17.11.23, Meeting Grounds: Essay as Event

Essay as Event

A gathering devised by Paul Bailey with the graphic design department at KASK & Conservatorium and special guest contributors: Metahaven (Vinca Kruk and Daniel van der Velden), Dayna Casey and Katja Mater.

Doors open: 17:00
Presentations & Performances: 18:00-19:45
Conversation: 20:00-20:30
Deejay(essayistic) Set at Sheela’s Bar: 20:30-23:00

The essay for the American essayist and climate activist Rebecca Solnit is a meeting ground. It is a process of ‘gathering up the shards and mapping them where they are, to find the patterns out there or make one … about the disconnections and the mysteries’.*

Drawing from Solnit’s framing of the essay, Meeting Grounds invites investigation, and experimentation, with the visual essay as a verb (essaying), an event (a gathering), and as a social form for collective reasoning.

Throughout the evening we will gather around essayistic propositions shared by our guest contributors; meander through a series of essays (re)staged by graphic design students from KASK; and move along to, and between, a selection of tracks sampled and arranged by an essayistic ear.

Paul Bailey is affiliated as an artistic researcher to KASK & Conservatorium, the school of arts of HOGENT and howest. The research project Meeting Grounds was financed by the HOGENT Arts Research Fund.

Meeting Grounds identity developed with Anouck Voisin, Seppe-Hazel Laeremans and Sjoerd Beijers featuring oblique and swirling extensions to Garamon(d/t) typeface published by fonderie.download

* Rebecca Solnit, Introduction, The Best American Essays, 2019