UNFOLD: students of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie (DOGtime), Writing the Light

For the 2021 edition of UNFOLD: Nan Hoover, students of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie (DOGtime) were invited to research and think up a re-interpretation of a work by the artist Nan Hoover. 

Set within the framework of a media theoretical course on Forensic Aesthetics, the students were asked to research a variety of possible aspects that the re-interpretation of earlier art works, especially the ones made with outdated or obsolete media, bring about. These aspects range from the analysis of the materiality of mediation, to questions about (dis)embodiment, to changes in the sensorium due to medial interventions, to the media archeological analysis of dominant medial regimes, to the artistic tactical attitudes to subvert or appropriate these medial set-ups (dispositifs). At UNFOLD: Nan Hoover, this research materialised in the re-interpretation of an existing media art work. 

As an experimental element in the program, these exercises functioned as an inspirational catalyst to pressing questions and dilemmas in thinking about the practice of re-interpretation (re-performance) of works to have a better understanding of these works and their preservation – and possibly new contexts of their presence.

Participating students: Alla Amma, Britt Geerdink, Mieke de Roo & Emily Bernstein, Giulia Capineri, Cassandra Dinah de Giorgi, Nicolas Dagieu, Noel S. Keulen, Martijn Janssen, Marjolijn Houdijk. Supervisor/tutor: Willem van Weelden.

UNFOLD: Sandra Sterle, REPLAY

Sandra Sterle works across film, installation, interventions, photography and performance. After meeting Nan Hoover in Amsterdam in 1994, the two became instant friends and took turns commuting between Amsterdam and Düsseldorf, where Hoover was giving a new class in 1995, as well as organising workshops and screenings around Croatia. 

During UNFOLD: Nan Hoover, Sterle answered a voice message left by Hoover on her answering machine almost 25 years ago. The voice message included the challenge to try to reply to her now, while at the same time Sterle explored who and what Nan Hoover had become.

UNFOLD: Judith de Joode, Direction of the white walls

Theatermaker Judith de Joode gives words to things we only can see, paying ample attention to the light that surrounds us. How do we experience a moment of light? And can it only exist with darkness by its side? Her ever growing collection of light and light reflections forms an inspiration for her texts.

For UNFOLD: Nan Hoover, de Joode reinterpreted the work of Nan Hoover in the form of a text. In line with Hoover's work, she attempted to give a new manifestation to natural phenomena by inviting the audience to look from a new perspective, as if employing different eyes.

UNFOLD: Davor Sanvincenti, Behind the Screens

At UNFOLD: Nan Hoover, a festival introducing artists’ performances and presentations of Nan Hoover’s work in new unconventional ways, Croatian multimedia artist Davor Sanvincenti gave a lecture titled Behind the Screens, which intertwined on important notions and notations studies relating to a sensitive creation process of Nan Hoover. Behind the Screens is about deconstruction and transformation of the form into new visual readings. 

The body as a landscape. The shoulder as a mountain, the hand as a desert. The lecture opened Hoover's notations studies on transposing and expanding the visible forms into a new visual language. The readings behind the notations accent the encounters of the body with light within the particularity of the medium: photography, video and spatial interventions. Sanvincenti started from the principle that ‘the cinematic image has no other side: it has edges’. Behind the Screens is a diverse cinematic experience which triggers our imagination of the media-poetical legacy by Nan Hoover.

Within Behind the Screens, Davor Sanvincenti was specifically interested in a field of audiovisual phenomenology and anthropology of visual culture, particularly focused on the conditions and forms of human senses and perceptions. His artistic practice takes shape in a variety of media – film and video, photography, physical light and sound installations and live media performances.

All videos on this page are excerpts. Full videos are available on request.

Header image by Rietveld DOGtime students.

This event was supported by the Mondriaan Fonds, Nan Hoover Foundation and AFK.