EVERYTHING IS VALUES
EVERYTHING IS VALUES
WRITTEN & DIRECTED BY MARILYN VOLKMAN
EVERYTHING IS VALUES, depicts and restages the complex interactions between people during the Challenging Jewellery master’s degree. Drawing on methodologies taken from anthropology, auto-fiction and institutional archiving, the work is at once a novel, a film, and an object interrogating how communal ideals, failure, taste, money, and scale interact in the collective search for inspiration and purpose.
From 2018-2020, Volkman inhabited the role of participant-observer, openly tracking and scripting developments between and within course collaborators into a thesis novel. She then adapted the manuscript into a serialized video that explores dynamics of institutionalized teaching and experimental pedagogy in scenes derived from the program. Born from a collaboration between the video’s characters and the physicist Dr. Kimberly Modic, the project also features a Class Ring which holds ninety-four pages of narrative about the Challenging Jewellery master’s engraved onto a silicon and stainless steel ring. Dr. Modic used micro-structuring techniques and a focused-ion beam (FIB) to craft the text-based jewellery alongside the novel’s characters.
In the wake of the master’s program, the work – presented as a video and jewellery installation – serves as an archive and fictionalized history for participants while posing a series of questions: How open can an open education be? Are we responsible for publishing our failures alongside our successes? Is sharing overlapping fictions a path toward realizing a future? What is at stake in a master’s? By streamlining this experiment into a genuine artistic method, Volkman’s work doubles as an interrogation and critique of anthropological and pedagogical methodologies, and emphasizes the potential of artistic responses to administrative processes.
Special thanks for contributions from Laura Mott, Dr. Kimberly Modic, Dr. Scott Waitukaitis, Todor Asenov, Dora Des, Benjamin Lignel, Silke Xenia Juul, Eva van Kempen, MASieraad, Steven Cottingham, Jeppe Ugelvig, the Institute of Science and Technology Austria, Challenging Jewellery and BLESS.
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Contact EVERYTHING IS VALUES
Links to Video Episodes
Episode 1: The Courage to Walk Away
Episode 3: Autonomous Zones of Learning
Clip from Episode 2: the seminar
Clip from Episode 2: the kitchen remake
exhibition at Het HEM as a part of Challenging Jewellery and the Sandberg Instituut's Graduation exhibition program.
© Marilyn Volkman 2020