photo credit: Binta Kopp
Joseph Baan engages in art, education and collaboration as ways to forge creative survival. They’re interested in the complexity of collectivity and in the possibility of establishing a solidarity that does not homogenise, but affirms difference.
They make performances, installations, texts, group works, collaborative formats, and scores that aim to unpack the problem of relating. They see performance as a way to become receptive to one’s own alterity when relating to others, offering the possibility to have embodied experiences that one does not identify with. Joseph is currently engaged in a PhD research at the Zürich University of the Arts and Mozarteum in Salzburg that examines the political currency of incoherence within post-Englightenment regimes of recognisability and sovereign subjectivity through the means of performance, specifically “training one’s own incoherence”. Investigating performative strategies of ambiguity, illegibility, and non-performance, they ask how contemporary performance intervenes in reproducing this fantasy of sovereignty—which is inextricably bound up with the biopolitics of settler colonialism—by cultivating nonsovereign forms of collectivity through aesthetic, pedagogical, and organisational practices.
Joseph’s practice is closely linked to their work as an educator, which is influenced by experimental pedagogies and non-hierarchical collaborative methods. Throughout their practice, they have developed projects for institutional and non-institutional contexts that explore forms of knowledge production through self-organised and horizontal pedagogies. These initiatives treat encounter as a site where political consciousness can emerge, and artistic and embodied practice as a vehicle for thinking through questions of collectivity and political subjectivity. They are a founding member of Rotterdam-based research group SOHERE; a community of practitioners working in the fields of art, design and science who develop collaborative, horizontal learning environments. From 2019-2022 they co-ran Zurich based School of Commons; a grassroots initiative dedicated to the study and development of decentered knowledge, with a focus on practices of peer learning and commoning. Between 2023-2024, they initiated and facilitated Echo Club at Theater Gessnerallee, a performance mediation format that combined theoretical study, collective attendance and analysis of live performances, and embodied research for a group of 20 yearly participants. They currently teach critical theory and performance at the Chair of the History of Art and Architecture at the ETH in Zurich.
contact: josephbaanproduction@gmail.com
They make performances, installations, texts, group works, collaborative formats, and scores that aim to unpack the problem of relating. They see performance as a way to become receptive to one’s own alterity when relating to others, offering the possibility to have embodied experiences that one does not identify with. Joseph is currently engaged in a PhD research at the Zürich University of the Arts and Mozarteum in Salzburg that examines the political currency of incoherence within post-Englightenment regimes of recognisability and sovereign subjectivity through the means of performance, specifically “training one’s own incoherence”. Investigating performative strategies of ambiguity, illegibility, and non-performance, they ask how contemporary performance intervenes in reproducing this fantasy of sovereignty—which is inextricably bound up with the biopolitics of settler colonialism—by cultivating nonsovereign forms of collectivity through aesthetic, pedagogical, and organisational practices.
Joseph’s practice is closely linked to their work as an educator, which is influenced by experimental pedagogies and non-hierarchical collaborative methods. Throughout their practice, they have developed projects for institutional and non-institutional contexts that explore forms of knowledge production through self-organised and horizontal pedagogies. These initiatives treat encounter as a site where political consciousness can emerge, and artistic and embodied practice as a vehicle for thinking through questions of collectivity and political subjectivity. They are a founding member of Rotterdam-based research group SOHERE; a community of practitioners working in the fields of art, design and science who develop collaborative, horizontal learning environments. From 2019-2022 they co-ran Zurich based School of Commons; a grassroots initiative dedicated to the study and development of decentered knowledge, with a focus on practices of peer learning and commoning. Between 2023-2024, they initiated and facilitated Echo Club at Theater Gessnerallee, a performance mediation format that combined theoretical study, collective attendance and analysis of live performances, and embodied research for a group of 20 yearly participants. They currently teach critical theory and performance at the Chair of the History of Art and Architecture at the ETH in Zurich.
contact: josephbaanproduction@gmail.com