My dear readers, 

I am afraid Keats was wrong. This isn’t the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. No! It is the season of back to school, complete with cut-price stationery and mass-produced backpacks from the factories of China and apples of pre-Lapserian perfection grown fat through the sprays and chemicals of Agrobusiness. But I have faith in those who are going back to school and university to learn and to research in spite of the increasing commodification of education, in spite of pedagogical methods premised on efficiency, speed and productivity.  Do not laugh at or pity the young generation. Greta Thunberg and many, many others are refusing to submit to such condescension used in the service of power. And do not laugh or pity the older generation. Stop reading this email and staring at this screen and forge alliances and companions and refuse a politics of division. If I am sounding concerned, not to say desperate, let us not forget that at the end of this month the UK apparently will leave the EU. At the end of this month, we are moving forward evermore toward ecological devastation with each passing minute of complacency, paternalism and fierce competition and unsustainable growth. 

And what we must do is breathe. But we must also know that we have to help those who cannot breathe. If we have to practice mindfulness then let us mind for our neighbours too.  

In the meantime, please enjoy some news from Rupert and join us at our events.

Rupert

Image: “Fortune Cookies” by Lokomotif (Laurynas Skeisgiela & Milda Dainovskytė). Final event of Rupert Alternative Education programme 2019. ©Laurynas Skeisgiela

In Residence

Suzy Halajian

Suzy Halajian (USA) – independent curator and writer based in Los Angeles, and is currently the 2018-19 Curator-in-Residence at Disjecta, Portland. Her work begins at the intersection of art and politics, treating image making as steeped in colonial pasts and modern surveillance states. At Rupert she will develop the publication A grammar built with rocks, a research-based project co-curated by Shoghig Halajian including commissioned and existing text contributions and artists’ interventions. It presents artistic practices that trace the racialized and gendered relationship between bodies and land, and question narratives of socio-ecological crisis that contribute to the displacement and erasure of people. It also explores how the materiality of land permeates our identities and representational structures, and simultaneously molds the body.

In Residence

Kah Bee Chow

Kah Bee Chow (Malaysia/New Zealand/Sweden) is an artist from Penang, Malaysia and Auckland, New Zealand, living and working in Malmö, Sweden. Whilst at Rupert she will be researching the parallels between traditional forms of divination such as the I Ching and algorithmic forecasting, along with how they diverge in sensibility, correlation and attitudes: what kind of texts and systems they produce to make the unknowable known. She will also investigate the practice of feng shui in relation to the writing of Keller Easterling taking the quote “Human constructs are a form of economic occult” as a starting point.

In Residence

Santiago Reyes Villaveces

Santiago Reyes Villaveces is a Colombian artist based in Bogota and Ambalema, a municipality in the countryside of Colombia. In 2017 he graduated from the  MA in sculpture at the Royal College of Art, London with the Abraaj Innovation Scholarship. His practice follows a material investigation of structures, assemblages, and dynamics that evidence states of transitivity and precariousness. At Rupert, he will continue his exploration into the latent architectural sensibility that is evident in precarious structures. Relating to urban detritus, overlooked by-products of construction, and improvised temporary structures.