THE MAKING OF MEETING—Now Available for Purchase!
Book publication reflecting on the four day symposium, The Making of the New Silk Roads.
Publication Outline
In August 2009, cultural practitioners from around Asia and their Arthub Asia peers from the rest of the world came together to discuss and reflect on the on-going dynamic echoes of the now-defunct Silk Road trading route and its multiple dimensions. As a four-day symposium, The Making of the New Silk Roads aimed to reassess the complex interconnections within Asia’s cultural and artistic spectrum, at the beginning of the 21st century.
The Making of Meeting summarizes the concerns and thoughts the symposium participants shared, while reflecting on the performative format the symposium explored. By extension, it serves as a memento of what its initiator Arthub Asia, a not-for-profit multi-disciplinary platform of curatorial and artistic experimentation, has achieved in its first seven years of existence.
The book is split into 4 chapters, looking into the personalities, scenography, performance and documentation behind the alternative form of meeting that was put to the test in Bangkok and lies at the core of Arthub Asia’s activities in Asia and world-wide.
Background
Arthub Asia has positioned itself in a fragile yet important environment since its inception in 2007. Arthub Asia has become a proxy, an experiment for local and global minds to connect freely and move wherever their imagination and creative impulses take them, while at the same time pooling some degree of global authority on Asia’s visual art scene.
At the culmination of a three year journey in partnership with the Prince Claus Fund, more than thirty prominent artists, curators, writers, academics and other cultural practitioners from around Asia gathered in Bangkok in August 2009.
The name of the symposium carried in itself a kind of tension and contradiction. Obviously, the “new” and the historical notion of the Silk Road represents two very different realities. Instead of questioning the overarching title however, all participants had one goal in mind: to share and to provoke, to kick off, motivate, enable/disable, initiate, invent, imbed, support and to engage in a platform of intellectual transaction, knowledge production, self-positioning and emotional exchange.
As a “performative” symposium, new formats, contexts and instruments of “meeting” were collectively explored. More than any other form of communication, performance locates itself in the unique moment of meeting. In the absence of the original, performance cannot be repeated; in its repetition it automatically becomes something else. The people and the space in which it takes place have altered; the present has unrelentingly replaced what has already become history. Therefore, this publication does not aim to be a material re-enactment or a literal translation of the symposium’s interventions, but traces back its coming-into-being through the (personal) stories of the people temporarily brought together.
Following this experiment, we raise the following questions: how do we further the possibilities within our networks and develop collaborative models that will carry cultural production into decades to come? If we are to choose, what are the aspects that we want to carry forward and leave behind? If we are shifting from a world where the key source of advantage was in protecting knowledge within a given set of knowledge stocks, into a world in which participation in knowledge flow becomes more valuable, then how can we effectively connect with more engaged and inspired partners who are creating, producing, renewing or possessing new knowledge?
Credits:
Arthub Asia general and curatorial direction: Defne Ayas and Davide Quadrio
Edited and conceptualized by Els Silvrants-Barclay
Produced by Arthub Asia with Louiza/Institute for Provocation and the Prince Claus Fund
Distribution by Louiza, who can be reached at els@louiza.org
Published by Aurelie Daems MER, who can be reached at aurelie@merpaperkunsthalle.org
Texts by Arahmaiani, Defne Ayas, Zoe Butt, David Cotterrell, Onno Dirker, Samah Hijawi, Jiang Jun, Davide Quadrio, Seph Rodney, Lina Saneh, Veronica Sekules, Els Silvrants-Barclay and Hakan Topal
Proofread by Francesca Girelli, Martina Johansson, Veronica Sekules and Els Silvrants-Barclay
Graphic design by Indianen Creative Studio, more information here
Soft cover, quadri colour print, 303 pages, 165 x 235 mm
Retail price 19.95 EUR – 30% wholesale price
Participants of The Making of the New Silk Roads:
Davide Quadrio, Agung Hujatnikajennong, Agung Kurniawan, Alexander Ugay, Defne Ayas, Els Silvrants-Barclay, Gary-Ross Pastrana, Hakan Topal, Jiang Jun, Seph Rodney, Stefan Rusu, Nikoloz (Nikusha) Chkhaidze, Kyong Park, Jompet a.k.a Kuswidananto, Shahidul Alam, Zoe Butt, Samah Hijawi, Iani Arahmaiani, Ho Tzu Nyen, Veronica Sekules, David Cotterrell, Howard Chan, Mu Qian, Onno Dirker, Lina Saneh, Rahraw Omarzad, Shaarbek Amankul, Pratchaya Phinthong, Le Huy Hoang, SuperSudaca, Max Zolkwer and Felix Madrazo
