Assistances (Working Title) w/ Valentina Desideri, Stefano Harney, Jason Hirata, Will Holder, Annick Kleizen, Cally Spooner, Eric Golo Stone, Mathilde Supe, Terre Thaemlitz, Marina Vishmidt

The event can also be attended online via Zoom (Password: assistant).

Day 1: https://leuphana.zoom.us/j/94170832858?pwd=K0lzUjJjNXA1eGVBSW5VWTJGbWI5Zz09

10am: Introduction

10:30am: Valentina Desideri* & Stefano Harney**

1pm: Lunch

2pm: Mathilde Supe***

3:30pm: Will Holder**** & Cally Spooner (online)*****

5pm: Eric Golo Stone******

*Valentina Desideri explores art making as a form of study and study as a form of making art. She trained in contemporary dance at the Laban Centre in London (2003–2006), later on did her MA in Fine Arts at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam (2011–13) and is currently a PhD candidate at the Social Justice Institute at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. She does Fake Therapy and Political Therapy, and is one of the co-organizes of Performing Arts Forum in France, she speculates in writing with Stefano Harney, she engages in Poethical Readings and gathers Sensing Salons with Denise Ferreira da Silva, she is part of the Oficina de Imaginação Política and the online platform www.ehcho.org, she reads and writes.

**Stefano Harney is Professor of Transversal Aesthetics at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne (KHM).  He has been Professor of Strategic Management at Singapore Management University, Professor of Strategy, Culture, and Society at the Queen Mary School of Business and Management in London, and is currently Honorary Professor in the Institute of Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice at the University British Columbia.  He has been collaborating with Valentina Desideri for twelve years, most recently on the practice of affordances and the decolonization of the senses.

***Mathilde Supe creates narratives through film, video, books and publishing. Her approach to storytelling blends fiction, collective imagination and media studies to explore representations and cultural norms. After a first exhibition in partnership with the FID festival in Marseille, she exhibited at the Galleria Continua and participated in various group exhibitions and fairs for young creators. She also studied sociology at the EHESS (Paris) and has just published a book on the artist Keren Cytter with Sternberg Press.

****Typographer Will Holder (born 1969 in Hatfield, GB) produces oral and printed publications with artists and musicians. He is preoccupied with conversation as model and tool for a shared set of publishing conditions—whereby the roles of commissioner, author, subject, editor, printer, and typographer are improvised and shared, as opposed to assigned and predetermined.

*****Cally Spooner is an artist who exhibits performances that unfold across media — on film, in text, as objects, through sound, and as illustrated in drawings. Recent institutional solo exhibitions have taken place at the Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Sint-Martens-Latem, Belgium; Parrhesiades, London; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Swiss Institute, New York; Castello di Rivoli, Turin; Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève; the New Museum, New York; and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Her work has appeared in recent group exhibitions at Pinacoteca Agnelli, Turin; Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen; Centre Pompidou-Metz, France; FRONT Cleveland Triennial; BY ART MAT- TERS, Hangzhou; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Castello di Rivoli, Turin; MAMbo, Bologna; Serpentine Gallery, London; Kunsthaus Zurich; the Aspen Art Museum, Colorado; and REDCAT Gallery, Los Angeles. Spooner is the author of recent and forthcoming monographs published by Lenz Press and the Swiss Institute (2023); Hatje Cantz (2020); Mousse (2018); and Slim Volume/ Cornerhouse (2016). Her novella Collapsing in Parts was published by Mousse in 2012. Spooner is the recipient of numerous awards and prizes, including the prestigious Paul Hamlyn Award and the Novo Nordisk Foundation’s Mads Øvlisen PhD Scholarship for practice-based art. She is currently a research fellow at Overgaden, Copenhagen, in association with the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and the University of Copenhagen (2021–24). She was born in the United Kingdom, is British Italian, and lives and works in Turin. Her solo show Two Thousand Six Hundred and Seventy-Four Seconds Wide was on view at ZERO…, until November 2022.

******Eric Golo Stone is currently artistic director at the Künstlerhaus Stuttgart where he has organized projects with artists including Eva Barto, Andrea Fraser, Cameron Rowland, Bea Schlingelhoff, and Ramaya Tegegne. His program at the Künstlerhaus Stuttgart has become known for presenting artistic positions that advance methods of institutional critique. His research, writing, and lecturing consistently examines the political economy of art, specifically emphasizing the socioeconomic structures, governance arrangements, and authority dynamics by which art institutions operate. His writing has been published in Afterall, October, Flash Art, and Texte zur Kunst, among other publications, and he is editor of the newly published book, Services Working Group, which revisits the seminal exhibition, Services, organized by Helmut Draxler and Andrea Fraser in 1994 at the Kunstraum Lüneburg.