The Speculative Life Of Things

This multidisciplinary summer workshop will span three weeks and is open to students from all practice and theory departments in Bezalel. Our practice led workshop will focus on the site of a historical event and begin with an exploration into the traces that remain of the event in the present. Departing from the reading and understandings of the documented traces we will set out to develop an estimated future imagination of the place. The workshop will open with a series of on-site meetings with an array of guest speakers and professionals to help us decipher and read the object as a ‘material witness’. We will examine how new technologies, from satellite imagery, photography, video, and acoustic analysis, as well as scientific and poetic practices, make it psible to listen to the material and decipher the narrative recorded in its materiality.

The students will work collaboratively - relying on their practice and knowledge to produce archaeological evidence through the use of sculpture, painting, private production of clothing, jewelry for a joint exhibition. The works will be built into an archive that will visually and materially present the common imagination that shapes historical reality through speculative action.

Bones and human remains, as well as stones, plants, and inanimate objects, appear as material objects that "speak and attest" to that which has happened to them. Environments are sensors that record and store the traces of their own transformation. Listening to their testimony can allow for the imagination of an alternative future for those who are willing to accept their call. The speaking of material objects exists in different cultures and religions, appearing in different forms of animism. But they are also the outcome of a movement in contemporary thought and aesthetics. Object-Oriented-Ontology and New Materialism alongside the Forensic Turn began to form different links between poetic, legal and political thought, resulting in the emergence of new forms of public truth.