Marianne Flotron in conversation with Philippe Pirotte

Marianne Flotron talks to Philippe Pirotte and other guests about how she used methods of Agusto Boal’s participatory Theatre of the Oppressed in a Dutch insurance company, in order to expose the unconscious mimetic moulding of the employees into the economic goals of the company.

Presented in collaboration with the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten (Amsterdam).

This talk is organized as part of the group exhibition Surplus Authors

Admission fee: €5 / €3 with discount

About Surplus Authors

Outside of personal romance, collaboration is perhaps the most elemental form of politics—just consider how the term plays a hand in issues as basic as “two heads are better than one” and as large as international alliances. To crack open this power relation, Surplus Authors looks at a group of artists whose work traces and delineates several fault lines inherent in the act of collaboration from (art) historical and social indebtedness, to trust, generosity, incentives, antagonism, and even cooption. Without laying claim to any illustrative narratives, Surplus Authors presents itself during a growing urge and call for institutions to work together as a promised means to alleviate the reasons for austerity. As a possible retort, Surplus Authors begs the question: Is collaboration an end in and of itself, or is it a tenuous and unfolding process in which psychological, intellectual, and political dynamics are contested and reconstituted?

About Prompts & Triggers

While talk is thick these days about crisis, be they economical, ecological, cultural, or even spiritual, a larger question looms: how and where to situate value, especially in a context as diverse as the European continent? Already riddled with moving-target projections and contradictory positions—such as the game of keeping a rising China or a potent Turkey at bay, while attempting to capitalize on them at the same time, or the conscious and subconscious anxieties produced when personal religiosity is expected to be surrendered in favor of a secular public body— it would seem that different and differing interests are not easily encompassed in neat packages. Prompts & Triggers is a series of propositions by artists who call attention to certain conditions, which spur social anxieties—and in so doing, ponder if such defense mechanisms actually betray underlying divides which must be first unpacked and examined.