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| Verbandkammer |
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Manifesta 9 Parallel Events
FLACC
Genk, Belgium
2012
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As part of Manifesta 9 Parallel Events Nilsson Pflugfelder have been invited by FLACC
to (re-)present the institution with a major installation that rethinks how FLACC
as a ‘Workplace for Visual Arts’ might – at a structural level – operate in a more
critical and self-reflective way. After Manifesta 9, the installation will mutate
and migrate throughout the institution to become a new framework for growth, production
and documentation.
The Verbandkammer is a concentration of the formal, programmatic and social aspects
of FLACC’s genetic make-up. In its first guise it is situated in the centre of the
gallery at Casino Modern. The Verbandkammer collapses cultural production, workplace,
residency, archive, administration, and discursive spaces into one coherent, dense
installation – a unified assembly consisting of disparate elements: 11 nos. types
of frames, 10 nos. types of cladding, 40 nos. types of modules, 6 nos. programmatic
entities and 1 no. Verbandkammer. Through the compressed adjacencies, the various
parts rub against each other generating a productive friction.
The Verbandkammer is a form of institutional memory – a sedimentation and fossilisation
of information. As a cross-section through the institutional shifts, it gauges where
FLACC has been in the past, where it is situated at the present, and acts as a firm
foundation from where the institution can project towards the future. It is a framework
for mining and reusing existing information previously produced at FLACC – a tangible
feedback loop obsessed with keeping past information in the productive present.
In its second guise post-Manifesta 9, the Verbandkammer will move from the ground
floor gallery to FLACC’s spaces on the first floor where the various elements will
be reconfigured to enable and guide future thinking and production at the institution.
In conjunction with the physical framework, critical research into FLACC as a workplace
for the visual arts will be conducted. The Verbandkammer is conceived as an open
system that can be altered or hacked by both future artists in residence as well
as the institution itself. The structure has no final form or predestined end. Along
with its host-institution it is constantly in the making.
The building of an archive and the formation of coal are deeply intertwined in that
they are both bound up with geological processes of sedimentation, layering, compression
and fossilisation creating dense stratifications of matter. Unlike the finite and
irreversible process of coal mining, the mining of the Verbandkammer is a sustainable
act in that it is concerned both with retrieval and production of matter.
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Photographs by Kristof Vrancken / FLACC
www.flacc.info
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