My first three month at Akademie Schloss Solitude are nearly over. But just before leaving, I had the pleasure of a visit from Laurence Rassel. In Herman’s library at the Schloss we served tea, cookies and conversation.

Laurence Rassel is currently director of Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona, an institution created in 1984 by artist Antoni Tàpies to promote the study and knowledge of modern and contemporary art. Since her appointment in 2008 she worked on several important exhibitions questioning the economic, geographical, political, technical and cultural conditions that operate through art. To give you an idea: Fundació Antoni Tàpies organised the first major European retrospective of Brazilian artist Anna Maria Maiolino. The exhibition Interval. Sound Actions engaged with the institution as a listening context. It used the museum’s stairways and elevators as well as main exhibition rooms and included interviews with cleaning staff about their specific rhythms. “Retrospective” by Xavier Le Roy was conceived as a choreography of actions that were carried out by performers for the duration of the exhibition. ¹
Over the last years, Laurence collaborated intensively with staff and researchers on the project Combined Arts (A Place for Education, Exhibition and Research). She asked: “How can we make understandable, visible that the archive – and by extension the Fundació itself – can be opened, used and questioned?” and thereby created an articulation of a transversal, critical and participatory discourse on the relation of the institute to its documents. ²
From 1997 to 2008 Laurence was member of Constant, a non-profit association and interdisciplinary arts-lab based and active in Brussels. Her investigative work centred around (cyber)feminist artistic practice and intellectual property and she established many of Constant’s current lines of work. ³
As project coordinator of ADA, a network of Belgian training centres for women in ICT, she organised Digitales. These yearly digital meeting days brought together women dealing with network and digital technologies (theoreticians, activists, developers, trainees, artists) in the same place for a short period of time. ⁴
Last but not least, enjoy her black humour in The Laurence Rassel Show that she recorded with Terre Thaemlitz: an electro-acoustic radio drama about feminist anonymity and the death of the author. ⁵

1. “Retrospective” by Xavier Le Roy, 2012 Retrospective_Leroy_EN.pdf
2. About digitising Antoni Tàpies artbooks, 2012 http://www.dca-project.eu/documentation/detail/interview_with_laurence_rassel_nuria_sole_bardalet_and_jesus_marull_fundaci
3. Notes from Field Workers (about Constant), 2009 http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v2n2/rassel.html
4. Interview with Cornelia Sollfrank (about Digitales), 2003 http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/oldboys-0301/msg00002.html
5. The Laurence Rassel Show with Terre Thaemlitz, 2007 http://www.comatonse.com/releases/c016