With this satirical action, Hito Steyerl demonstrated how arbitrary ownership claims are in the booming market for digital certificates of ownership (NFTs). By "minting" an entire institution as an NFT, Steyerl simultaneously got serious about the anarchist utopia of blockchain, which promises to distribute control of money and culture from the hands of gatekeepers into the hands of the masses.

But how democratic is the blockchain really? And is the Bundeskunsthalle really that undemocratic? On March 16, centralized institution and decentralized governance, representative democracy and anarchy will show what they are really capable of. Afterwards, Hito Steyerl and the Department of Decentralization will be in Bonn let the audience vote on the future of the Bundeskunsthalle, thanks to a specially developed software.

Three administrative models compete against each other: Managing Director Oliver Hölken explains how the Bundeskunsthalle works. The collective Department of Decentralization shows how blockchain could allow for increased co-design by the public and artists. And the collective Other Internet designs a model for more transparency regarding money and resources. The audience is invited to join in the discussion and ask questions.

A website that will be launched in the evening allows 100 guests in the room and on the stream to register (more are not possible for technical reasons). Each of them can distribute four votes among the three options. This method of "quadratic voting" is also a new form of voting that allows for more differentiated democratic participation.

What consequences the vote will have is still open. But one thing is certain: a new collective work of art. For the software will produce a live recut of Hito Steyerl's work "Strike" (2010), which has been in the Contemporary Art Collection of the Federal Republic of Germany since 2015, based on the distribution of votes. The result, "StrikeDAO," will be purchased by the Federal Collection and displayed in the exhibition of its new acquisitions at the Bundeskunsthalle from May 7, 2022. Hito Steyerl thus also decentralizes her own work.

Everything too complicated? Read our glossary. And come to STUDIO BONN, get involved and ask questions. If you've long wanted to understand the cryptic world of blockchain, which could fundamentally change the way we live together, here's your chance.

Hito Steyerl uses the latest technologies of control and surveillance as artistic tools. Her video installations and essays have made her one of the world's most influential artists.

Department of Decentralization (DoD) is a collective of individuals working on Decentralized Open Source and the intersection between such technologies and art.
From its inception, the DoD has focused on research around blockchain and arts, as well as trying to establish relations between the hacker and the creative communities and their cultures. DoD developed the voting tool for this evening with Tim Daubenschütz and Lea Filipowicz. María Paula Fernández, Stina Gustafsson, and Mary Elizabeth McCarthy are traveling from Berlin.

Toby Shorin, Sam Hart, and Laura Lotti represent Other Internet, an applied research organization. They study and build social technology and advise organizations on decentralized coordination. An overview of their projects can be found here.

Oliver Hölken has been the new Managing Director of the Bundeskunsthalle since August 2021. The graduate economist has held various management positions in the administration of Koelncongress GmbH since 2003.