The performance contains three layers of representation: the video, non-predetermined intervals of toasts by a representative of the Bologna Process, and scripted readings by a panel of readers timed to coincide with key segments of the video.
Following the classical tradition of the Greek symposia, spirits are imbibed at the whim of a toastmaster who stands in as the institutional figure of the administrator. The toastmaster is instructed to interrupt the screened narrative with statements read from documents of the Bologna Process, an EU initiative with the mission overseeing the unification of higher education throughout its member states into a single system of universities and academies. The performance symbolically enacts this top-down standardizing process while marking antagonisms within it.
As a means of behavior modification, popular film is singled out as perhaps the dominant ideological apparatus of subject formation. In addition, Howls for Bologna attempts to insert another form of behavioral modification through the progressive intoxication of its audience and performers. Our collective inebriation courts the possibility of potentially unruly outcomes within the pedagogical situation, while enacting the pressure to perform an age-old social ritual of coercive affirmation.
Nina Søs Vinther performed admirably as our first toastmaster at Overgaden Institut fur Samtidskunst in Copenhagen in 2010.
Exhbibited at:
Howls for Bologna, Overgaden, Copenhaguen, Denmark, 2010
Howls for Bologna, The Royal Academy, Copenhaguen, Denmark, 2010
___