Out of the Blue symposium. Image: Paul O'Neill

Out of the Blue
International symposium on Instant Urbanism, Hospitality, Duration and Accelerated Histories

Venue: The Blue House (Het Bauwe Huis), House Bloc 18, IJburg, Netherlands
Dates: Monday 3 - Saturday 8 August, 2009

Out of the Blue was an international symposium organized by The Blue House (Het Bauwe Huis) focusing on three main navigational strands in understanding experimental communities: Instant Urbanism (organised by STEALTH - Ana Dzokic and Mark Neelen), Hospitality (organised by Johan Siebers), Duration and Accelerated Histories (organised by Paul O’Neill, Situations). These three strands are the cornerstones behind the concept of the “residency of the mind” – the coined definition of The Blue House since its inception in March 2005. The symposium delineated the research work by numerous “inhabitants” of the Blue House over the previous 4 years and became a forum for exploiting new directions for the future articulation of the main research objectives.

Out of the Blue took place from August 3-8, 2009 on the island of Ijburg in Amsterdam. The site for the symposium is “Bloc 18” - the future “Activity Centre” on the island presently under construction. “Blok 18” will be used as a temporal public faculty, a residency space and an amphitheatre.

As part of the symposium, Paul O’Neill, GWR Research Fellow in Commissioning with Situations, University of the West of England, Bristol) was invited by the Blue House to organise one of the three strands of the symposium called:

Is Time Enough? Duration and Accelerated Histories

Brief Outline of Symposium Strand:
The Blue House was a four-year durational project initiated in a new city extension of Amsterdam, IJburg, which began in 2005 when artist Jeanne van Heeswijk arranged for a large villa in a housing block to be taken off the private market and be re-designated as a space for community research, artistic production and cultural activities.

Is Time Enough? was one of the three strands of the symposium ‘Out of the Blue’, which took the Blue House as a starting point to take a speculative look at how duration and the evolutionary process of time is conceived of as a key part of new cumulative approaches to artistic, organisational and curatorial praxis in response to a specific locations and contexts that have emerged in recent years. Centred around a series of presentations, focused dialogues and in-conversations, the symposium unpacked some of the key issues relating Durational form of practice to Commissioning and Participation; Collaboration and Play; Communities and Social Engagement, Organisational Models and Networks, and Critical Writing and Pedagogy.

Participants included:
Sally Tallant (Head of Programmes, Serpentine, London) and Jonathan Banks (Chief Executive, ixia – the UK national public art think-tank), curator Sophie Hope (co-founder of B+B) and writer-curator Eva Fotiadi; artists Barbara Holub & Paul Rajakovics (Transparadiso) and Mick Wilson (Dean of GradCam, Dublin); writer Ned Rossiter (author of ‘Organized Networks’) and Paul O’Neill, and a writing workshop on duration will also be led by Maria Fusco (Writer and Director of Art Writing, Goldsmiths, London).