Super Meta Ultra Sub

Art school — critical sessions — juries — meetings — exhibition installations — oh boy — a career? — HEAD — what are we supposed to do with all of this?
We don’t have the answer, but in the opaque ocean of the art world, among its mysterious and ever-changing currents, you will find buoys to hold on to, things to lean on.
The super meta ultra sub Think.Zone aims to cultivate survival skills to help you navigate cultural environments: demystifying the social and economic structures of the art world and figuring out how to situate your practice within them; arguing and negotiating; making choices in order to communicate effectively; creating and acting in alignment with your values; building a supportive and sustainable artist’s life within a profession that is often cutthroat.
Through materials and words, we will work on strategies for designing and making during artist training sessions: writing exercises, designing artworks in 10 minutes, “silly goose time,” dumpster diving.
The first semester will focus on the “conceptual” foundations; the second on implementation and self-assertion.
The sessions will be led alternately by Niels and Fig.
Fig’s sessions begin with gentle, kind vocal warm-ups, depending on the needs of the group. Drawing on a mix of anarchist pedagogies and translation didactics, they will collectively explore tools for drafting and revising texts, leading, in the second semester, to a multi-stage exploration of spoken text (presenting artworks or performing a reading).
If you are afraid of writing or speaking in front of people, by the end of the year you won’t be anymore; if you already think you’re hyper-strong at it, by the end of the year you’ll be better able to articulate why.
Niels’s sessions will be organized around a model of shared exchange, with the aim of exploring and gaining a better understanding of the different mechanisms that make up the art worlds. The idea is to help you refine your choices and better navigate the different situations you are already confronted with, or may encounter in the future.
What will be particularly interesting in these moments of exchange are the cultural differences we will be able to observe, as well as the ways in which they influence our practices and our relationships to the art world. We will also seek to understand the different power relations at work within these environments, which are more than ever present in them.
Without further transition, in the second semester we will turn our attention to questions of artistic production. More concretely, you will be asked to produce—not for the school, but for yourselves. These sessions will be organized around “exercises” whose only constraint will be time. The aim will be to gradually build a vocabulary of gestures and a repertoire of actions that will allow you to draw on a genuine arsenal of resources in order to develop and produce your work as effectively as possible.
The idea, then, will be to build, throughout the sessions, a set of tools and reflexes that you can draw upon depending on the situations, your needs, and your artistic practices.