Ambulator Project by Susan Kelly, Janna Graham, Valeria Graziano

...There were questions regarding who produces questioning: What are legitimate questions, and under what conditions are they produced? The seminar class, the think tank, the government department, the statistician’s bureau are sites for the production of questions, but we were suggesting others born of fleeting, arbitrary conversations between strangers, of convivial loitering and of unexpected lines of flight in and out of the museum as in the Ambulator project (Susan Kelly, Janna Graham, Valeria Graziano).... Irit Rogoff: Turning


Academy. Learning from the Museum September 16 November 26, 2006 Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven



Janna Graham, Valeria Graziano & Susan Kelly An Open Interview with the City of Leeds… and Lunch at Warp: Woof Conference, 2003 Photo: Vera Frenkel © Janna Graham, Valeria Graziano & Susan Kelly

The Ambulator
The Ambulator is a question relay that proliferates roaming encounters and public discourses. Since September 2006 the project has been hosted by the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven (NL), part of the exhibition, Academy: Learning from the Museum. In collaboration with the staff at the museum, students and people in the city of Eindhoven, questions and answers have been generated, exchanged, accumulated and lost. One such question will take to the road in November:

'What Can We Learn from Free Labour?'

The Ambulator Camper Van will dispatch this question on a route that begins in Bologna, home of the first university of the western world and, more recently, of the Bologna Process, an initiative of the European Commission that aims at standardizing education across the continent. This ongoing process, while virtually absent from media discourse, has proposed a number of problematic reforms in all aspects of Education, including the drastic re-definition of its relationship to labour. The Ambulator expedition wonders:

What will it mean to receive credits for all aspects of our participation in public life?
How/are unpaid internships different from free labour?
Why are people being sent to school to get a visa?
Are our endless educational experiences suspending the realization that there are actually no jobs for us?

Questions generated from conversations in each city will be delivered to the next one on route. The relay will continue through a modest publication, a reading group and who knows what else. After all, expeditions serve precisely to gain an idea of the morphology of a territory!

If you take part in self-organized knowledge exchanges, have experiences of daily virtuosity, or strategic proposals about resisting the current state of affairs in Education that you'd like to share, we'd love to meet with you along this semi-improvised journey.

Dates

November 3 Bologna
November 4 Munich
November 5 Eindhoven (and maybe Antwerp)
November 6 London
November 13 Eindhoven

…with the possibility of all stops along the route (Milan, Basel, Bonn, Koln, Stuttgart, Karlsruhe, Luzern, Freiburg, Gent, Brussels).

Contact: students and teachers, Janna Graham, Susan Kelly, Valeria Graziano theambulator@gmail.com

The Ambulator; or what happens when we take questions for a walk? is part of the exhibition, Academy: Learning from the Museum at Vanabbemuseum, Eindhoven.

© m1.antville.org

Links:
Van Abbemuseum A.C.A.D.E.M.Y.
The Ambulator

Reviews:
http://www.frieze.com/issue/review/academy/

Bibliography:
Participation, Becoming, Action by Janna Graham in conversation with Lucy+Jorge Orta. Black Dog Publishing, 2007.

ACADEMY Edited by: Angelika Nollert, Irit Rogoff, Bart de Baere, Yilmaz Dziewior, Charles Esche, Kerstin Niemann, and Dieter Roelstraete
Van Abbemuseum 2006, Revolver verlag
 

Bio - Susan Kelly

My research looks at relationships between art and micropolitics, rhetoric and practices of organisation in situations where questions are asked and answers are given. I make performances, public time-based work, installations and videos, I write and publish and convene events and performative investigations. I work both independently and collectively with the Micropolitics Research Group and the Carrot Workers Collective among others. Over the last nine years I have shown my work in Belfast, New York, Toronto, Helsinki, Prague, Dublin, St Petersburg, Krasnoyarsk, Tallin. Zagreb, and elsewhere. (© Goldsmiths, University of London)

Bio - Janna Graham

Janna Graham is a writer, organiser, educator and curator. Working with the collectives Ultra-red and Micropolitics Research Group, she participates in ongoing militant research projects on the conditions of cultural workers in London and pedagogies of anti-racism in England's rural areas. She has developed education and curatorial initiatives at institutions including the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), Project Art Centre (Dublin), Vanabbemuseum (Eindhoven) and Plymouth Arts Centre (UK). Janna is currently Projects Curator at Serpentine Gallery where she and colleagues have initiated The Centre for Possible Studies, an off-site popular research centre and and artist residency programme where artists, thinkers and local people develop 'possible studies' in relation to the Edgware Road neighbourhood of London. She is a Phd candidate in Curatorial Knowledge programme at Goldsmiths University, working on a project titled: Thinking with Conditions, which investigates the cross sections between contemporary art, radical education and institutional analysis.

Interests: Experimenting with modes of public participation, knowledge formation and instituent mischief, her current investigations explore the acoustics of administration, participatory organizing methods and radical relationship-making. (© c/k )
 

Bio - Valeria Graziano

Valeria Graziano is currently a visiting tutor and Phd candidate in Curatorial/Knowledge at Goldsmiths College, University of London and a member of the Commitee for Radical Diplomacy. She is an organizer, cultural mediator, artist, and theorist, with a taste for collaborative endeavours. Her work is concerned primarily with "instituent practices" - those relational and affective artistic projects that strategically inhabit processes of social transformation. She has been involved in a number of interventions whose implications extend at the crossroad of artistic media, knowledge production and play. Among others, she developed projects for the Pistoletto Foundation, IT; Van Abbemuseum, Netherlands; Atelier Marionbourg, Norway; Area10, London; House Gallery, London; World Summit on Information Society (WSIS),Tunis; 51.Venice Biennale; Human Rights Nights Film Festival, Bologna; Turin -UNESCO World Book Capital, Italy-. Her texts have been published in Italy, Spain and UK. (© Center For Constitutional Studies, The Johns Hopkins University, School of Advanced International Studies, The University of Bologna, Faculty of Law)