2019-2020 COOP study group: Performing the Living )) (( Living the Performing Reconnecting with Cycles. Tutor Team: Akinbode Akinbiyi, Arlette-Louise Ndakoze. Partner: SAVVY Contemporary

Student participants: 

Jose Iglesias Ga-Arenal, Flip Driest, Hubert Gromny, line kramer, Rosa Ronsdorf, Gabriela Passos, Nine Postma, Raul Sebastian Silva, Anne Toth, Hasan Özgür Top.

Tutor team:

Akinbode Akinbiyi

Arlette-Louise Ndakoze for SAVVY Contemporary 


Performing the Living )) (( Living the Performing Reconnecting with Cycles from Month to Month & Chronicles.



Evolving around Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung's concept for “sonsbeek 2020”: Force Times Distance – On Labour and its Sonic Ecologies” engaging with the conditions and rights of labour in history and present times, as well as with the architecture and labourers that have built the environment of Sonsbeek Park.

The lead tutors of this COOP, Akinbode Akinbiyi and Arlette-Louise Ndakoze propose to engage with the effects of labour and more precisely with the effects of Western industrial systems and their microcosms; the cities.

Western industrial societies build themselves upon violence.

The study group will focus on detachment as an indirect form of violence; A psychological, emotional, physical detachment experienced in modalities of carelessness.

Questioning its roots will put the group on the way back to human’s roots, back to connect:

How can we feed ourselves, make our economies, form a common life?

How can we recreate ecosystems?

Why care?

Connection is a need for °reflected existences in order to persist.

Existence with intelligence is the definition for “human’ as analysed by philosopher Alexis Kagame.

To be connected with their inner self and their environment is a need for reflected existences in order to have a sense of the living, and through this, perform the living.

  • “Living the performing” questions the place of artists in consumption oriented societies. What would artists who cannot sense the living perform? Would they still be what we call artists?
  • The waves in between the Performative-Living sides )) (( express the cycled reading and writing through sound which Bonaventure refers to in terms of “sonic ecologies”.

It involves a listening-resonating-performing-resonating-listening modus, a cycle as the modus for the living and the sense of it. From sensing reflecting is coming through, and from there, a possible connection towards each other.

The engagement will be composed in:

* Practices of common listening

* Moments of common reading: References of the SAVVY library

* Experiencing distance and proximity

  • How far can a word/a body go before we disconnect?

This also calls for practices of respect to oneself and one another.

  • How can sensing the common make us feel a common sense?

* Sleeping-dreaming-relaxing without disconnecting

* Experiencing the link between physical-metaphysical, body-spirit in:

paintings, sculptures, clay and further artistic practices

* Embracing differences/Complexities (identity topics)

  • Identities and their view on the living

* Back to the roots, reconnect: ancestors, soil, plants, raw materials

  • how to plant vegetables
  • how to make our own clothes
  • how to care for the nature

End work: Performing the connection

The type of end performance (a play, a radio show, a film) will be

reflected and worked on together with the study group.

In this sense, we will perform what we will have worked on in the study

topic, which is a work on reconnecting, on living together, on working