COOP SUMMIT 2023 ~ welcome to an assemblage of happenings

June 16-17

Nida

The Dutch Art Institute (DAI) brings together students and tutors from many nations, backgrounds and disciplines to study art and theory, aiming to research, rethink and reshape how we can live together between humans, non-humans and the planet in non-violent, non-extractivist and non-supremacist ways. 

Formal education promises emancipation to the individual, but in its structures and technologies it replicates all the pre-conditions for being "successful" in an unjust world. Without owning the means that would enable us to fully escape this predicament, the DAI, over 20 years, has tried to stretch as many boundaries as possible within the system:

-as Roaming Academy: school without walls and without a fixed homebase, temporarily landing there, where we are invited to study and to share our work—where we are welcomed as friends, as kin.

-as COOP Academy: DAI acknowledges that the most transformative work in art education is done outside of the University. Therefore DAI has been consistently commissioning non-academic art collectives and organisations, admired by us for their political poetics and poetical politics, their resilient thinking, ethical self-imagination and interdependent acting in the world, to convene, curate and guide inter-, trans- or non-disciplinary art research trajectories; bringing makers and thinkers, artists, writers and curators together around relevant questions and urgent topics of our time. Without having to give up on their idiosyncrasies, we have invited all the beautiful creatures that inhabit the DAI to make an effort to be more than the sum of their parts, and to join forces in this difficult process called cooperation. 

On June 16 and 17, the DAI community will present COOP SUMMIT 2023, an annual plurivocal event around the outcomes of the year-long enquiry by 6 COOPs—topical study groups positioned at the heart of DAI’s curriculum.

Over this year, the  6 COOP study groups have gathered in various places all over Europe—including Nida, located at a 15-minutes distance from the Russian border—for several days during each of our monthly DAI Confluences, to share research, probe and debate what is (not) to be done in order to develop a group work that honours the input and specificity of participants, places and public spaces.

DAI now returns to Nida, where the COOPs will go public (unassumingly) on the grounds of Neringa. We are again brilliantly teaming up with Nida Art Colony (NAC) for six COOP presentations activated at the Educational Nature Centre (Gamtos Mokykla), NAC itself and beyond.

Should you happen to be around the Curonian Spit, we will be absolutely thrilled, it goes without saying, to welcome you in our midst!

To those mourning that they will not be able to join us, we are delighted to convey that curator, (ex)philosopher and writer Tautvydas Urbelis from Vilnius will attend the two-day-long programme and write a meditation, later to be published on DAI website.  

PROGRAMME

(Time schedule might prompt minor changes. Please visit the website for updated version)

Friday, June 16

14:30 - 16:30 ~ Cure for the Itch

*COOP study group 2022-2023 Long Time No See: Forming a new art economy of the commons presents Cure for the Itch and invites you to multi-station crossings in a space of fracture and dissonance informed by a collaborative study on play and economics; their failures embraced while reflecting on (im)possibilities of gathering, on seeking answers in the endless forest.

Location: Parking Lot – Taikos 41, Nida

17:00 - 18:30 ~ Li Li Ko Ko Fəstival of 100 Centers

*COOP study group UNRAVELING THE (UNDER-)DEVELOPMENT COMPLEX presents Li Li Ko Ko Fəstival of 100 Centers and questions stereotypes of what celebratory, normal or deviant, comforting or threatening, developed or underdeveloped is and welcomes you to an aggregated procession, substituting the paralysis of imaginations with prefigurative echoes of the societies we want to cultivate.

Location: multiple departure locations near the Nida beachside

19:15 - 20:30 ~ COULD A SOUND PERSIST - UNDER SANDS - UNSEEN? 

*COOP study group FOREST AS IMAGE AND INFRASTRUCTURE Exploited, Assembled, Constructed, Protected, Cared for – Projections, Relations, Definitions – Forest Operational Images presents COULD A SOUND PERSIST - UNDER SANDS - UNSEEN? and invites you to a multimedia performance/rehearsal: a looped window of a secret forest and an invitation to bifurcate and become roots through whispers and prophetic sounds as we draw on dust with our pointed tails.

Location: Football Court at Neringa Forest, 55°18'45.8"N 20°59'18.9"E

Meeting Point: Parking lot near the Football Court

20:30 - 21:30 ~ DINNER prepared by Marla Nábožna & Tomek Pawłowski-Jarmołajew

Location: Griuvėsiai, Nidos-Smiltynės pl. 9, 93125 Nida 

Saturday, June 17

14:30 - 16:00 ~ My mother composed me as I now compose her

*COOP study group On Tradition - Future Ancestors 3: The Mother, The Archival and The Symbolic Order presents My mother composed me as I now compose her and summons an immersive space of painted scores, of movement as language and of symbols upended and renewed; brining notations and rhythms of the vast multiplicitous ways we are part of families.

Location: Nida Art Colony (NAC), E. A. Jonušo g. 3, 93127 Nida

17:00 - 19:00 ~ Evergreening the Cut [towards and beyond film's photosynthesis]

*COOP study group Curating Positions: Curating Positions: A cut through the screen presents Evergreening the Cut [towards and beyond film's photosynthesis] and invites you to a speculative conference built on interrupted film screenings, encouraging a celebration of imperfections and the recognition of the stories embedded in objects, more-than-human agents and their relations. 

Location: Nida's Community House, Taikos g. 17, 93123 Nida

20:00 - 21:30 ~ DINNER prepared by Marla Nábožna & Tomek Pawłowski-Jarmołajew

Location: Nida Art Colony (NAC), E. A. Jonušo g. 3, 93127 Nida

22:30 - 23:30 ~ NIGHTTIME SCREAMING/DAYTIME WHISPERING ~ A Creational Story in Four Acts

* COOP study group Publishing Practices: Textauralities, Oralitures, Corpoliteracies presents NIGHTTIME SCREAMING/DAYTIME WHISPERING ~ A Creational Story in Four Acts - a play (combining verbal and non-verbal languages enacted on a tower, seen as a vertical mirage and an antenna of tumultuous timelines unfolding) which invites you to explore the tower’s creation myths and the notion of publishing.

Location: Nida Art Colony (NAC), E. A. Jonušo g. 3, 93127 Nida

DINNER INVITATION

You are welcome to join us for our communal vegetarian dinners prepared by precious chefs Marla Nábožna & Tomek Pawłowski-Jarmołajew.

RESERVE your seat with KasteŠeškevičiūtetill June 15th. 

Payment of 10 euro per seat per day to take place on location by cash (kindly asked to provide the exact amount).