Davide-Christelle Sanvee (b. 1993, Switzerland, Togo) is a performance artist who focuses on spaces and staging. Investigating public space, she hunts for architectural, behavioural and gestural elements to create scenographies that fully surround his spectators. In order to activate these new spaces Sanvee uses fictitious elements and performative actions built around political and social realities.
Antoine Guay Antoine Guay (b. 1989, France) is an interior architect who focuses on redefining existing spaces. His main interest is to concentrate on how subversion and alternative appropriation of space is organised and – as a result – forces the public sphere to redefine itself. This has led Antoine to focus on practices, rituals and self-defined limits taking place in forgotten territories.
School in Common is a self-organized school for studying, learning and being in common, based in Stockholm and Utrecht, The Netherlands.
Collective cooking & artist talk with Davide Christelle Sanvee, Antoine Guay and School in Common: On interrogating and protesting the institution from within.
6 March, 2019 in Residence Botkyrka
Sanvee and Guay collaborate on spatial and performative interventions. Inhabiting what they call the ‘non-spaces’ of institutions, they work in those spaces otherwise left unused opening them up for experiment, protest and play. By using a strategy of camouflage, they obscure their work to claim a space for practices that destabilize the institutions borders from within.
Their most recent work, Tiramisu, 2019, saw the artists open a hidden grocery store in response to the strict no food policy of the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam. The store was secretly built in a ‘non-space’ under the stairs of the assembly hall in the school. Through camouflage, the work blended in perfectly with the surrounding structures, making Tiramisu a secret space to satisfy students unfulfilled needs and desires. Operating without fixed opening times the store was activated by late-night events such as concerts, dinners and parties. It became a meeting space where students got an opportunity to interact without representatives of staff around.
At Candyland, the artists continue this practice in the site specific installation Dissident Business. The work responds to written and visual statements from self-organized and critical school projects gathered by School in Common through the publication project A school (is a school, is a pamphlet). The schools and artists share a common ground of self-organizing, using existing institutions to claim a space for alternative practices of learning and artistic work. This will translate into a spatial intervention, activated during the opening moment.
With the support of Stockholm Stad and Kulturrådet. Residence Botkyrka is supported by Botkyrkabyggen.