Expanded Performance: The City School

Saturday 8 December 2012 (daytime and evening)
Location: all over the city of The Hague
Survey of performances (re)enacted: click here

All movies are now online:
YouTube: Immediate Spaces

Part of: Expanded Performance

On Saturday December 8, 2012, on various locations in The Hague, there will be performances related to and inspired by both recent and historical performances by a.o. Francis Alÿs and Vito Acconi. The actions take place in the city space and interact with it. When you walk through the city on this day, you could be followed, or maybe you will see a huge arrow flying by, people walking backwards, a boy falling into a canal, or people casually polishing the street. For a survey of performances on this day: click here.

The Dutch architect Anne Holtrop and his students of the Sandberg Institute, Studio for Immediate Spaces, will organize the project The City School in The Hague. They will restage, renew and explore historical urban performances (for examples see below) and look into how they relate to our present day and to the current situation in the city of The Hague. These experiments will be documented in collaboration with The One Minutes Foundation and screened during the finissage of Expanded Performance at Stroom Den Haag (Sunday December 16, 2012).

Participating students
Esther Bentvelsen, Madina Bissenova, Benjamin Day, Annee Grøtte Viken, Laura Holzberg, Christine Just, Sahar Mohammadrezazadeh, Chen Mu-Chieh, Ewelina Niedziella, Roeland Otten, Julia Retz Vilela Pinto, Max Royakkers, Ryuta Sakaki, Dennis Schuivens, Haruka Uemura, Elejan van der Velde, Claire van Lubeek, Alonso Vázquez, Lion Zeegers

Examples of historical performances
The Situationists drifted randomly through the city following their moods; Douglas Huebler arbitrarily picked an area on a map and asked people to walk there and make photos whenever they thought of some words he had given them; Gordon Matta-Clark searched for 'gutterspaces', unusable small slivers of land in between building sites, that were not even accessible in some cases; Rirkrit Tiravanija converted his house and its interior into a museum that he declared to be open 24/7, people were invited to stay there and use the space in any way they liked; Lara Almarcequi searched, documented and protected wastelands because nothing specific is happening there, thus everything could happen; Stalker occupies derelict pieces of land with objects in order to create new perspectives; Hamish Fulton declared himself a walking artist; Richard Long walked on a grass field repeatedly forwards and backwards on the same line; On Kawara recorded his daily walk on a map; Paulien Oltheten placed small objects next to people sitting on a park bench in order to make them more interesting (like footnotes in a text); Adrian Piper travelled in a bus through New York with a towel stuffed in her mouth; Bas Jan Ader biked into a canal; John Baldessari photographed the back of all the trucks he passed while driving from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara; Stanley Brouwn asked people to show him the way by asking them to draw a map on a sheet of paper; Daniel Buren pasted single, rectangular sheets of green and white striped paper on 200 billboards and surfaces throughout Paris; Mierle Laderman Ukeles cleaned the pedestrian pathways with a mob; Vito Acconci followed people on the street regardless of how far they travelled, until they reached a private place .....