The first time we exhibited our idea for a Mobile Academy was in 2006 at FILTER, Hamburg, and was part of the Art festival "Wir Sind WO Anders" (We Are Somewhere Else). As a durational performance piece we set up the tent during the opening and slept and worked inside the gallery for 3 days and nights. The collection of questions mounted to the windows we had started to gather in 2005 when we aksed curators to ask us a question.
Not long after, we exhibited the questions as part of the exhibition 'Academy" at Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven. It started when we discovered an online database with contacts of international curators at De Appel, Amsterdam and started to ask them for questions. We had always been fascinated by questionnaires, especially how they are used to create profiles of user groups which in turn become tools to create interaction between sender and receiver. The questions became an anchor for our practice.
We located the questions onto a European map, loved the potential, and started to think about ways to use it as a guide to reform ourselves. Around that time Annie Fletcher asked us to create a performance for the "Be(com)ing Dutch Gatherings" at Van Abbemuseum in 2007. Again we found a poetic way to use the questions.
During a 3 day perfomance we created a self-destructive island. When the water started to rise, the upward pressure in the bottles filled slowly found their way out of the sand. Once the bottles with questions freed themselves they floated to the river, back into the world. A distribution network; a platform for the gathering and dissemination of ideas. Our hunger for connection and interaction beyond the institutionalized world. An art-based dialogue about culture, politics, identity, or whatever binds us together.
Lately we started to look back at this idea of a nomadic sculpture and rethink its potential. A way to recognize Europe as a collection of subcultures. A strategy, hungry to express what is hidden in plain sight. Create living Art based on constant motion and flux. Use landscape itself as our exhibitionspace, wherever we happen to be, it will be happening.
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