Julia Wilhelm

The BWookshop rethinks books as merchandise, publication as a form of exhibition, performance and the book-commodity as a sub-critical fetish. It is also an economic community experiment, through the cross-eyed gaze of baroque economies. Reading Rhythms Club contributed with a playful workshop that proposed an expanded, embodied sense of reading.

At a moment when the world is becoming increasingly bleak and shaped by fascist logics, spaces for collective learning and political education become a necessity. We gathered at Bak, Basecamp for Tactical Imaginaries with self-organised study groups practicing across the Netherlands. Reading Rhythms Club presented their work and engaged in the collective discussion.

After a year of reading sessions organised in different spaces throughout Rotterdam; After many hours spent perched behind our laptops, writing, editing, 3d sculpting, designing, debating word-choices in the comment sections of online documents; After a month of tensely awaiting the arrival of our companions, our small but abundant books, we launched our publication ‘Why Read Together? On Companions, Co-conspirators, and Breathing Words’, published with HumDrumPress.

The 12-hour collective sermon Anti-fascist Church gathered more than forty art-activists, musicians, political organisations and social movements. It transformed the Paradijskerk in Rotterdam into a space for a broad coalition assembling in common opposition to authoritarianism, genocide, misogyny, systemic racism and the dismantling of social infrastructures.

The Shipyard explores ideas and strategies on how to collectively struggle against capitalist modernity which crushed webs of interrelatedness and solidarity in favour of individualism and separation. The textile installation proposes blueprints to plot escape routes from the brutalities of modernity.

The workshop celebrated the coming sunlight of spring and speculated on the monstrous as a tool. We created our own monsters through reflection, visualisation, mask making and movement exercises that reclaimed the streets in a terrifying parade.

During the group exhibition I showed my sonic piece Becoming Other Monsters, that invited the listener to consider different facets of the monstrous—its role in popular culture, in political demagogy, and in collective struggles. It speculated about transformative ways of appropriating the monstrous that challenge myths of separability between humans and their living environment and of using the monsters’ intimate knowledge about their creators against them.

Collective Cartographies against Neoliberal Development (Serda Demir, Iliada Charalambous, Santiago Pinyol, Kari Robertson, Julia Wilhelm) investigated tools to make people’s relations, stories, and belongings to place visible. In the context of neoliberal city planning, territory is thought of as devoid of people, as potentially empty land to generate profit from. The project asked what a map of a given territory looks like if the people who inhabit it – not the potential profit – come first.

Cooking Something Up collective (Yusser al Obaidi, Julia Wilhelm, Carla Arcos Mathon) invited visitors of the Fierce Togetherness Conference to their Alphabet Soup Session. Participants collectively explored the forms of kinship present among them. Through freewriting, discussion and communal cooking, participants’ personal experiences surrounding gender, race and class are transformed into a shared vocabulary, to be added to our collective soup and digested over a shared soup.

During the workshop, the group asked: on which ground are we standing? How are you connected to the soil, and what are your differences and potential ruptures? It started with a grounding check-in, a short reading, and a discussion of various excerpts from publications on soil and its connection to rupture, violence, interrelatedness, grief, death, decay, personal history, solidarity networks, social justice, contamination, and toxicity.

The urban development of Rotterdam is drastically changing the lives of its residents and the existing population is being pushed to the brink of displacement. In response, the Afrikaanderwijk Cooperative and a determined group of citizens have joined forces with Urban Front to counter these exploitative dynamics. During the workshop, participants engaged in reflections, tours, and discussions to think along the proposed infrastructures for embedded knowledge in the neighbourhood.

The workshop opened up the question of what radical love and radical imagination can mean through reading, discussion, and sketching. Through speculative storytelling exercises, we wondered what a world based on radical love might look like.

The Hamburger Community residents have been taking a fresh look at the concept of the Happening, coming largely from the Fluxus movement of the 60s as participatory, often improvisational performances. Questioning the relevance of the Happening in the 21st century, they organized eight Happenings that emphasized bringing the artists’ different communities into the space of Roodkapje, creating immersive, often theatrical environments, and offering space for collective learning.

Reading Rhythms Club (Senka Milutinović & Julia Wilhelm) organised nine experimental reading workshops together with a range of collaborators in different locations. From the way protest chants travel across localities, to the language of gentrification, to the role of food in queer community building practices, the sessions explored different social, political, and economic matters that affect our everyday lives. The project was funded by Stimuleringsfonds and Gemeente Rotterdam.

Dissemblage and the practice of dissembling concern the making of relations rather than an undoing. They require care and build on struggles in the interstices of existence. Care and subsistence rely on and shape specific relational bonds and collective formations before and around the fortress of identity. Throughout the evening we discussed ecologies and economies of care through readings, short sound pieces, and explorations of collective study and practice.

The Mustarinda Association is a group of artists and researchers, whose goal is to promote the ecological rebuilding of society, the diversity of culture and nature, and the connection between art and science. The residency allowed me to expand on my project Autoarachnology and to develop a work together with other residents to present during the Open Day.

Somewhere Else is Closer than You Think is a collaboration with artist and photographer Lea Novi. It emerges as a non-linear, photographic and sonic narrative that explores the mountain Zugspitze as an ecosystem through the lens of five different characters, who each have a specific relationship to the mountain. It was exhibited in The Grey Space in the Middle as part of the show In Times of Trouble We Dream with Open Eyes.

RRRadiossage was organized and hosted by the Reading Rhythms Club at the opening of the public program Ultradependent Public School (UPS). RRRadiossage was an eight-hour hybrid radio broad-cast consisting of sonic tours through of the exhibition, featuring voices of UPS collaborators in thought and practice. Experimental forms of reading and discussion and collective annotations took place throughout the schoolhouse.

During this workshop we experimented with different forms of documentary writing as a reflective, narrative, and creative practice. In short exercises, conversations, and readings, we playfully explored the strange divergences and conjunctions between words, experience, and memory.

During this workshop, Cooking Something Up invited participants to explore their relationship to the words sustenance and nourishment through zine-making and the preparation a collective alphabet soup.

What is your idea of a collective? Do you know your neighbourhood well? How is our society changing during the pandemic and how can we think about collectives and neighbourhoods from a virtual perspective? This time PANT Public #6 invites four artists and cultural practitioners; Reinaart Vanhoe, Emily Shin-Jie Lee, Julia Wilhelm and Heidi Vogels to present their work followed by a panel discussion moderated by Yun Lee.