Courses and workshops descriptions

WEEK 01 /// July 4 – 8

Group Critique: 12 hour group critic with Carla Herrera-Prats

These first two sessions will allow participants to get familiar with each other. Everyone will present a selection of works to the group for about half an hour. After each presentation, we will discuss about the social, political and aesthetic implications raised
by each project in a critical and respectful dialogue.

Studio Visit: Yoshua Okón

Individual Critiques with: Eduardo Abaroa, Carla Herrera-Prats, Yoshua Okón, Bárbara Perea, Nate Harrison, Pedro Reyes,

Visits to: Museum Carrillo Gil Museum, Museo Universitario de Ciencias y Artes

WEEK 02 /// July 11 – 15

Affective Labour of Caring and Politics of Dedication: 9 hour workshop with Larissa Harris and Anthony Huberman

Curators Larissa Harris and Anthony Huberman have organized exhibitions and events under the name The Steins since 2007. The name comes from a statement by American artist James Lee Byars, who once said that his three favorite people of the
20th century were Stein, Einstein, and Wittgenstein. The exhibitions, which take place in a small basement gallery in New York and usually last only a few hours, are homages to the Steins’ own favorite artists and thinkers and aim to share some favorite ideas with a community of friends.

For SOMA, The Steins lead a workshop focused around their own affective curatorial process. Beginning with a lecture by the German art critic Jan Verwoert, who discusses what he calls the affective labour of caring and the politics of dedication, the workshop asks participants to consider what they love and to find the appropriate form with which to share it and make it manifest.

Studio Visit: Vicente Razo / Carlos Amorales

Lecture: Cuauhtémoc Médina “The Biennial Syndrome”, a lecture about curatorial engagement within global exhibitions

Individual Critics with: Ruth Estévez, Larissa Harris, Anthony Huberman,Tyler Rowland, Vicente Razo, Carlos Amorales, Jorge Reynoso

Off sideDF* with Eduardo Abaroa

WEEK 03 /// July 18 – 22

Appropriation and Intellectual Property in Contemporary Art: 9 hour seminar with Nate Harrison

This seminar will offer a primer on appropriation art and United State intellectual property (IP) law, running from the 19th century, to the rise of “postmodernist” in the 1970s, through to recent appropriation projects in tactical media. The class will use
primary theoretical and legal texts to interrogate the criticality and political efficacy of appropriation given its position within a growing “culture industry,” and its antagonism towards regimes of intellectual property. Comparisons to other non-U.S. (or even non- Western) historical contexts are encouraged.

Studio Visit: Artemio

Individual Critiques with: Artemio, Eduardo Abaroa, Magalí Arriola, Yoshua Okon, Silvia Gruner, Nate Harrison, Carla Herrera-Prats, Lucia Sanroman

Off sideDF* with Eduardo Abaroa

WEEK 04 ///

Alternative Education Strategies – Learning and Art Education as a Utopian
Group Process: 9 hour workshop with Nils Norman

After Nils has presented his research, projects and teaching methods a session will begin with a group “check-in”, allowing for each student to speak freely without interruption about their own experiences in education and theirideas about what
education and learning might, could and should be. The three 3 hour sessions will be developed around an open discussion about what a future art education and school could look like.

Studio Visit: Minerva Cuevas

Artist Talk: Chip Lord

Individual Critics with: Minerva Cuevas, Gonzalo Ortega, Edgar Orlaineta, Victor Palacios, Nils Norman, Carla Herrera-Prats, Chip Lord

Off sideDF* with Eduardo Abaroa

WEEK 05 /// August 1 – 5

Residue and Appropriation: a Theoretical Approach: 9 hour seminar with Mariana Botey

Art criticism has the function to produce a system, or method through which to think the field of art. Contemporary art practices are inevitably linked to the production of critical discourse and to referents of theory and forms and figures of theorization. Working a distance that allows us to grasp the notions of Residue and Appropriation beyond current environmentalist trends and the proliferation of a digital culture that thrives on practices of remix and mash-up, the workshop will explore an argument that approaches the relation of these concepts to a radical economic critique of capitalism and to political strategies that aim to short-circuiting common sense and ideological constructs. Working from Georges Bataille´s intuitions about a “general economy” and his articulation of “The Notion of Expenditure” (1933) our discussion will move toward a re-figuration of the conceptualization of “residue” and “the residual” as part of a theoretical tradition that argues for economies founded in heterogeneity and uneven systems of development, exchange and calculation; that is, processes grounded within a logic of loss, expenditure or dilapidation, and the critical use of obsolete cultural forms and technologies. From collage to détournement to contemporary practices of radical confiscation, the examples to be discussed explore the avant-garde, neo avant-garde and post avant-garde use of appropriation as a mode of production and method of research in art practices.

Studio Visit: Tania Candiani

Individual Critics with: Mariana Botey, Miguel Monroy, Ricardo Dominguez

Visits to: Museum Contemporary Art Rufino Tamayo and Museum of Modern Art (MAM)

WEEK 06 /// August 8 – 12

Varieties of Readymade Experience: 9 hour seminar with Anthony Graves

Along with its subcategory, the assisted readymade, the readymade is the paradoxical exemplar of the most advanced and the most archaic varieties of magical thinking: the capitalist commodity and the religious fetish. In this seminar we will consider the
concept of the readymade in its various lives as negative aesthetic gesture and beyond. Much has been written on the readymade already, yet many texts do not address that formative gesture of 20th century modernism outside of its transgression of the
conventions of exhibition and display let alone beyond the authorial shadow of Duchamp.

The goal of this seminar is productive: rather than historicize the readymade, we will extend its logic as tactical appropriation to conditions and situations touching on a wide range of social phenomena. We will speculatively extend it to topics as diverse as
aesthetics, global climate change, improvisational economies, post-industrial labor, political protest, and the modification of social space. The question of symbolic resistance vis-à-vis direct action, that most recent historical whipping post of art versus
life, will haunt our seminar room as both the vanishing point and the stakes of our inquiry are political agency.

OPEN STUDIO : august 10

Individual Critics with: Carla Herrera-Prats and Anthony Graves

Visit to: Teotihuacan Pyramids

* Off sideDF
9 hour site specific workshop with Eduardo Abaroa
The workshop takes place in three different surprise non-academic places around Mexico City. Each session will be a group reflection and discussion on the concepts involving site-specificity and the possibilities of art to comment on specific cultural,
political, social and geographical situations.