Dream

In the opening process event of Murray-Wassink’s year-long guest residency at the Rijksakademie, the artist and collaborators (Amalia Calderón, Megan Hoetger, Radna Rumping) took stock of the artist’s oeuvre with guest Vivian van Saaze (Associate Professor of Conservation and Museum Studies at Maastricht University). Conversation focused on the tensions between productive and reproductive value in art objects, and the status of the art object in ‘the archive’. Friday 6 March 2020, 18.30-20.30hr, Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Sarphatistraat 470, 1018 GW Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Text co-written by Amalia Calderón and Megan Hoetger for an archiving marathon series that was never realised due to pandemic conditions.

In the opening process event of Murray-Wassink’s year-long guest residency at the Rijksakademie, the artist and collaborators (Amalia Calderón, Megan Hoetger, Radna Rumping) took stock of the artist’s oeuvre with guest Vivian van Saaze (Associate Professor of Conservation and Museum Studies at Maastricht University). Conversation focused on the tensions between productive and reproductive value in art objects, and the status of the art object in ‘the archive’. Friday 6 March 2020, 18.30-20.30hr, Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Sarphatistraat 470, 1018 GW Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

In the opening process event of Murray-Wassink’s year-long guest residency at the Rijksakademie, the artist and collaborators (Amalia Calderón, Megan Hoetger, Radna Rumping) took stock of the artist’s oeuvre with guest Vivian van Saaze (Associate Professor of Conservation and Museum Studies at Maastricht University). Conversation focused on the tensions between productive and reproductive value in art objects, and the status of the art object in ‘the archive’. Friday 6 March 2020, 18.30-20.30hr, Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Sarphatistraat 470, 1018 GW Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

In the opening process event of Murray-Wassink’s year-long guest residency at the Rijksakademie, the artist and collaborators (Amalia Calderón, Megan Hoetger, Radna Rumping) took stock of the artist’s oeuvre with guest Vivian van Saaze (Associate Professor of Conservation and Museum Studies at Maastricht University). Conversation focused on the tensions between productive and reproductive value in art objects, and the status of the art object in ‘the archive’. Friday 6 March 2020, 18.30-20.30hr, Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Sarphatistraat 470, 1018 GW Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

In the opening process event of Murray-Wassink’s year-long guest residency at the Rijksakademie, the artist and collaborators (Amalia Calderón, Megan Hoetger, Radna Rumping) took stock of the artist’s oeuvre with guest Vivian van Saaze (Associate Professor of Conservation and Museum Studies at Maastricht University). Conversation focused on the tensions between productive and reproductive value in art objects, and the status of the art object in ‘the archive’. Friday 6 March 2020, 18.30-20.30hr, Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Sarphatistraat 470, 1018 GW Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

In the opening process event of Murray-Wassink’s year-long guest residency at the Rijksakademie, the artist and collaborators (Amalia Calderón, Megan Hoetger, Radna Rumping) took stock of the artist’s oeuvre with guest Vivian van Saaze (Associate Professor of Conservation and Museum Studies at Maastricht University). Conversation focused on the tensions between productive and reproductive value in art objects, and the status of the art object in ‘the archive’. Friday 6 March 2020, 18.30-20.30hr, Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Sarphatistraat 470, 1018 GW Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Archiving tips sent to SMW by Adrian Piper via email in 2012 in response to photographs of SMW’s studio shared with Piper.

Diagram with caption created by Megan Hoetger on occasion of the Rijks 150-year anniversary publication. Caption reads as follows: Gift Science Archive (GSA) is an eighteen-month ‘monumental’ performance commissioned by If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution (Edition VII – Ritual and Display). The project has in part unfolded at the Rijksakademie van beeldende Kunsten, where Sands Murray-Wassink is a guest resident, and where he and collaborators Megan Hoetger (Curator, If I Can’t Dance), Radna Rumping (independent curator and editor), and Amalia Calderón (storyteller and graduate student) have dug through, ordered, and archived over 2000 ‘studio objects’ accrued over the artist’s expansive, multimedia twenty-five-year studio practice. Between March 2020 and May 2021 Murray-Wassink worked with Calderón and Hoetger in archiving sessions making an inventory of both physical and digital materials in a custom-built GSA digital database, developed by the If I Can’t Dance team to ‘catalogue’ objects through their messy webs of relations. Alongside the archiving proper, Rumping has developed the meta-archive: reflections on the archiving process, as well as recorded conversations between Rumping, Murray-Wassink, Calderón, and Robin Wassink-Murray on the intergenerational and intimate processes of remembering (later transcribed by Martha Jager). These private dialogues have been complemented by public “process events” that began in the Rijksakademie studio in March 2020 with art historian Vivian van Saaze (“VALUE. What is Trash? What is Trashy but Valuable?”) and transitioned into an eight-month epistolary exchange (“RELATIONSHIPS. Feminist Legacies, Queer Intimacies”) between Murray-Wassink and curator Aimar Arriola, which was shared in the ificantdance.studio over Winter and early Spring 2021. All of these intersecting activities—and countless other studio visits and research exchanges—form the multi-dimensional core of the GSA ‘performance’ and inform the project’s collaborative ethos. The exhibition In Good Company (Horsepower): Materials from the Gift Science Archive, 1993–present at mistral, Amsterdam, in Spring 2021 presented a ‘culminating’ performative installation, which offered viewers one-on-one haptic engagements with the GSA database, the meta-archive, and the materials unearthed in the gift-science-archiving process. For the final public moment of the performance, and in conjunction with the Rijks Opens Studios, the GSA database is being launched as giftsciencearchive.net, a website that makes Murray-Wassink and team’s Gift Science Archive accessible to audiences near and far. Following the formal end of Murray-Wassink’s guest residency at the Rijksakademie and, with it, the GSA performance, Murray-Wassink will open I Am Not American. I Have Venus Envy, an exhibition and public performance program developed over the course of GSAin conversation with the curatorial team of AutoItalia, London.

Foreword written by Frédérique Bergholtz on the occasion of the Rijksakademie 150-year anniversary publication.

Written by SMW on the occasion of the Rijks 150-year anniversary publication.

Text co-written by Amalia Calderón and Megan Hoetger for an archiving marathon series that was never realised due to pandemic conditions.

Text co-written by Amalia Calderón and Megan Hoetger for a proposed collaboration with Vondelbunker as part of the GSA archiving marathon series, which was never realised due to pandemic conditions and the lack of interest by the artistic committee of the Vondelbunker.

Verso: ‘Transpareny Incorporated © Sands’.