Ida Bencke

Ida Bencke, MA, is an independent curator and publisher with the Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology, a self-organized curatorial invested in experimental and activist exhibition formats. She is currently co-curating the exjhibition Hosting Lands along with Aziza Hamel and Dea antonsen. Hosting Lands is a slow and decentralized exhibition process exploring various pedagogies of the rural, as well as relations between land care and practices of commoning. Hosting Lands is invested in strategies of forging infrastructures for solidarity and translocal coalition building, and is along with partners and allies co-developing strategies for redirecting institutional resources towards selforganized communities and arts initiatives. She is currently working on a practice-based PhD as part of the research project Oikos - A cultural analysis of care and Crisis in the 21st century at the University of Copenhagen.

‘How do we chip chip chip away the institutional walls?’ – Collective Rehearsals Towards Building Alliances

In this talk Ida & Kathrine Bolt Rasmussen will introduce a newly established collaboration between LAE/Hosting Lands and ANA; two self-organized platforms operating within intersections of community organizing and collective art practices. The collaboration is based on a common interest in various commoning practices as strategies of cultivating infrastructures of resource redistribution, and challenging expectations to what an art exhibition can look like, and what it can do.
From 2027 we will begin to work towards merging our curatorial practices with the aim of pooling our resources, networks and experiences. We will start by creating a one-year ‘test space’ in ANA where we in dialogue with five invited artist collectives, will begin to explore and ‘rehearse’ what we – at this early stage – envisage might transform into a sort of experimental art school for commoning practices. Through this test-site we aim to gain a better understanding of which working methods, habits and success criteria within the arts we should abolish and which we need to cultivate, in order to lay the foundations for a future common platform built on solidarity and justice, rather than competition and scarcity.
The talk will focus on questions such as: How do we create spaces and methods for building alliances that allow us to think and act together across our diverse practices, positions, resources and experiences? How do we create translocal exchanges and connections between situated, rooted practices and life experiences? How can an art exhibition become a vehicle for redistributing resources and practicing solidarity between institution and self-organized, and between various positionalities.