Our Day Will Come: A free-school art project
Date uploaded: October 19, 2011
Our Day Will Come
Halo Nightclub, Hobart, Tasmania
Saturday October 15, 2011
A free-school art project by Paul O'Neill with Fiona Lee, Mick Wilson, Sarah Pierce, Annie Fletcher, Garrett Phelan, Jem Noble, Rhona Byrne, Gareth Long, Liam Gillick, David Blamey and others.
Our Day Will Come: Death of a Discourse Dancer is a school disco like no other. Taking place throughout a nightclub venue during the normal working hours of the club, it brings together two 'publics' to experience a simultaneous symposium and disco—all at once and at the same time—where overlapping zones of discursivity co-exist and interrupt each other. Two rooms of self-organized discourse co-mingle, with DJs playing disco in one, and school participants and guests providing formal lectures and presentations in the other.
Death of a Discourse Dancer is the final event of the project Our Day Will Come—a co-operative art project initiated by Paul O'Neill, a month-long free school in Tasmania. The school takes place in the central courtyard of the University of Tasmania School of Art in Hobart and is housed within a converted labourer's tearoom. It is a school within a school as much as a school of schools. It employs the free-school as a construct under interrogation and as an engine of production. Each week artists take up residence within the school and contribute towards the school's programme with performances, screenings, broadcasts, and objects engaging diverse 'publics'.
Over the space of a month, the project looks at four questions:
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What is a School?
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What is Remoteness?
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What is Autonomy? and
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What is Usefulness?
Each week the school begins with a question and closes with the publication of an issue of the school zine with its contents formed from contributions by school members during that week. Under the conceptual and curatorial frame of Iteration:Again, the project explores the conviviality of emergent and iterative practice and the nature and value of extant educational formulas. Our Day Will Come explores the implications of encroaching upon educational, academic and other formal structures, by intervening within them and re-framing them: from class to curriculum; from workshop to school dinner; from zine to school radio; from formal lecture to the end-of-year school disco. These are some of the discursive spaces that are being rethought and reconfigured as a means of enabling and supporting emergent forms of co-operative production.
Click here to view the project on the Iteration:Again website
