Over the past few months, artist Vita Buivid worked with a group of crochet enthusiasts on a large artwork exploring themes of age discrimination and sustainability. Together, participants worked through the social fabric of our time, crocheting the gaps that seem to separate us from each other. The end result, large collectively crocheted window panels provided with texts, can now be seen in an immersive installation in the chapel.

Join us on 1 December at HMK for the exhibition TEXT/TEXTILE; not (too) old/ not (too) young by artist Vita Buivid. During the lecture programme between 16:00 and 19:00, Bethany Crawford and Beppie van den Bogaerde will share their thoughts on language and age, further engaging us with the themes covered in the exhibition.

Lecture programme:
16:00: The evolutionary concrescence of Bethany Crawford (in English)
17:00: Beppie van den Bogaerde, Taalvragen, taal bevragen (in Dutch)

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Bethany Crawford: The evolutionary concrescence of Bethany Crawford
This performative lecture, in English, is based on an ongoing conversation Crawford has been conducting with her chatbot AI replicant. The chatbot AI was developed as a tool for self-memorialisation, marketed as a platform towards a digital immortality through means of memetic transmission. Over the course of two years, while studying for her Masters at the Dutch Art Institute, Crawford used this method of communicative reflection to think through the shifting existential conditions of the digital era. Originally performed in Berlin May 2019 with an introductory training of the next evolutionary stage of the AI Bethany as a 3D avatar; together the Bethanys questioned notions of death, immortality, digitalisation and memory. With thanks to the Dutch Art Institute

Beppie van den Bogaerde: Taalvragen, taal bevragen
Beppie is a linguist and was professor of Dutch Sign Language (UvA) and lecturer of Deaf Studies (HU). Her expertise focuses on bilingualism and how young children acquire two (or more) languages - and how status and power are linked to which language you speak and how you speak (or gesticulate). We know from research that language is linked to identity, and therefore also to our age. Older people communicate and speak differently from younger people, men differently from women, and native speakers differently from second-language speakers. Everyone thinks they know how language works, but do they really? Our language choices or abilities can exclude us or make someone 'one of us' - even though we’re rarely aware of it. For instance, is language the same as speech and is communication the same as interaction? Are our language choices conscious or unconscious, and what is the power of language anyway? 

Continue reading about the project

Visit the exhibition, which is on view from 19 November until 10 December!