Date: Friday 29 November 2024
Time: 18:00 - 22:00 with catering
Location: Varia (Gouwstraat 3, Rotterdam)

The times of Cold War seem long gone, yet they significantly impact present cultural ideologies that repeat and evolve in contemporary creative production. This evening gathering is the starting point of a series that tries to expose the influence of the Cold War across present day narratives, technologies and geopolitics. The first iteration will focus in on the role of the 'artist', and how this figure both manouvers and gets out-manouvered across political systems.

We will share our experiments into these questions with the work ‘a game for creative “freedom,”’ a game that uses the setting of the Cold War to consider colonial attitudes embedded within the art world, primarily by the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom. We will discuss OPERATION ZWIEBELMUSTER with you, an artistic research project dealing with the illegal embargo trading that took place between Japan and the former GDR and how cultural exchange specifically around porcelain was strategically used by the later to ease diplomatic and economic relationships between the two countries.

We will conclude the evening by watching excerpts of two sci-fi films, 'Eolomea' (1972) an East German/Soviet/Bulgarian coproduction about space travel and 'The Bed Sitting Room' (1969) a british comedy set in nuclear fallout, alongside fragments of the, mostly lost, sci-fi horror British television series 'Out of the Unknown' (1965 - 71).

Food and 'East and West' themed drinks will be served to enable frivolous polarisation. We intend to continue delving into this period in 2025 with public research into paranoid anxieties manifesting in Big Tech and extractive colonial process in suppposed technological advancement and surveillance.

This series falls under Varia's Counter Coloniality research thread and is supported by the Creative Industries Fund NL.