#1 Friday 10 March 2023 / Online via Zoom (link)
17:00–19:00 SG time / 10:00–12:00 CET
#2 Wednesday 15 March 2023 / Singapore (tickets)
19:00–22:00 SG time – At The Main Deck, L3
#3 Thursday 16 March 2023 / Singapore (tickets)
11:00–18:00 SG Time – at SAM Level 3 Conference room and Level 5 Natasha exhibition space
#1 Introductory online lecture: Building Nina bell F. House Museum: Why and how to build this home?
Artist Annette Krauss (NL/Germany) and researcher Nuraini Juliastuti (NL/Indonesia) will lay the conceptual ground for the questions, learnings and doings that are guiding the Nina bell F. House Museum: namely around the commons, unlearning, instituting otherwise, and archiving.
Nina bell F. as a collective figure first appeared at the Site for Unlearning: Art Organization. This was a long term collaboration between artist Annette Krauss and the Casco team about institutional habits in practicing the commons. It explored the relationship between an art institution’s vision with its cultural production and day-to-day workings that inform administrative and managerial ethos. Especially a discussion about collective authorship and shared admiration for the artistic, Black, feminist and political engagements of Nina Simone, bell hooks, and Silvia Federici had Nina bell F. (pronouns she/they) manifested. This spirit lives on, germinating the House Museum. Krauss will elaborate on the theoretical and artistic underpinnings of unlearning, and the material, artistic and political dimensions of unlearning processes, drawing from her engagement with Sites for Unlearning. Researcher and one of the co-initiators of Nina bell F. House Museum Nuraini Juliastuti will help understand the archiving practice of creative institutions as a living heritage, which will also draw from her ongoing research project on Commons Museums (ICI Berlin Press, 2023). She will discuss the significance of a growing platform to gather archives of independent cultural institutions from multiple contexts and elaborate on the infrastructural aspect of archiving.
Introductions and moderation by Casco director and Natasha co-artistic director Binna Choi.
#2 A taste of Nina bell F. House Museum at SAM: a tasty gathering with Nina bell and friends
Music, soy sauce and archival works with: Nina bell F. House Museum team (Donghwan Kam, Sophia Park, Ying Que), KUNCI Study Forum and Collective (Rifki Akbar Pratama), and Asia Art Archive (Sam Chan)
The public workshop of Nina bell F. House Museum on site in Singapore begins with A Taste of Nina bell F. House Museum. Here some of the Museum team members (Donghwan Kam, Sophia Park, Ying Que) will be joined by Asia Art Archive and KUNCI Study Forum and Collective to host a tasteful gathering with Nina bell and friends. Guests are invited for dumplings with soy sauce, in particular the one that has been fermented during Natasha in various locations in Singapore by Kam and many other human and non-human collaborators. His fermentation process has been an important metaphor for understanding the workings of the archive presented in the Nina bell F. House Museum. Taking cues from intuitive ways of cooking without a fixed recipe and the joys of mixing “ingredients”, fermentation can take place with a lens of understanding diverse archival practices. A Taste of Nina bell F. House Museum will prepare the workshop participants for the Nina spirit.
#3 Archiving, copying, discussing, making at SAM: Nina Copy Shop, Archival Contamination and Companionship
Archival contamination, harvesting and publication making with: Nina bell F. House Museum team (Donghwan Kam, Sophia Park, Ying Que), KUNCI Study Forum and Collective (Rifki Akbar Pratama) and Asia Art Archive (Sam Chan)
During Nina Copy Shop, Archival Contamination and Companionship, Nina bell F. and friends invite you to exchange knowledge and experiences about community archiving practices. They will facilitate a conversation to explore questions posed for the Nina bell F. House Museum. Archiving practices contain a diversity of values and principles dependent on questioning what matters or what is worth collecting. Various forms of documentation narrate the discrepancy between state-based archiving institutions and independent archival initiatives. In the Nina bell F. House Museum archival practices consider ways of being and knowing in common, whereby fragility, fragmentation and fermentation are embraced. Here archives as incomplete as they are can serve as the glue and structure for relationalit., An important question rises, what kind of spaces, practices, perspectives and resources do independent art and cultural organizations need to be sustainable?
Event participants are invited to bring materials from their personal or community archives to feed imaginations about independent forms of archiving practice as well as institutional building. The harvest of these discussions will become the base of an informal, hand-made publication-companion, to be put together, copied and bound on the spot to be distributed further beyond the room.
