DAI February
A bit of a change in the timetable at the DAI this week; we began on Monday with the private group mentor class, followed by a day of discussion relating to the looming menace of the thesis on Tuesday, and studio visits on Wednesday.
An unfortunate turn of events is that it is no longer possible for us to eat in the evening at the DAI – something to do with cooking not being allowed in the building. This means that we all had to decamp every evening to the Balengebouw on the other side of town, which was freezing cold and not exactly very hospitable in any case. The worst of this was sitting through lectures after dinner; it’s pretty hard to concentrate on even a very good lecture when your feet are freezing.
As the week wore on some practical measures were taken to deal with this, but it was still far from ideal. Gabriëlle promised to do something about this before the next DAI week – let’s hope so.
On Thursday we had a long meeting about the future of the Here As The Centre Of The World project, which should see us return to the five cities visited earlier (Beirut, Damascus, Diyarbakir, Taipei, and Khartoum) in small groups this autumn. There had been quite a lot of pessimism and confusion in the group about what exactly we were to be doing there, since the brief as originally announced was simply to present the book which will be shortly published about the project. Going all that way, and having contributed a significant amount to the costs of the project, it seemed like a very half-hearted, disappointing, and poorly thought through conclusion. However, we managed to discuss some proposals which represent an alternative and more active and engaged way of dealing with these forthcoming visits. I am personally a lot more enthusiastic now that there exist proposals for something to be done with the trips.
Finally, Friday marked an interesting departure in that it involved doing something active at the DAI. There were two workshops arranged, one in video and the other in performance. I chose to take part in the second of these, which was lead by Sanne van Rijn. It turned out to be a very enjoyable afternoon of improvised routines and discussion, and a very refreshing alternative to listening all day or waiting on your turn to be visited by a guest tutor. We have three more of these workshops, and I am certainly looking forward to the next one.
