The Critical Practices Intensive Month

The Fall 2019 Intensive month participants are: Myrto Katsimicha, Chrysanthi Koumianaki, Marina Miliou Theocharaki, Inés Muñozcano, Prodromos Tsinikoris, Raed Yassin (mentor)

The Fall 2019 Intensive month guests invited by Raed Yassin are: Shady El Noshokaty, Mark Leckey, Markus Shimizu, Irena Tomažin

Soft-shell crab is a culinary expression used to describe otherwise ordinary crabs that shed their exoskeletons for a short period of time in order to grow larger in size. They slowly break their outer shell, reveal their vulnerable parts for a few days, exposing themselves to all kinds of risks and dangers in the wilderness, until they grow a new skeleton again. In a way it is a courageous act, a bold and experimental feat undertaken in order to expand and develop themselves in the world. The shedding of skin and walking around absolutely defenceless must also be seen as a means to heighten all the crab’s senses during those fleeting moments of peril. Elation, looseness, freedom, pain, and nervousness all come to the fore. This state of being is very unlike the crab’s counterpart: the crocodile. A thick-skinned reptile, totally immune to its surroundings, unable to absorb a new sense of self since the age of the dinosaurs.

Harnessing ideas and phenomena from the natural world like these, our artistic approach involves excavating stimulation in the most unusual and unexpected places around us. How do animals perform camouflage? Where does fungus find a place to grow? Why do microorganisms proliferate? These are just a few points of inspiration that we will transpose ourselves into and attempt to learn from both aesthetically and conceptually. Functioning like viruses that thrive even in the harshest of surroundings, as artists and curators, we will manage to execute what we need and want in earnest without being seen. This sense of magic invisibility is very important in nature, as it should be to our understanding of how we make art today. So far we have been too concerned with ideas and practices that we consider as central to the art making process, and geographically focusing on only one hemisphere of the world. So in retaliation to the status quo, we will travel to the periphery, both literally and mentally, in order to experience things differently and instigate acts of improvisation. We will look at the works of the so-called art mavericks, and try to find parallels to what they achieved in the natural sphere.

We will also consider technology’s relation to nature, and it’s mimicking of it in every way. Much in the same manner as natural processes, technology often functions in total darkness and invisibility, creating an impression of mystery and awe from the outside. Like microorganisms infesting food, our inability to see their form or action with the naked eye does not negate the reality they inhabit. Technology has stolen concepts from nature (virus, meme, etc.) and implemented them in distorted methods, which we will also absorb as misused yet useful metaphorical ideas.

Today, vision can be considered as our weakest sense, due to our over saturation with and over consumption of images. In stark contrast, our body’s other senses are still in their infancy and have maintained a certain naivety and authenticity. So here we ask: how can we enrich our visual experience by taking inspiration from our other senses? Like “Umami” as the fifth taste in the culinary world, we can try to push ourselves to gravitate towards a sixth sense: experience. It is not seeing, listening, feeling or smelling per se. It is about living an experience that could prove to become a new sense for us.

Raed Yassin, 2019