The success of stand-up comedy heavily relies on shared experiences and nuance of language which leads me to believe that the identities that comedians hold are important within the context of the reception of their performances. British comedian and academic Oliver Double identifies that stand-up comedy is characterised by ‘personality,’ ‘direct communication’ and ‘present tense’…

by Tom Watkins During the seminar “Humour, Truth-telling, and Situated Knowledges,” Dick Zijp examined the idea that comedians function as “truth-tellers,” particularly within liberal frameworks of free speech. He questioned how humor comes to be understood as revealing truth in a “post-truth” political context, where satire is often positioned as an antidote to misinformation. Stand-up…

What, exactly, do we think of when we hear the term ‘experimental’ in relation to music? This Meet the Makers Conversation features Jessica Sligter, an experimental musician and composer who works at the interface of different genres and disciplines via the materials of voice, electronics, space, text and concept. Sligter is originally from Utrecht but has spent much of her…

by Agata Kok As Secretary General of Culture Action Europe, Lars Ebert advocates for strong cultural policies in Europe through cultural democracy. During the lecture moderated by Toine Minnaert, Lars introduced Culture Action Europe, which is an organisation that brings together over 300 members from 39 counties, including various cultural networks, organisations, artists, activists and…

How can we be many? A seemingly simple question, yet it became the red thread of the latest Transmission in Motion seminar “Culture for Democracy, Democracy for Culture”. Lars Ebert returned to it insistently, using it as an opening within the increasingly narrow space the cultural sector seems to occupy. How can the cultural sector…

During the seminar led by Lars Ebert, Secretary General of Culture Action Europe, I found myself reflecting on the temporality of value. The conversation moved through policy, inclusion, advocacy, and institutional structures, but the underlying tension of how quickly something is expected to prove its worth to justify public investment resonated with me. Culture seems…

In Living a Feminist Life, feminist scholar Sara Ahmed (2017) states: “When you expose a problem you pose a problem. It might then be assumed that the problem would go away if you would just stop talking about or if you went away,” noting that the act of naming injustice is often treated as the…

What stayed with me most from the session with Anne Breure was her way of thinking institutions as something that can be rehearsed. Breure described her graduation project as a proposal for a new institution. A reflection on what the world might look like in fifteen years and how a theatre could be organized differently…

One of the questions that stayed with me after the Transmission in Motion seminar On Institutionalizing Differently was not whether institutions can be changed from within, but what it means when such attempts seem to work. In the conversation between Anne Breure, Liesbeth Groot Nibbelink, and Maaike Bleeker, institutions appeared less as fixed structures and…

by Thorn Austin It is not a question of being against the institution. We are the institution. It’s a question of what kind of institution we are,  what kind of values we institutionalize, what forms of practice we reward, and what kind of rewards we aspire to. – Andrea Fraser 2005   Attendees of this…