Beaver, Wampum, Hoes continues at

Conflux festival

with….

Wampum Trail

On September 20, 2009 at 15:00 I will be doing a walking tour called Wampum Trail of lower Manhattan, starting at the National Museum of the American Indian library. Please join me if you can, rain or shine.

Wampum Trail: Can historical commemoration such as upcoming Dutch 400-year events be subverted toward a more radical relationship to historical research and cultural practices as a way to undermine and resist dominance in the present?

If you take the New Amsterdam Trail tour you are asked to listen, walk and follow but also to lunch, shop and experience the dynamism and renewal of downtown today. This walking tour asks instead to pause, look and reflect while rethinking the former Dutch colonization of NYC.

This peripatetic tour in a way exercises psychogeography by walking backwards, so to speak, through time but also looks at present day NYC in regard to its colonial history that hasn’t been written down in the history books. Rather it combines facts with anecdotes and oral history passed down by generations of Native Americans living in NYC today along with reinscriptive historic perspectives.

We will begin at the library in the National Museum of the American Indian, moving on to The Netherlands Monument at Battery Park, passing by The American Indian Community House, then crossing to Beaver Street. We will make stops along Pearl Street, the former water’s edge of Manhattan, and continue via Wall Street (the Dutch are credited with inventing the stock market). Broadway takes us along City Hall, over to the Bowery, finally ending at Astor Place, (Kintecoying), a former sacred gathering place. Afterwards, those who are thirsty can jump on the subway and end with a bout of Dutch courage at the Dutch Kills bar in Long Island City.

Map of the Trail

View Wampum Trail in a larger map

Download the Wampum Trail flyer + map (2.4 Mb, pdf)

Holland Mania 

Opening May 16, 2009

Museum De Lakenhal and Scheltema in Leiden, the Netherlands announce the exhibition Holland Mania from May 16th to August 31, 2009. Eight artists are invited to reflect on the American and Japanese pictorial image of the Netherlands. The most recent instalment of my Manhattan Project looks not only at 400 years of Dutch colonial settlement in the United States, but the city of Leiden- 400 years after the Pilgrims settled and eventually departed to the new world. What types of images are conjured up through literature, historical texts, remnants of the past and oral traditions?

Using the museum context as a background with its collection of historical exhibits, prints, paintings and objects, this series of works gathers a range of perspectives in regard to constructions of identity, in the form of ‘Dutchness’ as well as contemporary Wampanoag peoples.  Imagery consists of a Pennsylvania Dutch quilt designed by the Amish yet composed from the Dutch and American flags. Dial Dutchness is an installation throughout the museum incorporating Leiden telephone book pages and eight multi-coloured PTT T-65 telephones with audio tracks from locals as well as Americans with Dutch last names. These ‘vox populi’ voices are contrasted in Pillars of Orange-expert opinions presented as literary silk-screened excerpts from literature, music and academic texts as if for an imaginary book on ‘Dutchness’, contrasted by real books from the secret Pilgrim Press. In the chapel of the museum the installation Wampanoag uses the existent paintings and objects as a staging for two drawings and a single channel video projection where the Wampanoag do not re-enact but rather answer specific questions regarding 17th century conventions, oral histories and the contemporary usage of wampum.

The museum has also kindly offered me a studio during the exhibition as an impromptu call centre in which to continue my Dial Dutchness installation as well as work on my forthcoming online platform Beaver, Wampum, Hoes. Please let me know if you plan on coming to visit or if I should call you instead.

For those Dutch readers the Holland Mania website.

Beaver, Wampum, Hoes at 16 Beaver

What: presentation / discussion

Where: 16 Beaver Street, 4th floor

When: Friday Night 1.09.08 @ 7:00 PM

Who: Open To All

This week we’re excited to begin 2009 with an event that takes up the 400th anniversary of Dutch colonialism in what we now know as New York City. This event also arrives, with more specificity, as the long-awaited answer to the origins of the Beaver in Beaver Street. So, we welcome Renée Ridgway and Sal Randolph, two artists/other professional things who have been a part of past discussions and events at Beaver, as well as welcome back David Graeber, to discuss research, concepts, and projects addressing the historical transformation of gift economies into commodity economies, including debt, that made capitalism possible. Finally, it should be made clear that all of this work seeks to address contemporary New York and beyond by thinking through the current financial crisis, debt economies, and alternative systems of value.

Beaver, Wampum, Hoes

On April 4, 1609 Henry Hudson set sail from Amsterdam on a Dutch ship under the auspices of the Dutch East India company in order to find a passage to Asia. Instead he founded a settlement (West Indian Company) for the Dutch on the tip of Manhtattan (Museum of American Indian, near Beaver Street), a trading post exporting beaver pelts back to the old world because it was fashionable to make hats out of them. The company exchanged Europan goods (hoes, kettles, etc.) for

wampum with the indigenous population living on Long Island, the Narragansett. They then traded the acquired wampum for beaver pelts with the Mohawk, part of the larger Haudonausaunee (Iroquois Confederacy) or Six Nations.

Beaver, Wampum, Hoes is an online, multimedia platform that focuses on 400 years of Dutch colonization in NY. It uses the 17th c. trade triangle (Beaver, Wampum, Hoes) as the thread that weaves anecdotes with facts in an attempt to ask broader questions about the affects of colonization and the largest imminent questions (land) concerning taking account of this history. In the 21st century beavers are back in town, Native American casinos provide an alternative yet controversial signature of financial support, hoes a homonym comprised of European goods as well as human commodity. Beaver, Wampum, Hoes measures accountability through a heterogeneous, collective exchange system.

Beaver, Wampum, Hoes is the latest installment of Ridgway’s nine-year ‘Manhattan Project’. Frequently involving audience participation along with the physical and intellectual recycling and reinscription of historic as well as contemporary positions, this project investigates the commonalities between the Netherlands and the U.S. Presented in public spaces and using an extension of this methodology on different materials/subjects, such as deerskin, flags, tulip bulbs, money/investment, speech, beaver, wampum, hoes, silver and gold, all are ‘killed’ and reconstituted as raw material that is particular to the colonization of North America. The ‘Manhattan Project’ may be seen as a kind of contemporary barometric reading of the cultural, economic and political relations between these two countries.

Audacity to Vote

single channel video

Language: German

Following the American Presidential campaign of 2008, where issues of race, gender, age and class have all converged, ‘Audacity to Vote’ begins by asking residents of the Berlin Gropiusstadt community a simple question: “If you could vote, who would you vote for and why?” With diverse responses the citizen’s enter another dialectic- questioning political engagement, knowledge of international affairs and interpreting mass media. How does this affect our personal lives and how is it
disseminated to infiltrate our perception of political power in the public sphere?

‘Audacity to Vote’ (Part I) will be screened at midnight on election day, November 4, 2008 at the Bablyon Theater, Rosa Luxembourgplatz, Berlin.

But first a special screening of ‘Audacity to Vote’ (Part I & II) as a work in progress at Art Claims Impulse at 21:00.

Image translation: In a globalised world shouldn’t all of us be allowed to vote in the US presidential elections?

While I was in Philadelphia doing research at the Library Company for upcoming projects in 2009, I also was working on my residency at Basekamp, a space for collaboration in contemporary practice. On September 16, 2008 I presented n.e.w.s. Three of the contributors to ‘n.e.w.s.’  joined the presentation live on Skype: Prayas  Abhinav from Bangalore, Stephen Wright from Paris and Mia Jankowicz from London.

Prayas, Stephen, Mia and I gave feedback on how we use n.e.w.s. while Aharon, Scott and Basekampers joined in with some critical and insightful feedback about not only using Drupal, but in general how n.e.w.s. can be more negotiable. We tried to answer the questions from other contributors as well. We might have to wait for either time or money to get everything done that was suggested but it was productive. Here is my summary on the n.e.w.s. site.

Also, we are developing the ‘Plausible (Art) Worlds’ project, n.e.w.s. and Basekamp and we will be discussing this collaboration in the near future. In the meantime here is a beginning with Stephen’s text.

Please check out the n.e.w.s. website as it is growing – if  you feel so inclined you’re welcome to leave comments there  (commenting requires registering on the site) but you just need to sign up as a user with a valid email address.

I was also fortunate in my timing to see the ‘Black Founders’ exhibition at the Library Company. The ‘Black Founders: The Free Black Community in the Early Republic’ exhibition included manuscripts, books, prints, etc. and organised the archives through these headings: Slavery and Revolution in the Atlantic world, Emerging Slavery Movements, Emanicipation in Pennsylvania, Independent Black Churches the Christianity of Freedom, The Struggle for Equality and Citizenship, Abolition Day, The Enterprising and Talented, Colonization, Emigration and Identity. Curated by Phil Lapsansky.

The Library Company of Philadelphia is an independent research library specializing in American history and culture from the 17th through the 19th centuries and has one of the most comprehensive collections on African- American history. The Library Company is America’s first successful lending library and oldest cultural institution. It was founded in 1731 by Benjamin Franklin as a subscription library supported by its shareholders, as it is to this day.

from 19:00 to 22:00
@ The Substation
45 Armenian Street
Singapore

n.e.w.s. is a horizontally-organised, cumulative knowledge-based website for contemporary art and new media framed by curatorial contributions from around the globe, bringing together voices and images from North, East, West and South. n.e.w.s. reflects geographic diversity and facilitates a framework for collaboration, content and visions of change outside the normal parameters of the established art world networks.

Launch at ISEA 2008

Contributing curators and n.e.w.s. representatives will talk about building the platform, the way content is determined through curatorial positionings, and further collaborative tactics.

Contributors: Ade Darmawan/Ruangrupa, Ingrid Commandeur, Thomas Berghuis, Inti Guerrero, Mia Jankowicz, Rich Streitmatter-Tran, Mustafa Maluka, Stephen Wright, Yuliya Sorokina, and Branka Ćurčić/Kuda.

Moderators: Lee Weng Choy/The Substation, Renée Ridgway/n.e.w.s.

More about n.e.w.s.

A tool for distributing immaterial resources and intellectual goods in an era of diversification, n.e.w.s. attempts to initiate, build and foster relations and provide a valuable portal dedicated to cultural bricolage, enabling less seen artistic endeavors worldwide visibility.

n.e.w.s. structures contributions in the form of Web 2.0 technology: a blog/archive (images and text), along with a wiki-like ‘books’ (collaborative writing), tagging (shared vocabulary) and polling. Content is curatorially determined: images, texts, podcasts and links provide information in the form of documentation of previous works or new media online.

Open-sourced, collaborative action and authoring are not only encouraged but also are integral to n.e.w.s. along with a community developed event calendar and database. Building upon shared knowledge and past references, contributors engage with each others’ practices. Multilingual translation, tagging and commentary will eventually contextualise the contributions and open up new possibilities, collaboration in the form of further projects as well as producing printed multilingual publications.

Comments and user feedback welcome! Please add your events to our calendar or subscribe to our mailing for further projects and announcements.

n.e.w.s.: Tiong Ang, Sannetje van Haarst, Renée Ridgway

n.e.w.s. is supported by: Mondriaan Foundation

April 2, 2008

University of Amsterdam

Ridgway presented her work and conducted a workshop for students of the Research Master in Cultural Analysis programme.

Alternative spaces, web spaces, artists associations, and networks have thrived in recent years, encouraging and enabling resistant forms of art, political and social positions. What are the means to determine value and is there any general standard with which to work? If ‘money tends to be represented as an invisible potency because of its capacity to turn into many other things… its hidden capacity for action.’ (Graeber, 2001, p. 114), how are cultural currencies cultivated? This presentation considered the production of art and its use value in the twenty-first century, along with its relationship between new media and the Internet, cultural translation witihin the art world and wealth distribution models.

Politics of the contemporary: Globalisation and Interculturality
Research Master in Cultural Analysis Programme

Professors: Sophie Berrebi and Deborah Cherry

Course guidelines: Key concepts will be explored in relation to a range of cultural instances such as museums and international art exhibitions, documentary, installation, contemporary art and the globalization of culture and politics. The inherently interdisciplinary nature of the subject requires the use of a diversified range of theoretical sources. While the presentations by tutors and seminar discussions will predominantly deal with case-studies from the visual domain, students are invited to research other areas of contemporary culture in which relations between the local and the global are seen to be at work.

Holding an Angle

Videoscreening of works by international artists

Saturday, February 9, 2008

at the Cacao Fabriek Helmond, the Netherlands

This site-specific context of a former chocolate factory was the place of a series of screenings by various artists.

Curated by Lieke Snelling and Ruth Legg

Skin Deep
single channel projection
12 minutes
2008

In this video the topics addressed deal with land and sovereignty. The value of the currency, in this case embodied by the possession of land, is continuously increased and decreased over time. Land here is currency as well as the material salt and is determined by gains and losses. In this case, time is the length of the video, reflected here through the action/ritual by a performer replacing an area of the projection (light) with salt. This crystalizes the image, so to speak, allowing it to be seen; the video becomes visible. The video is Native New Yorkers, a one-minute loop showing a time-lapse of an entire piece of deerskin (as a metaphor for land) being cut up, unravelling.

Be(com)ing Dutch: The Gate Foundation, it’s past, present and future

November 19, 2007 at the Van Abbemuseum

Part of the caucus programme of Be(com)ing Dutch

Guest speakers: Sebastian Lopez (Director Iniva London) Shaheen Merali (Head of Art, Film, New Media, exhibitions at Haus der Kulturen der Welt ) Diana Franssen (Head librarian, Van Abbemuseum) Renée Ridgway (former Board member, Gate Foundation, artist, curator)

This workshop which addressed the acquisition of the Gate Foundation within the Van Abbe Museum and its present state and use value by exploring the cultural significance of its history, its accomplishment and ambition of its collection. Taking the Gate as a case study, as an ‘interpretative field of material’, we further contextualised this within the framework of alternative ‘autonomous insitutions’ (Iniva, Haus der Kulturen der Welt) whose mission is to reinstate internationalism, world culture, while working towards inclusion.

Part of the workshop was devoted to attempting to unpack some of the terminology associated with ‘cultural diversity’ used in policymaking over the years within the cultural sector, to question the autonomy of these institutions in relationship to areas of ‘positive discrimination’ as well as the ‘top down’ financing that supports such cultural initiatives. These questions were conceived together with Sarat Maharaj and are being further discussed and disseminated via a wiki. More soon.

A Short History of Dutch Video Art

224 pages, 340 illustrations, English/Spanish
design: Sander Boon
publisher: episode Rotterdam
ISBN: 9059730313
Price: € 27,50

This is the last publication of the Gate Foundation.

The publication catalogues the exhibition A Short History of Dutch Video Art, which was curated by Sebastian Lopez and organized by the Gate Foundation. With its 224 pages, this bilingual (English and Spanish) publication has already been shown in 7 museums around the world. It contains 340 colour illustrations and descriptions of the works as well as comprehensive videographies, thereby providing the most complete overview of the artist’s achievements. The publication also includes an essay by Sebastian Lopez, reflecting on Dutch artistic and cultural dynamics around the new medium of video introduced in the 1970s.

Official launch and symposium at Casco Projects in Utrecht, the Netherlands.

October 6th, 2007, 14:00-18:00

guest speakers:

Jan Verwoert, Frans-Willem Korsten, Marina Grzinic.

Moderators:
Katarina Zdjelar & Renée Ridgway

in cooperation with Piet Zwart Institute and Revolver Books

Another Publication is a book project around the manifold perspectives on otherness. Twelve writers were invited to contribute a text on this subject, each writing a preface to a possible book around the ‘other.’ Together, these prefaces trace different identifications and applications of the term, such as collaboration, love, aesthetics, institutional critique and globalisation. In addition, 82 artists were invited to submit a cover for this book and they, in turn, invited another to contribute an image for a cover. Each compilation of texts is framed by one single cover image, each in an edition of seven.

Editors: Katarina Zdjelar and Renée Ridgway

With text contributions by: Mieke Bal, Dieter Lesage, Bojana Kunst, Steve Rushton, Hito Steyerl, Nato Thompson, Thomas Michelon, Frans-Willem Korsten, Jelena Vesic, Boris Buden, Jan Verwoert, Rosi Braidotti
Graphic designer: Sander Boon

Website: http://anotherpublication.net/

Order a publication at Revolver Books

Once again, many thanks to the writers and all of the 164 image contributors for their images!

Oliver Ressler, Mieke Bal, Christoph Keller, Peter Piller, Erzen Shkololli, LIGNA, Marina Grzinic and Aina Smid, Zoran Todorović, David Maljković, Chris Sullivan, Paul Khera, Christina Erman Widerberg, Karl Persson, Raqs Media Collective, Inder Salim, Ivan Grubanov, Predrag Pajdić, Siniša Ilić, Bojan Djordjev, Ivan Moudov, Michael Hofstetter, Carey Young, Ine Lamers, Robert Suermondt, Bert Sissingh, Nalini Malani, Nourit Masson-Sékiné, Diego Ferrari, Mr. Chankyong Park, Wendelien van Oldenborgh, Diego Bruno, Craig Coulthard, Philip Provily, Chad McCail, Biljana Djurdjević, Jos van der Pol, Maurice Bogaert, Melvin Moti, David Maroto, Antoine Prum, Holger Nickisch, Liesbeth Bik, Stefan Saffer, Monali Meher, Renzo Martens, Banu Cennetoglu, David Kellner& Ivan Jurica, Frank J.M.A. Castelyns, Roland van den Berghe, Kara Hamilton, Johan Waerndt, Sanjeev Sinha, Hans Bernhard, Nancy Bleck, Odili Donald Odita, Tere Recarens, Durga Kainthola, Servullo Mendez Rey, Hinrich Sachs, Olaf Probst, Tamuna Chabashvili, Betsy Green, Anneke A. de Boer, Sandra Semchuk and James Nicholas, Christiaan Bastiaans, Carlos Aires, Joseph Semah, Duba Sambolec, Delphine Bedel, Caecilia Tripp, Natasja Straat, Melanie Carvalho, Alireza Rasoulinezhad, Ni Haifeng, Caterina Pecchioli, Matthijs de Bruine, Margret Wibmer, Peggy Buth, IRWIN, Group OHO (1966 – 1971), Katrin Plavcak, Marieken Verheyen, Eduardo Molinari / Archivo Caminante, Simon Ferdinando, Susan Kendzulak, Abrie Fourie, Shaheen Merali, Basekamp, Thomas Buxó, Mark Zirpel, Klaas van Gorkum & Iratxe Jaio, Tina Aufiero, Mounir Fatmi, Sylvia de Swaan, Kenneth R. Vick, Masist Gül, Hung-Chih Peng, Els Vanden Meersch, Sonia Balassanian, Anita Di Bianco, Libia Castro & Ólafur Ólafsson, Maria Dumlao, Tiong Ang, Stefan Bohenberger, Charlie Citron, Ella Klaschka, Cecilia Mandrile, Sandra Stephens, Stephanie Benzaquen, Judi Werthein, Remy Jungerman, Arthur Neve, Mary Ellen Carroll, Sharmila Samant, Raul Marroquin, Risk Hazekamp, Tushar Joag, Dawn Woolley, Radcliffe Bailey, Marietheres Finkeldei, Berend Strik, Desiree Palmen, Albert Weis, Thomas Lenden, Mark Brogan, Franco Angeloni, Karolina Freino, Marisa Jahn & Steve Shada, Shunji Hori, Serkan Ozkaya, Stani Michiels, Lisa Holden, Ayreen Anastas, Luisa Kasalicky, Rene Gabri, Astrit Schmidt-Burkhardt, Rob Birza, Guerilla Girls, Mohamed Abdulla, Rachel Wilberforce, Steve Lambert, Isabel Cordeiro, Sal Randolph, Kathe Izzo, Orgacom, Bert de Muynck, Naomi Tereza Salmon, Lucia Zegada, Atone Niane, Manon de Boer, Paul Carter&Paul Gray, Rodrìguez foundation, Birgit Knoechl, Mark Booth, Fendry Ekel, Joachim Stein, Nasrin Tabatabai, Miloš Lolić, Naro Snackey, Josiah McElheny, Adi Hollander, Eitan Ben Moshe, Ana Dzokic, Corinne Gambi