Author Archives: Julie Harboe

Proto-Call: no-how

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World Ornamental Forum Davos 2016

PROTO_CALL for three days of collaborative work in the Kirchner Museum and surroundings May 5th -7th 2016

Like a museum, like a dream, like art, and maybe even life, WOF entails PARADOX. PLAYFULNESS chases away the hovering shadow of PRODUCTIVITY and yields spaces of careful unlimited activity. Retracing gesture as form and ornament as intermediary WOF is a dancing EXCHANGE of elegance and SIGNIFICANCE. Go for it like an unfolding vortex, like the almost invisible entasis.

WOF 2016 will meander between model and gesture:

Case study – example – Fallstudie – paradigm – Beispiel
Praxis – visualisation – movement – performance

WOF has a virtual and an analogue existence here and there. You can log into www.worldornamentalforum.ch and be in the WOF any time or you can ascend into Davos and be with Kirchner and others who expose themselves to the pleasant anxiety of no-how*.

WOF is an academic and abstract endeavour into the territory. We need to hack and circumscribe the assignment and we have to engage not with structures but with the material itself always in situ. WOF gives you a space to check your thinking with others, picking up the energy between Sein and Schein necessary today. WOF moves from craftsmanship-to object-to discourse, it asks you to get in line and talk to the people next to you do as much and as little as possible. Folding and unfolding. Welcome to WOF.

*see texts and talks by Sarat Maharaj

RECALL

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\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/Which key-notes would you like to share with all of us?

The WOF is an experiment towards the ornamental and the engagement of the participants was holding up mirrors to ourselves, of the gestures we make, and their effect. The ornamental in this context as defined in the “call” is about intermedia agency. In the open space all acquires meaning and keeping a discussion constructive demands ethics and interest. The arts are quite well-trained at this.

\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/What is the relevance of WOF in your work? How do its aspects reflect in your current projects and how could you imagine integrating the questions WOF raised in future projects?

The participation in WOF reminded me of the importance of research CULTURE and that this has to be taken so seriously that it needs to take the timeframe . I was inspired by the participants who engaged positively looking into this open frame. This attitude is enabling. This is to me economy. Not just speaking of economy – as our WEF colleagues do it all the time, while continuing to ruin peoples lives – but to be economic in that we respect and practice exchange of knowledge and seek to leave the secure forms (and the power they might give) in order to truly collaborate and be .. ornamental.

The three impulses I tried to set up referring to model, ornament and gesture (“The museum as a model to recall materiality”, “The changed colours of Kirchner’s ornamental bed cover as a sign of the depth of time” and the “Being inside the collectors impatient gesture”) – were short and immediate, to me a way to understand “enacting” as a starting point for a form of narrative and the brevity of the moment without any auxiliary tools.