at the Institute of Cultural Inquiry
The ICI has scheduled a series of monthly sessions to help ease the application process for individuals who want to submit curatorial proposals. During each session, we’ll present one of our ongoing projects as a means of demonstrating (not merely presenting) the ICI method.
The first session will be on Wednesday, November 9, 2011 at 7 p.m. and will focus on the Manual of Lost Ideas. Please rsvp by October 31 at info@culturalinquiry.org
The Institute was featured in LA Weekly’s “Best of L.A. 2011” Magazine, named “Best Place to Figure Some Shit Out”. Please visit L.A. Weekly’s website to view this article in full.
The Institute was featured in the premier issue of Installation Magazine. To view this article in full, please visit the Installation Media & Magazine website.
The catalogs for the 100/10 (100 days/10 visions) project are an homage to many o f the ICI’s favorite people and things: W.G. Sebald, his poem After Nature, and The New Museum in New York. Modeled on the museum’s catalog for its 2008 exhibition After Nature, this ICI Press edition also owes allegiance to Aby Warburg (1866-1929). Warburg, lamenting the possible loss of open stacks in public libraries, argued that when looking for a desired book on a library shelf it is often its neighbor that first draws your attention, its good neighbor that holds the answer you are seeking.Under the dustcover of each catalog you’ll find a “good neighbor,” a book that impacted the curator of each iteration (and so, a different title for each participant) even though that book’s influence may not be immediately apparent in the exhibition photos that are sprinkled within its pages.
The 100/10 Complete Catalog is boxed in a silk clamshell box. The edition includes the catalogs for each iteration of the 100/10 project (10 in total), a removable colophon and an ICI “extra” hidden in each box. The ten catalogs contain several color inserts that document each of their corresponding projects.
The 100/10 Complete Catalog has been issued in an edition of 5 with three artist proofs.
Price: $325 at the ICI Gift Shop
These are the books that comprise this unique edition coupled with the dustcover catalog that is folded around each book. They can be purchased individually in our gift shop.
100/10/1: Alex Harvey and Anna Ayeroff
The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin
“The aboriginals in Australia believe that their ancestors sang the world into existence. Our utopian ancestors believed their world into existence. By returning to the desert, they discovered themselves.”
100/10/2: R. Coppens and A. LaFarge
Trickster Makes the World by Lewis Hyde
“In myth, one of the trickster’s primary roles has been to cross, blur, fracture, and render permeable the boundaries by which cultural categories are stabilized.”
The Blue and Brown Books by Ludwig Wittgenstein
“Much like Wittgenstein’s Blue Book, Norway Nori uses a loose web of thought and ideas to construct his confusing and slightly annoying questionnaires. Our answers to his queries reveal silent resemblances among a group of respondents.”
100/10/4: P. Evans and K. Frimkess-Wolff
The Enormous Room by E. E. Cummings
“ To create is first of all to destroy—there can be no such thing as authentic art until the bon trucs [good dodges] are entirely and thoroughly and perfectly annihilated.”
100/10/5: Pam Posey and Christine Nguyen
Tinkers by Paul Harding
“Tinkers offers a different way of perceiving nature. Harding describes the dismantling of the mechanisms of the brain alongside the collapse of the perceived world.”
100/10/6: C. Dillbohner and I. Kamps
Paracelsus by Sergius Golowin
“Today Paracelsus’ knowledge and accomplishments are described as ‘wholistic.’ He is the pioneer in the domain of empirical psychological healing science.”
100/10/7: C. Smith and R. Woodward Smith
Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
“Driving around L.A. after living in Europe for ten years, I was struck by a sense of disconnection. The question became how can we map what we feel, how we experience the sense of place.”
The Island of the Day Before by Umberto Eco
“Our work is not pure research, and not even necessarily practical in nature. Rather, it aspires toward Eco’s lyrical explorations, deft navigations through multivalent time and space.”
100/10/9: C. Hitchcock and J. Linnehan
Mathematics and the Unexpected by Ivar Ekeland
“Ekeland chose Hieronymous Bosch’s The Temptation of St. Anthony as the cover image for his book. The author’s metaphors for mathematics are no less hallucinatory.”
100/10/10: terra publica (coordinated by E. Baek and J. Black)
blank sketchbook
“the blank book calls upon individuals to move out into the ‘field’ of the project, to the very earth we all inhabit.”
Coordinated by Jojo Black and Elisa Baek with contributions by terra publica
June 28 – August 15, 2011
Mappa Mundi: The Earth Project drew inspiration from the ICI’s “Earth Cabinet”, a collection of dirt specimens from all over the world currently housed in a refurbished communion cabinet. These specimens comprise of dirt, dust, grit, shell, sand and other types of earth material from locations including: Ayres Rock, Australia; Suzhou, China; Stonehenge; the Berlin Wall; Zion, Utah; Jerusalem, Israel; Kanagawa, Japan; Paris Catacombs; the Grand Canyon; Gubbio, Italy; and Giza, Egypt. The “Earth Cabinet” collection brings together a myriad of geographic terrains to reveal where the Institute of Cultural Inquiry and its publics have visited in the past, as well as where they might go in the future.
Using the tools and resources of the Internet, The Earth Project provided a platform for people to contribute their own “earth samples” and plot them out on an interactive world map where others can easily view and share them across various networks.
Through their contributions, the terra publica (people of the earth) became the curators of this project. They selected the material, they made the connections, the interpretations, the meanings, they gave the “earth samples” their movement and purpose. 100/10 was an invitation to construct a new world map, one that reflects all the intricacies and experiences we share as individuals on this journey through earth’s terrains.
Here, you find an archived interactive map of The Earth Project – and explore the contributions of terra publica. An archived capture of Mappa Mundi: The Earth Project website, which provided the platform for participation, can also be seen below. You can also visit the documentation page at our laboratory for more information.
Over the last few summers, we have watched the fervent nest-building activity of the hummingbird population that favors our secluded, lush garden. Their bricolaged nests are small enough to fit in a human child’s hand and are often built on the thinnest branches of a tree where they become invisible to the human eye. Each year, we would stand watch over these nests as soon as the mother bird began her quiet occupancy (in itself, a sight to see) but we never saw any chicks; their birth was becoming as legendary as an elephant’s death.
This year, we left for the three day 4th of July weekend with mom still sitting quietly on her nest. When we returned the following Tuesday, the mom was gone and the nest was empty. We later found out that Steven Eighmey, our plant manager, had stopped by the Institute on July 4th. While most humans were lying on beaches or flipping burgers in backyards, the hummingbirds in our garden were getting ready to leave home.
So here, finally, our first documented graduating class of hummingbirds from the ICI garden.
