The University of Trash is an experiment in alternative pedagogy, architecture, and urbanism, taking place at SculptureCenter in Long Island City from May 10th to August 3rd, 2009.
Information
- Location:
- Long Island City, NY
- Mon:
- 11:00 am - 6:00 pm
- Thurs:
- 11:00 am - 8:00 pm
- Fri - Sun:
- 11:00 am - 6:00 pm
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Events
51 past eventsSee All
- Conceptualizing Urban Space, P...
The University of Trash
Monday, August 3 at 4:00pm - The Shape of Things To Come
The University of Trash
Monday, July 27 at 11:00am - How to Launch a Secret Societ...
the University of Trash
Sunday, August 2 at 4:00pm - Foucault Lab: October in the 80’s
the University of Trash
Sunday, August 2 at 12:00pm - Focault lab: October in the 80's
the University of Trash
Sunday, August 2 at 12:00pm - Summer Sessions: BARR, Silk Fl...
SculptureCenter
Saturday, August 1 at 5:00pm - Garblogging
Sculpture Center
Saturday, August 1 at 5:00pm - GarBlogging
Sculpture Center
Saturday, August 1 at 1:00pm - Queer Mutiny: 10 Ways to Kill ...
The University of Trash
Friday, July 31 at 4:00pm - UofT: Architectures of Crisis/...
SculptureCenter
Monday, July 27 at 7:00pm
University of Trash
University of Trash thanks everyone who participated this summer!
University of Trash
The themes exhibited by the University of Trash are explored also by scholars in the social sciences. And there are lively conversations between the "ivory tower" academics and "street" practitioners (activists, artists, citizens/residents) on what trash is, how we deal with it and why.
Aseel Sawalha talks about the ris...e of academic theories of space and place in the social sciences, touching on major thinkers and key debates, illustrated by case studies in Beirut and in New York City.
Judith Pajo talks about her ethnographic research on recycling in Berlin and in New York City. She explains how heightened concerns about the natural order articulate social concerns over political and economic transformations. Beliefs in global warming symbolically express visions of the post-Cold War world and practices of recycling help produce the emerging global order.
University of Trash
Knock knock.
Who's there?
Shelby.
Shelby who?
Shelby dance? On a bright cloud of music, Shelby dance?
The shape of things to come is a condensation as much as it is a distraction; words return to a primal abstraction through gesture. The future is imagined as a figure as peripheral as the promise of progress, replacing the... declarative nature of the projected future with the stubborn persistence of what has come to be.
A dancer will perform in self-determined collaboration with the other events of the University: as either attentive student, distracted participant, or lingering parasite. On various afternoons from now until the end of the University, she will wander on the edges as well as inconvenience the center. Words and information, printed and spoken, will be used to create new gestures.
New structures demand conscience, born out through its inhabitants - even a squatter in borrowed space.
A project between Jen Liu and Erin Kelly
Time:11:00AM Monday, July 27th
Location:The University of Trash
University of Trash
This workshop is about developing the skills, mind-set and theoretical basis for starting creatively-based, experimental esoteric organizations.
It is not about debating, uncovering, or critiquing existing or suspected groups.
Together, through hands-on participatory exercises, presentations and group-work we will consi...der the basic functional components of secret societies including: agenda, ideology, initiation rites, punishments, degrees and levels, regalia/dress codes, signals, meetings, communications and oaths. We will envision, discuss and design new preliminary models for contemporary art-based societies and sects using non-traditional methods.
Who should attend this event?
Artists and outsider interventionists, collectivists and inventors, amateur historians and aesthetic heretics, community workers and writers.
A workshop by Nsumi Collective
Time:4:00PM Sunday, August 2nd
Location:the University of Trash
University of Trash
Marginalized outside of societal definitions of love, goodness, nature, normalcy, health, sanity, family, the "queer" is an ontological impossibility. Heterosexuals call gays "flamboyant," meanwhile the entirety of normative heterosexual society is flamboyantly straight. Terms like "flamboyant" set the bar at which it ...is acceptable for someone to manifest gayness, punishing gays for a demonstration of their identity to be "flamboyant," meanwhile heterosexuals would take that same manifestation for granted to be their right. A world in which basic attributes of being human are coded beforehand to be "heterosexual": marriage, parenting, god, family, law, religion, universality, the heterosexual regime is a constellation of violently guarded points that renders any gay utterance invisible.
Queer Mutiny is an Epistemological Revolt against the taken-for-grantedness of the Heterosexual Prism, this prism that makes us color all our value-neutral universal categories and assumptions (love, sanity, family, normality, marriage, law, parenting, god) to be "heterosexual” with a seamless inevitability.
Queer Mutiny is a 12 part lecture-as-performance deconstructing the building blocks of the Heterosexual Regime, a regime of violence and institutionalized state sanctioned genocide of gays, a discursive regime that casts gays are outside the purview of the Universal or Common Good.
“To qualify as legitimately human, one must be coherently sexed. The incoherence of sex is precisely what marks off the abject and the dehumanized from the recognizably human.”
-Judith Butler
Performed by Andrea Liu
Time:4:00PM Friday, July 31st
Location:The University of Trash
University of Trash
The world of “garbloggers” is diverse and ever-growing, ranging from artists sharing work made out of recycled materials to armchair environmentalists tracking their own waste to make a political statement.
Leila Darabi, creator of the blog everydaytrash, will give an overview of the many voices talking and tracking tra...sh online and the common themes connecting them.
Trained as a journalist, Darabi works in international development, a career which allows her to blog about trash from the far reaches of the planet.
University of Trash
The three part discussion Supersede Yourself, will take up the ideas of the Situationist International using as its point of departure a 1963 an exhibition held in Odense, Denmark entitled The Destruction of RSG6. Organized by J.V. Martin, in collaboration with Guy Debord and Michèle Bernstein, the exhibition was an ...attempt to reconcile two strains in Situationist thought: a desire to remain active within the realm of cultural production, and a commitment to the supersession of art through unitary revolutionary practice.
A year prior to the exhibition, the Situationists were effectively split in two when Debord expelled the majority of the Scandinavian members. This resulted in the formation of the 1’IS, made up primarily of the French and Belgian wing, which included Debord and Vaneigem; and the Bauhaus Situationists, consisting primarily of the expelled Scandinavian members organized around Jørgen Nash–Asger Jorn's younger brother. This break remains a crucial moment in Situationist history, specifically as it points to the division of the group over the fundamental question of the role of art within Situationist practice. A 1963 text written by Debord on the occasion of the RSG6 exhibition titled The Situationists and New Forms of Action in Politics and Art, further develops the Situationist position on cultural production, and attempts to clarify the role of the 1’IS after the split. In this text Debord calls for a critical art that recognizes itself as only one facet of a global political struggle–an art that will also ‘contain it’s own critique’.
For three sessions, the artist Ilya Lipkin will initiate an open discussion around some questions raised by the split of the SI, and the text written for the exhibition in Odense. For the first session we will discuss Debord's text and excerpts from Howard Slater's seminal history of the Scandinavian Situationists, Divided We Stand. The texts will be available at SculptureCenter two weeks prior to the first talk. For the second session we will use some of the questions and thoughts generated in the first discussion to further consider the role of the art institution in relation to critical practice; we will reflect more specifically on the relationship between SculptureCenter and the University of Trash itself. For the third and final session, we will meet at SculptureCenter for a walk through Brooklyn. The walk will end in lower Manhattan at the East River amphitheater, where the session will culminate in a final reflection on the ideas generated in the preceding two talks.
links to readings:
http://infopool.org.uk/2001.html
http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/newfo
July 12th, 26th and August 2nd (SUNDAYS__ 2-5)
Time:2:00PM Sunday, July 26th
Location:SculptureCenter
