Decommissioned: Sophie Berrebi

Dwelling Reconsidered: From Yoga Mats to the Platform Economy

How much space does our body occupy?  

How much of it do we need for various activities?  

How can things mediate our relation to our physical environment and to others, and help us organise and divide it?  

In other words, how do we inhabit space?  

Such questions deserve to be investigated in a time when an increasing amount of our life is spent online, sucked into a digital world where we are constantly required to recreate our ‘profile’ and consider our exchanges with others.  

In order to address these questions, and using Martin Heidegger’s notion of 'dwelling' and Marcel Mauss’s concept of ‘body techniques’, writer Sophie Berrebi examines a series of everyday objects that mediate our relationship to space and help to elucidate possible ways in which we ‘practice’ the world, both physically and digitally.

Sophie Berrebi is a writer, art historian and curator born in Paris and based in Amsterdam. In January 2015 she published The Shape of Evidence, a book on the use of documents in contemporary art (Valiz, Amsterdam), and in the autumn of 2015 a new edited volume on the writings by Hubert Damisch and Jean Dubuffet appeared (JRP|Ringier/La Maison Rouge). She has published widely on contemporary art and is on the editorial board of of the new academic journal Stedelijk Studies. She received her PhD from the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London in 2003, and is based at the University of Amsterdam, where she teaches and researches art history and theory. Her research at the university is based at ASCA, the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis. She is a research fellow at Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam.

In a series of ten lectures, Decommissioned seeks to address how strategies of disavowal, inactivity and transition are employed in contemporary art and design. When encountering cultural bias, uncertainty and co-option across the arts, how can the dominant flows of information, language, policy and ideology be circumvented? Curators, sociologists, artists, politicians, academics, queer-thinkers, bio-designers, film-theorists and others will respond through diverse fields of exciting and critical research.    

This series is curated and convened by Dr. Stephen Wilson and is staged in collaboration with Chelsea College of Arts Postgraduate Community and the University of the Arts London, CCW Graduate School.