ASSEMBLY 

Faculty of Invisibility

Shedhalle Zürich
10.07.2010 – 8.08.2010 
Curated by Sönke Hallmann, Inga Zimprich

–– With Laurie Cohen, Benjamin Cölle, Maaike Engelen, Clemence Freschard, Jeanne van Heeswijk, Ingela Johansson, Achim Lengerer, M7red (Mauricio Corbalan, Pio Torroja), p-r-o-x-y, Dagmar Reichert, Darren Rhymes, Jan Rolletschek, Elske Rosenfeld, Simone Schardt, Johan Siebers, Tanja Widmann et al 
–– Materials on loan by Robert Havemann Gesellschaft, Archiv Grünes Gedächtnis der Heinrich Böll Stiftung
–– Retreats by Maartje Dros, Francois Lombarts

In its curatorial guest project the Faculty of Invisibility engages with the political place of the assembly. Along moments of institutionalisation it traces the question which possibilities of assembly the contemporary art institution suggests and allows for. The Faculty of Invisibility proceeds by investigating forms of political speech, moments of inscription and acts of enforcement that make social articulations binding and recognizable. If the institution marks the threshold where articulations are inscribed into the realm of the visible and communicable, to question the institution’s political capacity today requires to exercise the institutional as a function of speech and to assemble within its mechanisms of showing and issuing.
 
The exhibition room conveys a series of settings similar to those that direct roles and spaces of speech in institutional entities. These spatial set-ups draw on such acts as the address, the foundation, the protocol, the delegation and the declaration to ask: What does it mean to gather within the language-based apparatus of the institution –– within those places the institution provides, but which in turn reproduce the institutional itself? What can it mean to gain articulation in them, to have a voice within them? How could one open a space of speech inside the institutional realm in which one’s own being-in-language becomes apparent and available?

Aiming to make moments of recent history available in their capacity, the exhibition setting assembles footage such as quotes, contracts, protocols, and recordings from archives of political instances. The relation contemporary writing and artistic production holds with reality also comes forth from the possibilities and hopes that reveal themselves in a collection of past moments of public articulation, traceable in statements, inscriptions, documents, and speech acts. The exhibition setting thus aims to assemble a vast collection of voices. 

Amongst them are singular moments stemming from the archives of the United Nations, whose proceedings exemplify the mechanisms of speech in the institutional realm. The protocolls of the Zürich city council display the means, like motions, interpellations, and postulates, by which municipal law is acted upon. The video recordings of the conventions of the west-german Green Party 1984, as much as transcripts from its founding congress in 1980 (on loan from the Archiv Grünes Gedächtnis der Heinrich Böll Stiftung) do not only document the secession, arguments and negotiation of a young idealist movement, they also mark the place of speech of a time marked by a particular world-view that is no longer available and accessible. Next to the video registration of the GDR’s Central Round Table, borrowed from the Robert Havemann archive are personal peace treaties, which citizens of the GDR signed with citizens of other countries in cold war times.

16/17/18 July, daily 8pm
Assuming the peculiar place of the example – that is essentially resembling others– the Faculty of Invisibility convenes at the beginning of the production. Since 2006 the Faculty has traversed formats of becoming public: So for example in its founding moment, The Speech (2006), its first publication, Communiqué (2007), its series of letters, The Invitation (2008), and most recently in the place of the Spokesperson (2010). By employing and altering institutional speech acts, the Faculty aims to put them at play in new constellations. Within its performative use of language, in its convention and proclamation, in its invitation to its participants, the Faculty of Invisibility issues itself as a blueprint of a possible modality of assembly. 
The Faculty of Invisibility – with Maaike Engelen, Ingela Johansson, Johan Siebers, Jeanne van Heeswijk, Dagmar Reichert, Laurie Cohen, Benjamin Cölle and Darren Rhymes, takes place from July 16th – 18th and becomes public daily from 8pm in public events, performances, statements and lectures

23/24 July, 2 – 8pm
Representatives of all parties and social movements of the GDR, such as Initiative for Peace and Human rights (IFM) or the New Forum gather in 1989 at a round table in order to create constitutional legacy and prevent the outbreak of violence. The committee strives to facilitate the first free elections, which could pave the way for reunification. Quickly overhauled by the factual reunification, the Central Round Table had drafted a proposal for a constitution of the GDR, it has negotiated and questioned its own ligitimation, its self-conception, its own proceedings and aims. The urgency to answer to the loudly voiced protest on the streets of the city plays into these meetings:
"DUCKE: That has been a concrete proposition. I’d like to take it up now. We discuss whether we should send out a delegation. POPPE: Maybe we can agree on the proposition by Mr. Ullmann. DUCKE: No, please, I have asked, do we want to send out a delegation, not only from one side? Frau Köppe. KÖPPE: Yes, but a delegation that issues a respective statement from all sides. Not a member of the SDP going out to negotiate.... ZIEGLER: I think your demands are just. Only we are not there yet, that we could issue a statement, in particular addressing these specific questions. We’d have to reach an agreement first."
In view of processes of history writing the open workshop on July 23rd and 24th works with excerpts of the transcripts of the Round Table’s meetings. Facing such questions as memorability, their communicability, the inscription of political events, the interaction between the individual and community as well as moments of testimony. With an open group of participants these protocols will be read, commented on, enacted as well as acted out. 

30/31 July, 1 August, 2 – 6pm
In the Department of Reading’s tableaus each image suggests itself as singular within a series without being inserted into a readable chronology. In its singularity it belongs to a series of similar images. Equally the work of the Faculty of Inivisibility is drawn into the production of images that convey and communicate events. It is itself engaged in the production of images of institutional practices of the discoursive, that it consults.  
For the duration of the Assembly the Department of Reading takes the silent, nearly invisibile but incessant place of the protocoll, which contains the traces of voices, as well as the place of the tableau that registers and exhibits the ongoing acts and stagings. As a mechanism connecting wiki-pages, Skype-chat and spatial settings the Department of Reading invites its readers to comment on and discuss, work through and alter existing texts. The public reading events taking place daily between 30th of July and 1st of  August are dedicated to the relation between mass and movement as well as images of the discoursive. With Tanja Widmann, Achim Lengerer, Johan Siebers, p-r-o-x-y and Helmut Draxler (invited).

7 August, 4pm
In the closing series of meetings the Shedhalle itself comes into view as a place that makes the inscription of emancipatory political strands readable in its organisational structure, programming and history. But also in view of its founding context and its contemporary position in Zürich’s cultural landscape. In conversation with former and current employees and board members of Shedhalle questions of continuity and breaks, historicity and the relation to today’s political forces will be raised. Selected from the archives of Shedhalle itself there are pages of protocoll which mark the internal struggles to readjust its programmatic and political course during the years 1992/1994 for instance, which help to trace the Shedhalle as a concentration of discourses, demands, expectations and political possibility. As an insertion into the Shedhalle’s ongoing program the Faculty of Invisibility asks with this production as well, in how far it can take up and extend political strands at work in Shedhalle’s own institutional set-up and history.   

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