Part political science, part experimental history, part performance, Jeremiah Day’s public memory project takes up the largely neglected affirmative polemic contained in Hannah Arendt’s late work – the argument that council democracy could be a practical form of self-government for contemporary society.The project will unfold in two tracks: a reading group leading to an international seminar on the subject, and a series of performances taking up the key sites and episodes where councils have been formed.

Jeremiah Day (1974, USA) is re-examining political conflicts and resistances through unfolding their subjective traces and contexts through photography, speech and body language. Day studied and collaborates often with Simone Forti, one of the pioneers of post-modern dance, in particular working with her improvisational research-moving-talking method, in which content appears not as didactic transmission, but rather in an open-ended and unfolding embodied form of questioning.

Day graduated from the art department of the University of California at Los Angeles in 1997 and lived and worked in Los Angeles until moving to Holland in 2003 to attend the Rijksakademie. From 2000 to 2002 Day was artist-in-residence at Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center in Los Angeles where he organized such events as “The Great Silence: 10 Years After the Burning,” commemorating the 1992 riots.

Day’s performances, photographs and installations have been presented at the Santa Monica Museum, the Centre George Pompidou in Paris, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and this year’s Thessaloniki Biennial. He is represented by Ellen de Bruijne Projects, Amsterdam and Arcade, London.