Open Group
An open database of people who are interested in the proposition of studying Open Rehearsal processes. This group will include students, faculty, community, local, national, and international scholar-artists interested in this work, along with institutions. People can dip in and out across the year. There is no attendance obligation, no expectation that anyone produce anything for the group. The invitation is repeatable rather than binding. This group will be invited to the Open Rehearsal online events.
If interested in joining the Open Group, please add your name to the list here.
Black Sound and Music Working Group
Led by: Sofia Smith (visiting PhD student, Brown University)
This working group is for artists, practitioners, researchers, and those in between with a stake in Afro-diasporic, creative, and/or avant-garde music practices. The sessions will be designed in collaboration with participants, structured around a mix of listening sessions, discussions of shared readings, and playing music together. Key areas of exploration include (but are not limited to) black music’s entanglement with modernity and the human, performativity and enfleshment, and questions of form. Woven throughout the sessions, the division between theory and practice will remain an active site of inquiry. Rather than exclusively working with material that is about music and sound, the group will engage a wide array of sources to consider sound as music as a method for thinking. Thinkers we might engage with include Amiri Baraka, Tina Campt, Alice Coltrane, Malik Gaines, Saidiya Hartman, Kodwo Eshun, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, George Lewis, Fred Moten, Sun Ra, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Nina Simone, Hortense Spillers, Alexander Weheliye, Sylvia Wynter, Calvin Warren, Kandice Chuh, Amber Musser, and others. We will meet once a month, beginning in October.
Meeting cadence: Once a month starting in October (2-3 meetings in the fall semester, 3-4 meetings in the spring) with the possibility of a culminating performance/symposium.
Who: Faculty and grad students (in or outside of Berkeley), community members, interested undergrads can reach out for consideration on a case-by-case basis, those without musical experience are also welcome to reach out to see if the group would be a good fit
(image: Conspiracy, 1975, album cover, Earthforms Records)
INTEREST FORM: tba
CONTACT DETAILS: sofiasmith@berkeley.edu
Gesture and Thought Working Group
Led by: Angel Gutierrez (PhD student, Rhetoric)
The Gesture and Thought Working Group’s primary focus is to be a research and performance collective of students, artists, and scholars, irrespective of discipline, who critically study and engage with notions of gesture, poiesis, creation, structure, form, sign, symbol and/or language. Gesture (i.e., the representation indexed by the concept-metaphor of ‘gesture’) is not a neutral site indicating the successful force of language or the body to index signs nor is it simply an auxiliary act for language. To think gesture is to consider the interpenetration of matter and thought, and the task of this collective is to study how the processes of colonization, of conquest, of slavery, of capitalist modernity, and racialization have structured and continue to structure cognition and movement. The group will approach different notions of gesture and thought at play, drawing on selections from Sylvia Wynter, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, the EZLN, Selamawit Terrefe, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Hortense Spillers, M. NourbeSe Philip, Walter Benjamin, Henri Bergson, Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Georges Bataille, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Nina Simone, Joy James, Arca, Tracie Morris, Sylvia Rivera, Delcy Morelos, Mire Lee, Regina Jose Galindo, Carlos Martiel, Theresa Hyak Kyung Cha, and Ana Mendietta.
Working with 6 key themes (Movement, Sound and Speech, Sacrifice, Structure, Idea and Myth, & Production and Consumption), the Gesture and Thought Working Group aims to build a space where participants collectively organize thought and action, using variegated forms of practice, towards critical thinking. The working group will be structured around:
- Open Studio Space: Will run consistently throughout academic year. Critique of participants' works will be collectively organized within the space. (Note: There are facility limitations and codes to take mind of. This will be discussed in group.)
- Movement-Performance Workshops: to occur 3 times a semester. Each workshop will include movement-performance exercises, in-group discussion over selections, and screenings.
We ask that workshop participants be able to attend as many movement-performance workshops. No previous knowledge or experience is required. Participation is limited. Free and open to all -- anyone can be a student
PLEASE FILL OUT AN INTEREST FORM: here
QUESTIONS? CONTACT: angel111@berkeley.edu
D23 Gallery Working Group
Led by: Yiming Clara Li (undergaduate, Art Practice and Rhetoric)
D23 Gallery is a working group and provisional gallery space that convenes faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates across disciplines to explore how artistic forms of presentation may give rise to new modalities, contexts, and socialities for their academic work. Focusing on projects already underway, the group draws from the practical methodologies of artists to imagine alternate forms for ideas to surface, opening onto new outlooks and publics while taking a generative detour that helps push ongoing work toward the intended end. These forms are anchored by presentation in a public exhibition that momentarily transforms the Arts Research Center (HFA D23) into a gallery, while extending into various programming that explores ideas in performance based methods. Each exhibition will host an opening event which occasions as a social gathering for the wider community. The project will also seek to produce yearly catalogues in the form of Artist’s Books that give another life to the group’s work.
Inspired by the way artists often allow material to lead to the emergence of a thought, we use the simple method of gathering––differnet minds, dispositions, and pre-existing projects––to occasion the emergence of new ideas. Curatorial concepts thus succeed a period of convening, and exhibitions emerge out of this constellatory practice. The working group will be structured in seasonal cycles where a curatorial fellow, a lead artist, and an evolving cohort of participants meet weekly. Exhibitions will take place monthly or once every two months. This working group grows out of Apartment 19, an independent, artist-run project space that comes from the same impulse to create new encounters through the context of art. (Image: Installation view of The Chair at Apartment 19. Photo: Yiming Clara)
DAY/TIME:
CONTACT: clara.li@berkeley.edu
The Study Group
Led by ARC Director Fumi Okiji, the study group is an invitational cohort (mainly Berkeley faculty and grad students, but a few further afield) who meet twice a semester to help think through proposals, support, and the shape of the project. This group has actual work: the question of how we support graduate and undergraduate students pursuing this kind of practice, and how we support each other.
The work of this group will lay the groundwork for a new Designated Emphasis at UC Berkeley.
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