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Let's play institution: meet Laurence Rassel


The last guest for the first half of my stay here in Solitude is Laurence Rassel from Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona. This coming Friday we'll be serving tea, cookies and conversation in Herman's Library from 16:00-18:00. Welcome!

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Laurence Rassel is currently director of Fundació Antoni Tàpies in  Barcelona, an institution created in 1984 by artist Antoni Tàpies to  promote the study and knowledge of modern and contemporary art. Since  her appointment in 2008 she worked on several important exhibitions  questioning the economic, geographical, political, technical and  cultural conditions that operate through art. To give you an idea:  Fundació Antoni Tàpies organised the first major European retrospective  of Brazilian artist Anna Maria Maiolino. The exhibition Interval. Sound Actions engaged with the institution as a listening context. It used the  museum's stairways and elevators as well as main exhibition rooms and included interviews with cleaning staff about their specific rhythms. "Retrospective" by Xavier Le Roy was conceived as a choreography of actions that were carried out by performers for the duration of the  exhibition. [1] 
Over the last years, Laurence collaborated intensively with staff  and researchers on the project Combined Arts (A Place for Education,  Exhibition and Research). She asked: "How can we make understandable,  visible that the archive – and by extension the Fundació itself – can be  opened, used and questioned?" and thereby created an articulation of a transversal, critical and participatory discourse on the relation of the institute to its documents. [2] 
From 1997 to 2008 Laurence was member of Constant, a non-profit  association and interdisciplinary arts-lab based and active in Brussels. Her investigative work centred around (cyber)feminist artistic practice  and intellectual property and she established many of Constant's current lines of work. [3] 
As project coordinator of ADA, a network of Belgian training centres for women in ICT, she organised Digitales. These yearly digital meeting days brought together women dealing with networks and digital technologies (theoreticians, activists, developers, trainees, artists) in the same place for a short period of time. [4]
Last but not least, enjoy her black humour in The Laurence Rassel Show that she recorded with Terre Thaemlitz: an electro-acoustic radio  drama about feminist anonymity and the death of the author. [5]

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[1] "Retrospective" by Xavier Le Roy, 2012 
[2] About digitising Antoni Tàpies artbooks, 2012 http://www.dca-project.eu/documentation/detail/interview_with_laurence_rassel_nuria_sole_bardalet_and_jesus_marull_fundaci
[3] Notes from Field Workers (about Constant), 2009 http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v2n2/rassel.html  
[4] Interview with Cornelia Sollfrank (about Digitales), 2003 http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/oldboys-0301/msg00002.html
[5] The Laurence Rassel Show with Terre Thaemlitz, 2007 http://www.comatonse.com/releases/c016/