As part of second year of workshops and talks for the inquiry Infinite Ear, Council contributed to “Slash: Hybrid Ecologies and Audiences Today”, a symposium at Kunstinstituut Melly (fka Witte de With) presented in the following text. 

Taking Dutch born, Beijing based curator/dealer/art historian/artist/translator/publisher Hans van Dijk (1946-2002), currently the subject of Kunstinstituut Melly (fka Witte de With)’s exhibition Dai Hanzhi: 5000 Artists, as a point of departure, this symposium will investigate what happens when cultural sector divisions—such as public/private, commercial/non-for-profit, academic/non-academic and so forth—bleed. Although the latest financial crisis has passed, a new generation of cultural producers and institutions has come of age in — and was similarly forged by – this downturn.

Six years on, now is the time to take stock of how these initiatives, particularly those led by artist or writer-led startups, have scaled. To this end, Kunstinstituut Melly (fka Witte de With) hosts a convocation of artists, thinkers, and producers currently engaged in these newer platforms—spanning artistic practice, exhibition and institution making, education, publishing, and others—to discuss how novel, and at times heterodox, modes of address, support, and management have reshaped—for better and for worse—the ways ideas spread. With a keen eye and ear to the past, the day is punctuated by a series of ‘case study’ presentations, which each revisit the design, means, and context of related historical endeavors from several different periods and places.