| Title | Mentor | Description | Links | Dates |
| Sensing the Commons: Listening For Alice | Jason Waite and Christian Nyampeta Jason Waite is curator at Casco - Office for Art, Design and Theory in Utrecht, the Netherlands. He was the co-curator of the 4th Biennial of Young Artists in Bucharest, and is founder and curator of the mobile platform the International Guerrilla Video Festival that engages moving image and the urban/social environment with its multiplicity of conflicting histories. Recently, he was co-curator of The Real Thing? at Palais de Tokyo, Paris and Maintenance Required, The Kitchen, New York. He holds an M.A. in Art and Politics from Goldsmiths College, London and was a 2012-2013 Helen Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in New York. Christian Nyampeta is a London based artist. Ongoing contributions include Practice International and Tagore's Universal Allegories, and a residency at Iaspis in Stockholm. Current writings include a contribution to Stephen Willat's Control magazine. Ongoing projects and recent exhibitions include New Habits at Casco - Office for Art, Design and Theory in Utrecht, the Netherlans, Prototypes (2014) at The Showroom in London, How To Live Together (2013) at Casco - Office for Art Design and Theory and at Stroom Den Haag in 2014. He is also an MPhil/PhD candidate at the Visual Cultures Department of Goldsmiths, University of Lon don. |
Topics: Commons, artistic practice, postcapitalism, radio, theory, alternative economies, music... Short description: Where to locate the terrain to begin to think about a postcapitalist future? What is the role of commoning and how can the historical, theoretical and potential commons be central to establishing a different understanding of being together? How can art practice be a critical site for new ways of considering our relationship with society, economy, and nature. The artist Christian Nyampeta's radio station and installation How To Live Together, Radius provides a platform to discuss, speculate and share on the commons. Radius is a model for living, a habitat for considerate forms of life and an organ for sensing a common. As a testing ground, Radius is an open structure in the form of a radio station. The station is migratory, alternating between hosting and being a guest, a passage and a destination. In this oscillation, we hope to sense a Common. This means: to avoid arrogance, while we accommodate and face up to the urgencies of the moment, and while we generate a living and responsive space through revisiting the past, hearing the present, making and listening to the future alone and together. Language: English |
www.16beavergroup.org/silvia_george_david/ www.minorcompositions.info/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/undercommons-web.pdf www.bollier.org/blog/eight-points-reference-commoning libcom.org/history/radio-alice www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch27.htm |
28 July - 2 August 2014 |
| Participation in the Artistic and Curatorial Practice | Cecilia Guida Cecilia Guida is professor of History of Contemporary Art at L'Aquila Fine Arts Academy and of Communication Process Analysis at Florence Fine Arts Academy. She is specialized in the relationship among participative artistic practices, new technologies and contemporary public space. She has curated exhibition projects in museums and in public and nonprofit spaces in Italy and abroad. Her book Spatial Practices. Funzione pubblica e politica dell'arte nella società delle reti (Public and political functions of art in the networked society) was published by Franco Angeli in 2012. She is member of the IKT - International Association of Curators of Contemporary Art. She collaborates with Cittadellarte - Fondazione Pistoletto, Biella. |
Topics: Artistic practice, Project, Communication, Curatorship, Politics, Democracy, Responsibility, Community, Public space, Network, New technologies. Short description: The course will showcase crucial historical moments and the most relevant critical theories about the transformation of art into a participative and collaborative practice, the artist's shift from author to activator of shared aesthetic experiences, the audience's shift from spectator to participant. Particular attention will be given to the vocabulary normally used when referring to these processes and phenomena, through the examination of wider and more complex concepts such as participation, project, politics, democracy, network, etc. The analysis will then move to issues related to the curatorial practice and the ways of displaying participative projects. Language: English |
openengagement.info/home/conference-information creativetime.org collabarts.org www.skor.nl/eng/about/item/skor-foundation-for-art-and-public-domain www.oncurating-journal.org/index.php/issue-19-reader/public-art-consequences-of-a-gesture-an-interview-with-mary-jane-jacob museumarteutil.net www.cittadellarte.it www.atitolo.it www.progettodiogene.eu www.artisopensource.net |
1 - 5 September 2014 |
| Intersubjectivity in Participatory Practice | Beatrice Catanzaro Beatrice Catanzaro current practice focuses on activating public participation and situations of mutual learning. She has been researching and producing works throughout Europe, the Middle East andIndia. She has collaborated as visiting artist/tutor with the Unidee Artists in Residence International Program at Cittadellarte - Fondazione Pistoletto for several years. Her work has been exhibited in international venues as Manifesta7 (at the MART Museum of Rovereto), Fundacao Gulbenkian in Lisbon and the Espai d'art contemporani de Castellò (EACC) in Spain. In 2010 she moved to Palestine, where she currently teaches at the International Art Academy in Ramallah (Palestine) and initiated the participatory art project Bait al Karama in Nablus, the first Women's Centre in the heart of the old city of Nablus. Bait al Karama is a culinary social enterprise featuring the first Palestinian cooking school and run entirely by women. |
Topics: Intersubjectivity, empathy, imagination... are some of the aspects we will explore within the framework of a meaningful participatory practice. Short description: Though participation seams dealing with the collective, through the practice, I came to understand the radical importance of each and every subject involved and the need of building understanding through active listening and empathy. This unit will explore notions of empathy and imaginative processes as tools for a truly engaging participatory practice, where the artist is never an external observer but, rather, a subject equally involved in the process. Language: English |
www.baitalkarama.org | 8 - 12 September 2014 |
| The Architecture of Social Space: Creating Spaces of Critique Within the Places We Live | Matthew Mazzotta Matthew Mazzotta's work evolves from an interest in exploring the relationship between people and their environments, as well as between each other. His practice is conceptual and manifests as participatory public interventions that aim at bringing criticality and a sense of openness to the places we live. These sociallyengaged interventions allow for a reentry of the physical and metaphorical landscapes of our lives by provoking conversations around exploring the local, questions of ecology, public involvement, community building, artist sensibilities, science, and dissecting the systems that make up our &lsq uo;everyday&rsq uo;. His work is about reversing the top down oneway exchange of ideas and allowing people to contribute in a more tangible way to their own environment. Matthew works in a transdisciplinary fashion, collaborating with community members, laborers, academics, engineers, builders, activists, artists, poets, and anyone else that is willing to be involved in something experiential and participatory. His work has been recognized and awarded both nationally and internationally and has also found its way into mainstream media, being featured on CNN, BBC, NPR, the Discovery Channel, and Wired and Science Magazine to name a few. Matthew received an undrergraduate degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a Masters of Science in Visual studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he now teaches at MIT's Program in Art, Culture and Technology. |
Topics: Socially engaged art, public engagement, physical transformation of public space, transformation as a methaphor, reclaiming neglected urban spaces and converting them into creative public goods, collaboration, community participation, temporary vs permanent interventions, and spectacle. Short description: The week-long course will investigate, identify, and conceptually pull apart the space that we call "Public" within the built-environment so that it can be seen for the potential it has to shape relationships, develop community, build identity, raise issues, and be the site of interaction and critical dialoques that cuts across class, race, religion, and social and cultural barriers. At the same time, we will dissect successful public interventions from a wide range of known artists and explore their methods of engaging specific public and their audi ences. In class students will spend time researching, exploring, and defining the m ethods/strateg y of one success public intervention they are interested in and from this research they make a new intervention in a new public space of their choice using a conceptually similar strategy / artistic sensibility, however applied to a new public space and audience with its unique and specific context that they will research in parallel. Language: English Documentation produced during the week (PDF) |
Alfredo Jaar - Skoghall Konsthall (paper museum intervention) www.youtube.com/watch?v=ub6PTs-ftOk Rick Lowe, Project Row Houses www.youtube.com/watch?v=4K8qEThOU58 Mel Chin - Operation Pay dirt www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvipqW3_hvw Krzysztof Wodiczko - Homeless Vehicle Project www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjHguYUwilY Matthew Mazzotta - Open House vimeo.com/70386286 |
15 - 19 September 2014 |
| Implicities and
Complicities; Convivially Mapping our Praxis |
Sakiko Sugawa Sakiko Sugawa is cofounder of Social Kitchen, a social and cultural center in Kyoto, and currently is working in Auckland as a ST PAUL St Gallery's Inaugural Research Fellow. In 2008 Sugawa participated in UNIDEE - University of Ideas at Cittadellarte-Fondazione Pistoletto, where she developed collaborative art project focusing on the Israel- Palestine conflict together with Palestinian and Israeli artists. Sugawa has also co-founded projects in New York (USA), Biella (Italy), Yaffa (Israel), and Perth (Australia). Sugawa's praxis is underpinned by long-term projects with an emphasis on collaboration. These typically take shape around social relationships, forms, structures and places that correspond to specific political and social issues. Through these small-scale projects Sugawa's work aligns with resistance to the impact of local and global injustices, and to inequalities created by capitalism. |
Topics: |
The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism by David Harvey www.goodreads.com/book/show/7502073-the-enigma-ofcapital-and-the-crises-of-capitalism www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhZGOWPcMAU Shadow Work by Ivan Illich http://logica.ugent.be/philosophica/fulltexts/26-2.pdf The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context by Grant H. Kester www.dukeupress.edu/The-One-and-the-Many https://ourgoods.org http://brooklynlaundrysocialclub.wordpress.com |
22 - 26 September 2014 |
| Cittadellarte, Ambassadors of the Third Paradise | Cittadellarte Cittadellarte-Fondazione Pistoletto is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1998 by the artist Michelangelo Pistoletto. It is an institution that is radically by art, rather than just for art, as most museums and cultural institutions are. It is an evolving living laboratory that brings together experts and researchers from the different sectors of society. It builds and participates into networks of public and private constituencies engaged in the practice of social change, contributing to sketching out a geography of effective transformation on a glocal scale. Cittadellarte's programs include the fostering of a network aimed at linking together small-scale artistic and cultural practices of social change and democratic innovation under way in different countries, in order to bring together their potential and contribute to its unfolding. Cittadellarte acts in the policymaking arena (advisory and advocacy to UN, EU and local governmental and nongovernmental level) and in the local ecologies where practices unfold in their negotiative and organic dynamic. Cittadellarte has run an artist in residency program since 1999 where more than 250 artists, practitioners, curators, scholars, social entrepreneurs, thinkers from different fields have experienced 4 months collective residencies in batches of 12/18 people. Cittadellarte is formed by different bodies, each of them tackling a different area of living together: from architecture to fashion, from spirituality to food, from economy to politics. Such bodies are called Uffizi, and they are environments where various constituencies congregate and cooperate with Cittadellarte at local level. An extensive research and educational activity is carried out, via various tools such as residencies, seminars, exhibitions, events and publishing activities. The overarching vision Cittadellarte promotes is represented by the concept of the Third Paradise, a project aimed at harmonizing the intelligence of humans with nature. |
Topics: artivation, ecological architecture, intercultural dialogue, sustainable consumption, ecology and creativity, social change, socially engaged art practices, participatory processes, education, sustainability in the textile industry, food and landscape care, agriculture, culture, conviviality, nature/artifice. Short description: Participants will experience Cittadellarte's environment and receive and in-depth insight into most of its current activities. Starting from Pistoletto's historical works to his present writings, the journey will unfold into Cittadellarte's regenerated spaces and will introduce the participants to many of its members, artists, curators, managers. Participants will gain an understanding of the complexities and methodologies of creating such an initiative and negotiating its existence and development within the local communities. Language: English / Italian |
www.cittadellarte.it | 18 - 19 October 2014 |
| What Kind of Participation? / Quale modello di partecipazione ? |
a.titolo a.ti tolo is a non profit organization established in Turin by a collective of curators and art historians: Francesca Comisso, Lisa Parola, Luisa Perlo. Since its foundation a.titolo has focused on artistic practices that face the social, political and cultural dimensions of the public realm. a.titolo curates and produces art projects for public spaces, context and audience specific projects, exhibitions, videos and documentary films, conferences, workshops and training programmes developing an interdisciplinary dialogue between the visual arts and the urban and social sciences. Its activities are carried out working closely with artists, curators, writers, architects, video and film-makers, designers and city planners, social workers, public institutions and other organizations both within and outside the art field. Members of a.titolo are cultural mediators of the Nouveaux Commanditaires programme for the production of works of art commissioned by citizens, promoted by Fondation de France. With Maurizio Cilli, in 2010 a.titolo conceived the educational platform situa.to, aimed at developing art and design interventions, and narrative projects in the Turin metropolitan area through a learning-by-doing methodology based on observation and listening techniques. a.titolo is currently the artistic direction for the visual arts of the crossborder European project Acteurs Transculturels and co-curator of We-Traders. Swapping Crisis for City project, promoted by Goethe-Institut, which includes exhibitions, forums and workshops in five European cities. |
Topics: Socially engaged artistic practices, participatory processes, new institutional models, education, conflicts, public space, symbolic space, new idea of community, active citizenship, commons, cities from below, cultural and artistic demands, contemporary heritage, local/global, geography. Short description: Starting from the practical and theoretical experience of a.titolo, who have been dealing with art in the public sphere since 1997, the course will investigate some crucial issues regarding socially engaged artistic practices, with a particular reference to the notion of participation. What kind of participation? means to analyse and present case studies and best practices in order to activate a collective comparison also starting from the positions Miguel Benasayag and Angelique Del Rey expressed in the book In praise of the conflict, highlighting the importance of the processes of creation: "it's not the fact of thinking about solutions that drives us to commitment, on the contrary it's the acting that allows us to imagine what ends up being defined as the solutions". Particular attention will be given to highly discursive and dialectical processes of artistic creation, able to define even that shared "symbolic space" which the politologist Chantal Mouffe deems necessary to be able to articulate the logic of conflict - constitutive of a model of pluralistic democracy - beyond the antagonistic dimension of a clash between enemies, but in its potential dynamics among different visions and positions. The reflection will also deal with issues related to the processes of empowerment, active citizenship, learning-by-doing, selfdetermination, commissioning, emphasizing the different ways to configure and activate participation. Is there a need for art? Where is the demand for art? The considerations about these questions will concern the identification and configuration strategies of the demand for art in the context of a possible reformulation of the concepts of cultural demand and offer, and the mutuality of the creative processes. Language: English / Italian |
www.atitolo.it
www.nouveauxcmmanditaires.eu www.goethe.de/ins/be/prj/wet/itindex.htm Miguel Benasayag - Printemps des arts en résistances fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miguel_Benasayag www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cp5d45Fr3_c www.youtube.com/watc h?v=wGlx73p2N6c Chantal Mouffe - Agonistic politics and artistic practices en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chantal_Mouffe vimeo.com/10375165 www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Wpwwc25JRU |
20 - 24 October 2014 |
| Seedbed | ARTINRETI In 2012, for the 15th edition of Arte al Centro - Art at the Center of Responsible Social Transformation, Cittadellarte produced the exhibition ARTINRETI: Artistic Practices and Urban Transformation in Piedmont. The exhibition aimed at mapping artistic researches and practices, thought and created in Piedmont's institutions where, for over 10 years, a series of projects focusing on the relation between art and public sphere, have been activated. In that occasion, the results of an in depth research on associations and collectives' activities operating in Turin as well as in smaller contexts like Moncalieri, Frassineto Po and Ameno, have been shown forthe first time. Methodologies activated by ARTINRETI participants rise a need for localizing and documenting how, in a pre-crisis moment, the local territory has been able to create a cultural network made by significant experiences of different urban communities. To the abused term of participation, the working group have substituted an idea of transformation. This idea has been based on a dialogue that, without removing the conflict - constitutive element of a real process for civic emancipation - analyzed the public sphere concept seen as ample and porous territory which is able to receive reflections born from urgencies and desires of such different temporary communities. After two years, ARTINRETI is now an open discoursive platform which has become a path of selftraining and sharing. The project has been developed through itinerant meetings focused on concepts and projects relating with changes happening in the existing situation. The groups part of ARTINRETI are: 6secondsTO, a.titolo, Acting Out, Asilo Bianco, Banca della Memoria, Maurizio Cilli, Cittadellarte - Fondazione Pistoletto, Eco e Narciso, Kaninchenhaus, Par coii bsogna semnà / Chi semina raccoglie, PAV - Parco Arte Vivente, Progetto Diogene, URBE - Rigenerazione Urbana. |
Artinreti. Seminar / seedbed: a platform dedicated to critically analyzing, sharing and developing independent art projects, seen as active enzymes on the urban ecologies. Topics: artivation, social transformation , discussion and critical analysis, net, public, private, common, collective and community space, legitimation, commitment, relationships with the communities and policy makers, objectives and methodologies. Short description: The workshop is developed on two paralleand linked paths: the first consists of an in depth analysis of the projects taking part to ARTINRETI (they will be exstensively presented). The intense and lucid collective environment will offer the participants often pressed on an operative and constantly urgent planning dimension - the possibility of meditating on the motivations and the objectives, analyzing the coherence of the methodologies and of the programs. The second path represents the hypothesis relating to the need, the opportunity and the utility of extending to the interregional (interlocal) level the debate on the public space as a collective and community heritage. This will be the occasion for establishing a link with other organizations and networks working on the same subject on a national and international level. Maximum number of participants: The seminar is aimed specifically at subjects who are already active in ARTINRETI. |
Arte al Centro 2015 | 27 - 31 October 2014 |
| Cittadellarte - an In-depth Experience of its History and Current Activities | Cittadellarte Cittadellarte-Fondazione Pistoletto is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1998 by the artist Michelangelo Pistoletto. It is an institution that is radically by art, rather than just for art, as most museums and cultural institutions are. It is an evolving living laboratory that brings together experts and researchers from the different sectors of society. It builds and participates into networks of public and private constituencies engaged in the practice of social change, contributing to sketching out a geography of effective transformation on a glocal scale. Cittadellarte's programs include the fostering of a network aimed at linking together small-scale artistic and cultural practices of social change and democratic innovation under way in different countries, in order to bring together their potential and contribute to its unfolding. Cittadellarte acts in the policymaking arena (advisory and advocacy to UN, EU and local governmental and nongovernmental level) and in the local ecologies where practices unfold in their negotiative and organic dynamic. Cittadellarte has run an artist in residency program since 1999 where more than 250 artists, practitioners, curators, scholars, social entrepreneurs, thinkers from different fields have experienced 4 months collective residencies in batches of 12/18 people. Cittadellarte is formed by different bodies, each of them tackling a different area of living together: from architecture to fashion, from spirituality to food, from economy to politics. Such bodies are called Uffizi, and they are environments where various constituencies congregate and cooperate with Cittadellarte at local level. An extensive research and educational activity is carried out, via various tools such as residencies, seminars, exhibitions, events and publishing activities. The overarching vision Cittadellarte promotes is represented by the concept of the Third Paradise, a project aimed at harmonizing the intelligence of humans with nature. |
Topics: artivation, ecological architecture, intercultural dialogue, sustainable consumption, ecology and creativity, social change, socially engaged art practices, participatory processes, education, sustainability in the textile industry, food and landscape care, agriculture, culture, conviviality, nature/artifice. Short description: Participants will experience Cittadellarte's environment and receive and in-depth insight into most of its current activities. Starting from Pistoletto's historical works to his present writings, the journey will unfold into Cittadellarte's regenerated spaces and will introduce the participants to many of its members, artists, curators, managers. Participants will gain an understanding of the complexities and methodologies of creating such an initiative and negotiating its existence and development within the local communities. |
www.cittadellarte.it | 3 - 7 November 2014 |
| Working Together: Mapping a Collective Memory | Sofìa Olascoaga Sofìa Olascoaga works in the intersections of art, research and education by activating spaces for critical thinking and collective action. Olascoaga was Research Fellow at Independent Curators International (2011), and Curatorial Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Arts Independent Study Program (2010). She received her BFA from La Esmeralda National School of Fine Arts in Mexico City. Olascoaga's work involves the experimental design of thinktanks, along with artists, theorists, curators and educators, and with a wide range of institutional and independent spaces. In 2012, she was a Workshop Clinics Director for SITAC X, the International Symposium of Contemporary Art Theory in Mexico City. From 2007 to 2010, she was Head of Education and Public Programs at Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil in Mexico City. Olascoaga was educational curator and public programs manager for the first grant initiative Bancomer-MACG Program for Young Artists in 2008-2010, created by Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil and Fundaciòn Bancomer. Olascoaga also collaborated with international laboratories for public programs at Art21, Inc and MoMA New York, Steirischer Herbst Festival in Austria, Experimental Nucleus for Art and Pedagogy in Rio de Janeiro, Independent Curators International in New York, street public program La Galeria de Comercio, and Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporàneo in Mexico City, among others. Her ongoing research, Between Utopia and Disenchantment (Entre utopìa y desencanto), critically assesses the productive tension between utopia and the failure of intentional community models developed in Mexico in past decades, addressing the ideas posed by Ivan Illich at the Centro Intercultural de D ocumentaciòn (CIDOC), and the influential role this model has played in the practice of many Mexican and international thinkers and artists. For this project, Olascoaga is the recipient of the 2012 Cda- Projects Grant for Artistic Research and Production, a CIFO Artistic Production Grant, and the National Arts Fund in Mexico. |
Topics: Collaborative platforms, artistic research, collective learning and unlearning, learning threads, blurring hierarchy, mapping collective memory, active archives, community. Short description: This unit will focus on various frameworks for collective research and learning, taking as a starting point the basic components from Ivan Illich's Learning Threads in Deschooling Society: learning peers, learning guides, access to tools and sources, learning model. Language: English |
www.iconoclasistas.net entreutopiaydesencanto.org entreutopiaydesencanto.tumblr.com |
10 - 14 November 2014 |