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Higher Seminar: Explain that Gesture! Handbooks and Handwork. 2/4

Kungl. Konsthögskolan/Royal Institute of Art invites you to a higher seminar with Asier Mendizabal, Johanna Gustafsson Fürst and Manuel Cirauqui: 

Explain that Gesture! Handbooks and Handwork.

The correspondence between the capacity to perform technical gestures and the cognitive development that concludes in abstract thought is a founding myth of modernity. Even the cranial capacity evolved, according to André Leroy-Gourhan, in a direct proportion to the centimetres of sharp blade the hands were able to get from a flintstone. If we could strip off the teleological, evolutionary veneer of that myth, could we still make use of this link between technical hand gestures and symbolic thought? One claim of this seminar – which evolves from the long discussions and research in the 3D Area at Royal Institute of Art in conversation with EINA IDEA, Barcelona, which we categorized under the generic term of Manual– is that art is the realm in which this link is always renewed, as a tool to locate ourselves in the world, in each present moment. Art inhabits the gap created in the mistranslations between material and technical operations and the concepts they enable.

Manuals, handbooks, were not originally created to teach the trade of artisans and pass it on to their apprentices. No one would have believed that the intricate interrelation between the pressure of the hand in moving the gouge, to make it flow in the different hardnesses of different woods, could ever be described in words. The first manuals were printed for collectors and amateurs who were curious about these crafts and saw a certain mystique in the precision by which they seemed to perform gestures more fitting than words. The gestures themselves became symbolic renderings of how a sublimated idea of work as virtuous formgiving gave privileged access to a way of reading the world. When art education insists on the hands-on teaching of the workshops and tools, when the art discourses of the present insist on reevaluating craft and material processes, we might need to assess those urgencies against the backdrop of that fertile mistranslation manuals were based upon.

A warm welcome!

Manuel Cirauqui is a curator and writer, working at the crossroads of contemporary art, design strategy and experimental academia. Cirauqui currently serves as curator at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and is also the founding director of Eina/Idea, a think tank associated to EINA University School of Design and Art, attached to the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Additionally, he is a collaborator of S+T+ARTS, an initiative of the European Commission to promote collaborations in the fields of science, technology, and the arts. In this framework, Cirauqui recently organized the exhibition NEAR+FUTURES+QUASI+WORLDS at State Studio, Berlin, celebrating five years of S+T+ARTS’ activities. At the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Cirauqui has organized the major exhibitions Soto. The Fourth Dimension (2019); Architecture Effects (2018, co-curated with Troy Conrad Therrien); Henri Michaux. The Other Side (2018); Art and Space (2017); and Anni Albers. Touching Vision (2017). He also oversees the museum’s Film & Video exhibitions programming. Recent projects in other international institutions include the two-part exhibition Artaud 1936, at the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City (2018); and the site-specific installation Puerto Rican Light (Cueva Vientos) by Allora & Calzadilla at Dia Art Foundation (2015, co-curated with Yasmil Raymond). Cirauqui has been a guest lecturer in numerous international universities such as MICA Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore; HEAD Haute École d’art et de design, Geneva; Aalto University of Art and Design, Helsinki; Universidad Complutense de Madrid; and has served as Adjunct Lecturer in Critical Curating at the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, USA.

Asier Mendizabal is an artist and Professor of Sculpture at the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm. The representations of the collective, the construction of identities and the role of technique in these phenomena recur throughout his work. His practice confronts conventional narratives of history, archival or ethnographic objects, as well as political and subcultural representations, observing their technical and material conditions. Writing is a common instrument in his work, always in relation to sculpture as a practice and a genealogy. Mendizabal has held solo shows at Museo Reina Sofía, MACBA or Raven Row, and collectively at Vienna Secession, Guggenheim Bilbao, Museu Serralves, Manifesta 5 and the Venice, São Paulo or Taipei biennials among others.

Johanna Gustafsson Fürst is an artist whose work processes operate in the connections between social systems and individual existence. For example, in the relationships between power and resistance, language and body, linguistic violence and inclusions and exclusions in public spaces. She mainly uses sculpture and installation where the physical’s ability to respond and operate relationally in the spaces is central to creating changes between the known and the imagined. She sees the field of sculpture as an integrative and moving place that opens the possibility of reorienting dialogues. In 2017 she received the Friends of Moderna Museet Sculpture Prize. Part of the jury’s motivation read: “She challenges the materials, their properties and common uses, in order to create an inverted, suspended, not to say unyielding, sculptural otherness.” Since 2020 she is professor of Fine Art specializing in Sculptural Processes at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. Exhibitions include: Not That Cloud, Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2017), RIBOCA, Riga Biennial, Riga (2018) Graft the Words, Whip My Tongue, Accelerator, Stockholm, (2020).

About the higher seminar

The higher seminar is a place where we together explore and discuss issues that have emerged through the various artistic research processes that take place at the Royal Institute of Art. Each seminar has a form and content that reflects the specific question and artistic project that we are invited to engage with. The core of the higherseminar is the communal thinking and sharing of methods and experiences in the middle of an artistic research process.