Expanded Lecture of 2015
“Loose Attractors: a workshop on newspaper reading, time bending and moonwalking in water”
By Raimundas Malašauskas and Valentina Desideri

• Date: December 12, 2015, Saturday, 18:30-20:30
• Venue: TFAM auditorium, free admission
• The lecture will be in English; consecutive translation is available.

Lecture Introduction

This convivial lecture will focus on where New Year’s resolutions come from, and will be elaborated in the form of questions and answers among Valentina Desideri, Raimundas Malašauskas, the participants of the workshop and hopefully anyone keen to get involved. Valentina Desideri and Raimundas Malašauskas will enter into conversations around their practices and their points of convergence. Amongst those, they will discuss fake therapy, political therapy, fictional identities and the hypnotic show. They will share materials, ask questions and attempt answers. The conversation is convivial as it is open to anyone who might wish to get involved too with their own practices, questions or answers.

Some of the questions they have shared with workshop participants are:

Let's swap voices in our heads first, what do you hear?
Describe what happens in a film that you never saw, but would like to see.
You will reincarnate as ....
When we've met in XVII century we didn't recognise each other because ....
Create a character based on what you were thinking about today
What did you learn from computer games?
Create a character that said I don't want to stay true to my knowledge.
Choose one headline from a newspaper today, change one word in it, forget the original.
Reduce a sentence to a symbol, forget the sentence, remember the symbol.
When were you someone else most recently?
When did you travel in time last time?

Raimundas Malašauskas, born in Vilnius, is a curator and writer. From 1995 to 2006, he worked at the Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius, where he produced the first two seasons of the weekly television showCAC TV, an experimental merger of commercial television and contemporary art that ran under the slogan “Every program is a pilot; every program is the final episode.” He curated “Black Market Worlds,” the IX Baltic Triennial, at CAC Vilnius in 2005.

From 2007 to 2008, he was a visiting curator at California College of the Arts, San Francisco, and later, a curator-at-large of Artists Space, New York. In 2007, he co-wrote the libretto of Cellar Door, an opera by Loris Gréaud produced in Paris. Malašauskas curated the exhibitions “Sculpture of the Space Age,” David Roberts Art Foundation, London (2009); “Into the Belly of a Dove,” Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City (2010), and “Repetition Island,” Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2010). He was the curator of Oo, Lithuanian and Cyprus pavilions in the 55th Venice Biennale, one of the curators of Weather Permitting, 9th Mercosul Biennale, Porto Alegre, 2013; d(OCUMENTA) 13, Kassel, 2012 and the up-coming 2016 Liverpool Biennial

Valentina Desideri is an Amsterdam-based artist. She trained in contemporary dance at the Laban Centre in London (2003–2006) and later on did her MA in Fine Arts at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam (2011–13). She does Fake Therapy and Political Therapy, she co-organizes Performing Arts Forum in France, she speculates in writing with Prof. Stefano Harney, she writes biographies by reading people’s hands, she engages in Poetical Readings with Prof. Denise Ferreira da Silva. She also makes performances and writes biographies by reading people’s palms.