Join us at the second edition of the Making Matters symposium, which will take place on Friday 20 and Saturday 21 November 2020 at Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam and online.

The three day conference Making Matters, is organized by the workgroup Material Practices (formerly known as Critical Making). Recent years have seen the emergence of a new kind of collective material practices that transgress the classical opposition between theory and practice, or thinking and making. These practices actively engage with our catastrophic times and yield collaborations that connect cultural, technological and more-than-human concerns. They show a potential to develop a comprehensive approach to art, science and technologies, driven by the necessity to fundamentally reimagine the relationship of humans to the world.

The conference brings together practitioners from various backgrounds and disciplines such as artistic research, experimental publishing, visual art, business and performance. These practitioners will share their work in which thinking and making are entangled, and will discuss the critical potential that this entanglement entails.

Through online workshops and presentations, the contributors invite a broad audience of artists, activists, teachers, theorists, students, designers, etherpads and other non-humans, to engage with diverse subjects such as alternative economies, feral ecologies, shared authorship, xeno-biologies, pedagogies, publishing infrastructures and radical collectivities.


Presentation
Friday 20 November, 14.15-15.00

How we have been preparing for the not-yet

Jeanne van Heeswijk is a Rotterdam based artist who facilitates the creation of dynamic and diversified public spaces in order to “radicalize the local”. Her long-scale community-embedded projects question art’s autonomy by combining performative actions, discussions, and other forms of organizing and pedagogy in order to assist communities to take control of their own futures. Her ongoing research Training for the “Not Yet” develops a curriculum of community learnings through theoretical frameworks, performative workshops, creating “learning objects,” and developing test sites to enact trainings for the “not yet.”

Workshop E
Saturday 21 November, 10:00-12:00

Reading You

A second exploration on commitment to share other realities in times of breakdown in a collective reading and writing session.

The Already Not-Yet Becoming Collective

Explores the notion of collectives not as a pre-existing social structure but as actively becoming in context as part of developing and enabling a series of public scenarios to enact and imagine collective futures. Ima Iduozee, Iida Nissinen, Joy Mariama Smith, Vishnu Vardhani, Jeanne van Heeswijk. As part of a durational Project commissioned by PUBLICS, Helsinki.