Open Ended is a two day programme created by the 2016 Associates of Open School East. The weekend will see Associates share work, including processes and approaches to public engagement developed over the course of the year. These explorations and experiments – resolved or otherwise – extend research through exhibition, performance, installation, film screenings and creative workshops.

We invite you to respond to and engage with the Associates – Henry Babbage, Eve Chabanon, Eleanor Davies, Louis-Jack Horton-Stephens, Anneke Kampman, Tannu Kotecha, Rosie Morris, Anni Movsisyan, Bekki Perriman, Alex Ressel, Emil Scheffmann, Theo Shields, Joel Sines and Eleanor Vonne Brown – to mark a year of learning at Open School East, be ready to have fun!

Associates’ work will be shown throughout the building for the duration of the weekend. There will be NutriBullet Blending, Speculative Tours, Reading Group, Doorways Project, Exhibition, Ritual for Renewal, Ceramics Workshop, Internet Radio, Letter Writing Workshop, Poetry reading, Performances and Film screening, Communal Dinner, installation by Gates of Rome. All aspects of the weekend are free and open to all.

Saturday 10 December
Public Programme 11am – 6pm
Exhibition 11am – 9.30pm
Exhibition Tour and Drinks  5 – 7pm
Film and Performance Evening 5.30 – 9.30pm

Sunday 11 December
Public Programme 12 – 6pm
Exhibition  12 – 6pm
Communal Dinner 6 – 8pm

Programme: Saturday 10 December 2016

Saturday 11:00 – 11:30am & 5 – 5.30pm
NutriBullet Blending
Main Hall
The Aesthetics Academy London, brought to you by associate Eleanor Davies, will be hosting two NutriBullet tasting sessions over the weekend. These sessions will be an opportunity to experience NutriBullet at its best. The nutrient-dense juice recipes on show will streamline your clean eating lifestyle, and provide you with increased mental clarity that will last throughout the day, allowing you to live the rest of your OSE experience to the full.

Saturday 12.00 – 2.00pm
Workshop: Letter of Complaint
Common Room
In a workshop led by Emil Scheffmann, participants will explore experimental modes of address and protest through the medium of the postal service.

Saturday 2.00 – 3.00pm
Internet Radio
Common Room
Regular internet use continues to rise, with more than 8 in 10 people going online almost every day in 2016. However, many older people are still to catch up with the digital revolution, with nearly half of single pensioners still having no internet access at all. Join Eleanor Vonne Brown for a podcast on The Digital Divide using research material from audio sessions with Hackney Stream. We’ll be talking about how Skills, Age, Location and Wealth play a key part in how people use and access the internet. Come and listen to the conversations or bring a new voice to the table, coffee and cake will be provided

Saturday 2.00 & 5.00pm
An Invitation to a Silent Conversation
Site Specific Installation and Durational Performance
Tannu Kotecha
Studio 13

Saturday 3.00 – 5.00pm
Future Fossils, After Effects
Common Room
Associates will host a reading group exploring texts by Walter Benjamin, Donna Haraway, Jussi Parrika, Elizabeth Povinelli and Aase Berg. No prior reading is required as the texts shall be read together from a specially made catalogue of extracts. Led by Henry Babbage, Alex Ressel and Emil Scheffmann.

Saturday 4.00pm
Ritual for Renewal
Main Hall
Anni Movsisyan will be performing “Ritual for Renewal” to a closed group of people. Specific to the season of Autumn, fruit harvested from the Tree of Life will be consumed collectively in order to plant our wishes for the future within ourselves.

Saturday 5.00 – 5.30pm
A year to forget
Common Room
Adopting the format of a holiday slideshow, Emil Scheffmann will present some closing remarks in ‘a year to forget’.

Saturday 5.30 – 6.15pm
Performance Talk: A Fifth Empire
Common Room
A speculative proposition of a fictional meeting between Fernando Pessoa, Amílcar Cabral and Agostinho Neto somewhere in the crossovers of poetry and future revolutions. A dialogue of resistance that takes place or perhaps a form of delirium where events become manifest as objects, images, memory and identity, through different media, right before the eyes or within the gaze of our eminent characters.

Saturday 5.30pm
Film Screening: Love Where You Live
By Rosie Morris
Main Hall
Love Where You Live is the result of a six month collaboration with Terry Turner, a long term resident of Stoke Newington, in North East London, and concerns landscape and memory, particularly within the context of London’s social housing crisis. We are identified by our memories and our memories are embodied in landscape; if our landscape is under threat then what does this mean for our memories, our identities?

Saturday 6.00 – 6.30pm
Orlando
by Eve Chabanon
Main Hall
The biographer is now fed with a difficulty which is better perhaps to confess than to gloss over. Up to this point in telling the story of Orlando’s life, documents, both private and historical, have made it possible to fulfil the first duty of the biographer; which is to plod, without looking to right or left, in the indelible footprints of truth; unenticed by flowers; regardless of shade; on and on methodically till we fall plump into the grave and write finis on the tombstone above our heads. But now we come to an episode which lies right cross our path, so that there is no ignoring it. Yet it is dark, mysterious, and undocumented; so that there is no explaining it. Volumes might be written in interpretation of it; whole religious systems founded upon the signification of it. Our simple duty is to state the facts as far as they are known, and so let the audience make of them what they may.

Saturday 7.00pm
Film Screening: How The World Works
By Rosie Morris
Main Hall
A 2016 stock-take from Foyles in Central London revealed that the four most frequently stolen books in the shop were all from the Philosophy department. The act of stealing the book perhaps a silent protest, a murmuring, an invisible statistic that reflects a general feeling? In How The World Works, young adults from East London discuss their feelings around some of the themes proposed in these books and are invited to map out their past experiences, creating a visible landscape of memory and linking these broad ideas to the everyday. This project was developed in collaboration with Frank Sweeney (The Crib youth charity, Hackney), Yael Shavit and Steven Campbell Harris (The Philosophy Foundation) and through workshops with members of, Generation Uncovered, the Crib’s Youth Music project. The film was shot in one day in the former children’s library at The Rose Lipman Building in De Beauvoir with participants from Generation Uncovered and Create Jobs.

Saturday 8.00pm
Performance Figures. Figure. Stuck.
Anneke Kampman
Main Hall
We’re right in the middle of the breakdown, middle eight ahead and one chorus down. Ready? Can you feel where we’re going next? A flat figure made of light blown up into three dimensions; there are several characters present, working their way through an exaggerated landscape, transmitting themselves across multiple bandwidths. The body is a material within which something else manifests. How do we perform? How are commercial processes exposed within the fabric of our thinking and through the texture (language, tone and prosody) of our speech? Can we perform differently? Do we really feel what we think we feel, or are we just pretending?

Saturday 9.00pm
Film Screening: Staging of Death by Streetcar
Main Hall
A proto music-video-come-archive-film by Rosie Morris, Anneke Kampman and The Florence Lawrence Chorus. Centering on the life of Florence Lawrence, the first ever female silent film star, this work questions what it means to be a woman performing voiceless in this context. Known for her nuanced use of gesture and a method of acting called ‘versimilitude’ (derived from the latin ‘same-as-truth’) our interest lies in how this naive bodily ‘truthfulness’ was exploited by the production company that hired her, would not release her name publicly and even faked her death in order to turnover a profit. Using voice, choreography and text we draw parallels between events that occurred in Florence’s own life and those of her fictional persona.

Programme: Sunday 11 December 2016

Sunday 1.00 – 3.00pm
Speculative Tours: Get Lost with Anna B. Sexton
Off Site
“All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking”
– Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols
Anna B. Sexton will lead an artist walk through topography immediate to Open School East. Be open to create new avenues of thought, sight lines of discovery and an earful of good conversation.

Sunday 1.00 – 3.00pm
Workshop: Plastic Technique
Common Room
In a workshop organised by Alex Ressel, participants will explore techniques of clay slab building and textured reliefs. You are invited to work independently or collaborate to build something together.
Plastic Technique will hopefully develop into a regular ceramic workshop group in the Rose Lipman Building over 2017 If you would like to develop a nascent interest in the medium, or are interested in a place to work on existing ceramic projects, please come to the workshop or get in touch with Alex on alexressel@gmail.com

Sunday 2.00 & 5.00pm
An Invitation to a Silent Conversation
Site Specific Installation and Performance
Tannu Kotecha
Studio 13

Sunday 3.00 – 4.00pm
Talk: The Doorways Project
Common Room
Join artist Bekki Perriman and curator Shiri Shalmy in conversation about The Doorways Project.
Inspired by her experience of life on the streets, The Doorways Project is a site specific sound installation which explores homeless culture through the personal stories of society’s most silenced people. Hear about Bekki’s research and the process of making the work and join her and Shiri in discussing attitudes towards homelessness, the role of art as a social commentary and the wider political and cultural context.

Sunday 4.00 – 6.00pm
Film Screening: Eternal Traveler For Freedom
Common Room
Anni Movsisyan and Joel Sines will present Ashik Kerib (1988), by the late Soviet-Armenian film director Sergei Parajanov, to discuss his unique experimental oeuvre and its interdependence between ritualistic gestures of avant garde cinema and the transcendental nature of a cinematic process that challenges the canonical boundaries of filmmaking.

Sunday 6.00 – 8.00pm
Communal Dinner
Main Hall
In collaboration with artist Michael Rakowitz, OSE associates will prepare a performative dinner that will be “tainted” with questions of hostility and hospitality, labour, western consumption and provenance.