To Hold Things Together is a two-day symposium focusing on modes of social and institutional nodality and protocols of encounter and solidarity in our hyper-local and hyper-dispersed existence. It concludes the first year of the Vera List Center’s program cycle As for Protocols, and is curated by BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht and presented by the VLC. Compositing real and speculative community and institutional models and proposing theoretical and practical elements of coalitional exchange, the symposium’s discursive strands seek to build aesthetic, poetic, and tactical forms of research, assembly, mobilization, and co-creation amid fraught unfolding realities. The symposium resonates, in motivation and format, with the VLC’s As for Protocols seminars that came before and can be accessed here. 

The program expands over two days, each led by a distinctive tactic and site of investigation. Presentations blend lectures, conversations, performances, and artistic interventions. All sessions feature American Sign Language interpretation and live captioning.

DAY ONE: LOCALITY AND NODALITY

PANEL DISCUSSION
Affective Protocols of Locality
11 am–12:30 pm EDT 
The (new) age of pandemics has renewed conditions for rethinking localized and situated practices. This panel discussion revisits proximity and communal artistic labor for collectives, institutions, and less formalized groupings.

Speakers:
Mitchell Esajas, The Black Archives, Amsterdam, the Netherlands; 
Maria Hlavajova and Rachael Rakes, BAK basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht, the Netherlands; Elizabeth Povinelli, Karrabing Film Collective, Northern Territories, Australia; 
Norberto “Pee Wee” Roldan, Green Papaya Projects, Manila, Philippines

Break 20 minutes

PANEL DISCUSSION
On Artistic Coalition and Institutional-Communal Nodality 
1–2:30 pm EDT
This panel discussion engages political and public networks and coalitions within modes of artistic public practice. Presentations discuss the mutual priorities of embeddedness and connectedness in creative solidarities and learning structures across physical distance. Further topics include co-situated learning and embodied study for coalitional practice. 

Speakers:
Adelita Husni Bey, 2020–2022 VLC Fellow, School of Pandemics, New York; 
Emeka Okereke, 2020–2022 VLC Jane Lombard Fellow, Invisible Borders: Trans African Photographers, Lagos/Berlin; 
Rolando Vazquez and Rosalba Icaza, Maria Lugones Decolonial Summer School, Utrecht, the Netherlands;
Angga Wijaya, farid rakun, Gesyada Siregar, Gudskul: Collective and Contemporary Art Ecosystem Studies, Public Learning Space, Jakarta, Indonesia

Please register for each session/day on the individual page:

Hél čhaŋkú kiŋ ȟpáye (There lies the road). A Dialogue About Making Art in a Good Way

As for Protocols–To Hold Things Together: Day Two

As for Protocols—To Hold Things Together is the concluding event of the first year of the Vera List Center’s program cycle As for Protocols, and is curated by BAK and presented and hosted by the VLC. BAK and the VLC act as coalitional partners here, with the long-term goal of more closely aligning their support of developing political imaginaries through artistic practice.

The VLC’s participation is made possible, in part, by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Arts, the Ford Foundation, the Kettering Fund, the Selma Yomtov Schwartz Endowment, and the Sigrid Rausing Trust, as well as the members of the Vera List Center Board.

BAK’s participation is made possible, in part, through financial contributions by the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, and the Municipality of Utrecht.