FIVE HUNDRED AND TEN SHOWS, NO REVOLUTION

09/09/2013 – 20/10/2013

Participating artist(s) Caetano Carvalho, Hannah Dawn Henderson, Ronald Huynen, Sara Pape Garcia

Acid-free folders alongside cheap removal boxes, pencil scrawled dates and blotted marker-pen descriptions. What exists and what could exist between four walls. We are carefully closing the boxes of the past; we leave the archive as it is.

Examining the ongoing motion that W139 has created since rising up, we tend to grasp at that which is forever beyond our reach: the pure, undiluted newness that everybody talks about. We attempt to run at the future head first, but in doing so we are eternally anchored to memories, compressed like a stack of faded photos tautly wrapped in off-blue archival paper. We strive to produce a true repetition yet always fall victim to the adamant imposter of personal taste and the unattainable nature of exact replication.

The space becomes a library where possibilities are offered. Situations drive the flow of movement, events drive its composition. Uncertain possibilities increase the tension that drives this collaborative effort to materialize what is not tangible in the archives of the W139. We pose the question of where the archive begins: in the linear boxes, the floor upon which they rest, or the walls that surround them? Fixed, yet temporal changeable elements. We wade with curiosity through the chaos, chancing to pinpoint that moment at which the past segues into the present, before both are consumed by the future.

We invite you to join us for forthcoming evolving programme of events, which include roller-disco(s), Thursday night dinners, workshops, Trade School Amsterdam classes, consultation hours, music and film screenings.

Program

• THE FUTURE IS DEADF!?, 25th of September: We will start this session with a tour through the show FIVE HUNDRED AND TEN SHOWS, NO REVOLUTION by the artists who are making it happen. Our special guide of today is anthropologist Scott Dalby, who is currently teaching the course Big Questions in Future Society at the Amsterdam University College. He will give a recap of the course and how/why he ended up at W139. The last part of the class we will have the opportunity to create new forms through literally peeling off the walls of W139. An image of Martin Luther King who is walking around his own grave with his family painted in 2007 has the possibility to slowly reappear again. Let’s celebrate the history of the birth and death of the future… but also the revolutionary potential of our experiences in the present.
• DÉJÀ VU Night, 26th of September: A perfect repetition is ungraspable, a pure original can never be relived — one can certainly strive to fill in the blanks, to satisfy questioning with assumption mixed with imagination. Studying the photographs that litter the archive of W139, one encounters names, faces and images that possess a curious sense of distant familiarity. A man donning a hardhat, the violet smoke of his cigarette frozen in the moment of a camera´s flash. One is inclined to question what he was saying and what was his cause for doing so – words and intentions that cannot be traced like the outline of an image or the dates written on the archive box. Further searching presents clarity, but not a perfect twenty-twenty vision of the past. We cannot re-enact. We invite you to join us for dinner and an evening of performances and live music starting at 18:00. The artists of FIVE HUNDRED AND TEN SHOWS, NO REVOLUTION, invited visual artists Anna Moreno and Kosta Tonev to co-participate in the evening´s performance series. Roro aka Rogier Smal {drums} & Yedo Gibson {sax} will together transform the created energy of the space into improvised music. Roro’s drums are temporary sculptural constructions that happen to make sounds mixed together with the spacial reverberations of Yedo’s sax.
• THE FUTURE IS DEADF!?, 3rd of October: Process.2 Exercising Failed Utopias and the Revolutionary Present: THE FUTURE IS DEADF!? Scott Dalby is an anthropologist teaching Big Questions in Future Society at Amsterdam University College. Join Scott and his students at W139 in explorations of philosophy, image and body. We start at around 19:30. Please also be welcome to join us for dinner from 18:00! On the menu: vegetarian, vegan, sattvic food!!! If possible, please bring a CUSHION, a CLOTH, a YOGA MAT, or a CARPET (to sit on!) –
• Entropie Avond, 17th of October: Entropy measures the amount of order or disorder in a closed system. The evening will be a wild investigation on Entropy. We will talk about unpredictability, creativity and life itself and the natural tendency for order to dissolve into chaos. Experiments will be performed that reveal the end of all things, including the performance I Made Love to Carl Sagan on The Shores of The Cosmic Ocean by Maria Mercedes Salgado, Entropies of The Avant-Garde by Sara Pape and a series of performances by Cathalijne Smulders and Mariko Kuwahara. Dinner will be prepared by Gijs Frieling for only €10.