Causerie

Alexandre Singh leads sessions over two days in which he discusses learning based upon conversation and dialogue as a tool for intellectual exploration. Joining him are specially invited thinkers and practitioners who have approached this topic from different perspectives. The framework of these sessions mirrors the concept, being an intimate discussion held across a table with a small audience of listeners.

This class forms a link with the artist's ongoing project 'The Humans' that he has developed for Witte de With, Rotterdam: http://www.wdw.nl/event/the-humans/

Approximate duration of each session: 3 hours

Alexandre Singh (b.1980, Bordeaux, France)
Alexander Singh's narrative performances begin as straight academic discourses before becoming intellectual wild-goose chases, meandering into diversions, digressions and tall stories. As he describes them, 'each of the lectures starts off with the relation of various facts and dates and somewhere along the line somehow dissolves into a web of slippery connections and associations seemingly far removed from the original premise, but always coming back again and again to explore in a surprisingly fantastical manner the very dry facts and figures that I'd casually dropped in at the beginning.' A wealth of more or less useless information, encompassing such subjects as science, pseudo-science, industry, magic, technology, commerce, history, art history and literature is presented in a mesmerising mix of fact, fiction and tangential logic. Singh considers his contribution to Wide Open School as an extra-mural part of his theatrical project, The Humans (currently on view at Witte de With in Rotterdam), which is described as 'an on-going installation, an exhibition, multiple encounters and "Causeries" [chats], rehearsals and a play.'