Public Sphere

A new performance by Sara Wookey presented by Automata Arts Los Angeles

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tumblr_llyvwrdY7x1qje7eco1_500.1AUTOMATA PRESENTS: Sara Wookey’s new solo performance/lecture

Disappearing Acts & Resurfacing Subjects

The performance considers dance as a disappearing act, an erasure as construct, and questions recurring subjects floating in the public sphere- such as the preservation, ownership, and value of dance itself.

Through image, movement and text, Sara reflects on being a subsidized artist in Europe in the 1990’s, a freelance artist creating site-based projects in Los Angeles, and a selection of responses to her well known Open Letter to Artists. She spins together large themes of legacy in dance, the economic condition of artists, and strategies for making it (including a humorously touching, yet failed, fundraising campaign on Kickstarter), into a digestible, funny and poetic consideration of dance in our time.

MARCH 15 & 16, 8:00PM
MARCH 17, 4:00PM

SEATING IS LIMITED: Please purchase your tickets in advance at Automata Arts 
$15 General
$12 Members/Students/Seniors

Call for abstracts: Mediating Modernity in the 21st Century – Rethinking and Remembering?

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This festival, taking place from the 24th-25th January 2013 in Bangalore, India,  organized by the Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore, India and the School of Arts and Communication, Malmo University, Sweden is inviting abstract entries till the 20th November 2012.

This festival brings together artists, academics, activists and other media and cultural practitioners to consider how modernity is mediated in the 21st century via a transdisciplinary framework. By bringing together a range of practitioners, the festival hopes to cross-­pollinate diverse perspectives through conversations on approaches, interests, understanding disciplinary trends and various methodologies.

Four types of presentation- papers, artist talks and audio visual presentations of artistic work, short films and performances – are invited under one of the following panels:

  • Gendering Modernities
  • Memories of Modernities
  • Modernities, Cities and the Public Sphere

For more information on the festival and further details on the call, click here.

Cultura21 is a transversal, translocal network, constituted of an international level grounded in several Cultura21 organizations around the world.

Cultura21′s international network, launched in April 2007, offers the online and offline platform for exchanges and mutual learning among its members.

The activities of Cultura21 at the international level are coordinated by a team representing the different Cultura21 organizations worldwide, and currently constituted of:

– Sacha Kagan (based in Lüneburg, Germany) and Rana Öztürk (based in Berlin, Germany)
– Oleg Koefoed and Kajsa Paludan (both based in Copenhagen, Denmark)
– Hans Dieleman (based in Mexico-City, Mexico)
– Francesca Cozzolino and David Knaute (both based in Paris, France)

Cultura21 is not only an informal network. Its strength and vitality relies upon the activities of several organizations around the world which are sharing the vision and mission of Cultura21

Go to Cultura21

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Cartographies Of Hope: Change Narratives

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Gallery DOX – Prague – Nov. 2012 to Feb. 2013

“In the last few years we have witnessed how the corrosion of the three main modes of social imaginary that defined modernity – the market economy, the public sphere, and the self-government of citizens – has reached a critical point. As a result, the increasing number of people in different fields, social scientists, artists, public intellectuals, and activists are calling for rethinking and reinventing social change. Such voices, however, are too often fragmented in their respective boundaries, and, consequently, they have not yet been able to articulate a compelling alternative metanarrative that the public would identify with and which would thus result in a major positive change.

The project Cartographies of Hope: Change Narratives was born out of the sense of urgency and the effort to address this situation. It seeks to bring attention to this condition and to call for joint effort to identify alternatives we can agree. The premise of the project is that narratives of social imaginary play a key role in generating positive changes. Social change is always seen as a certain story, which then becomes an important driver of the change itself. This double function of reflection and agency constitutes a methodological core of the project.”

More information on the project webpage

Cultura21 is a transversal, translocal network, constituted of an international level grounded in several Cultura21 organizations around the world.

Cultura21′s international network, launched in April 2007, offers the online and offline platform for exchanges and mutual learning among its members.

The activities of Cultura21 at the international level are coordinated by a team representing the different Cultura21 organizations worldwide, and currently constituted of:

– Sacha Kagan (based in Lüneburg, Germany) and Rana Öztürk (based in Berlin, Germany)
– Oleg Koefoed and Kajsa Paludan (both based in Copenhagen, Denmark)
– Hans Dieleman (based in Mexico-City, Mexico)
– Francesca Cozzolino and David Knaute (both based in Paris, France)

Cultura21 is not only an informal network. Its strength and vitality relies upon the activities of several organizations around the world which are sharing the vision and mission of Cultura21

Go to Cultura21

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Expressive Arts in Conflict Transformation & Peacebuilding, M.A. at the European Graduate School, Switzerland

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Applications are currently being accepted for the M.A. program in Expressive Arts in Conflict Transformation & Peacebuilding (EXA-CT) at the European Graduate School in Saas Fee, Switzerland.  EXA-CT is a low residency master’s program completed over three summer sessions of three weeks each in Switzerland.   During non-residency periods, students complete an internship and write their master’s thesis.

EXA-CT’s unique emphasis on art practice, human rights, and peacebuilding in international settings provides students with the skills and experience to use art in the public sphere for social change.  Artists, humanitarians, therapists, conflict transformation professionals, peacebuilders and policymakers are encouraged to apply.

2012 Summer Session Dates in Saas-Fee, Switzerland

June 12 to July 4: Expressive arts, digital arts, and media
July 10 to August 1: Expressive arts in conflict transformation and peacebuilding

US Federal Government student loans, and limited scholarships from the European Graduate School, are available for eligible EXA-CT students.

Applications are due by April 30, 2012

Late applications will be accepted on a case-by case-basis.  For more information, please contact the Interim Program Director, Prof. Ellen Levine (ellen.levine@egs.edu), follow us on Facebook, or visit the European Graduate School’s website:expressivearts.egs.edu

Program Description

The EXA-CT M.A. is a three-year low residency summer program concentrating on the use of creative methods through the arts to address conflicts within teams, in communities, and across cultures. The EXA-CT program provides students with frameworks for merging the arts with conflict analysis interventions, restorative justice, trauma awareness and healing, mediation, humanitarian response, and research. EXA-CT’s emphasis on art practice, human rights, and peacebuilding in international settings provides students with the skills and experience to use art in public settings for social change.

Distinguished faculty in the fields of the expressive arts and conflict transformation provide instruction during three summer school sessions, with continued support and supervision throughout the year as students complete their internship, thesis, and community of practice.

Summer residency in Switzerland

Students spend three summer sessions in residence in the beautiful Alpine resort town Saas-Fee, Switzerland. Students needing additional prerequisites may complete the coursework over five summer sessions.  Each residential session is 21 days long.  During the first two summer residency periods, students follow courses on the principles and practice of both expressive arts and conflict transformation and peacebuilding. Within each course, students are challenged to experiment with the application of the arts in conflict transformation and peacebuilding paradigms, along with group discussions and reflective exercises. During the third summer session, students complete oral and written exams, and defend their master’s theses.

Sample courses include:

  • Principles and Practice of Expressive Arts: Aesthetic Responsibility in Action
  • Conflict Transformation and Arts-based Approaches to Peacebuilding
  • Community Arts: A Collective Response to Conflict and Crisis
  • Project Design and Implementation in the Field: A Multi-System Approach
  • Conflict and Crisis Intervention: Human-Rights Perspectives
  • Building Resilience in Refugee and Displaced Communities
  • Trauma and Resilience: Expressive Arts Perspectives
  • Biography as a Resource in Humanitarian Interventions
  • Professional Ethics In Community Based Interventions

Non-residency requirements

In between the summer residencies, EXA-CT students are expected to complete a prescribed self-study plan, an internship, and a master’s thesis supervised by an EXA-CT faculty member. Students also participate in the design and creation of the EXA-CT in an ACTION group project and meet in a virtual classroom to discuss assigned readings and videos.

To receive a full description of the EXA-CT program, please visit: expressivearts.egs.edu/academic-programs/masters-programs/master-of-arts-in-expressive-arts-conflict-transformation-and-peacebuilding

For additional information, please contact Prof. Ellen Levine, EXA-CT Interim Program Director: ellen.levine@egs.edu

European Graduate School
Arts, Health & Society Division
Alter Kehr 20
CH-3953 Leuk-Stadt
Switzerland
T + 41 27 474 99 17
F + 41 27 474 99 18
expressivearts.egs.edu

via Expressive Arts in Conflict Transformation & Peacebuilding, M.A. at the European Graduate School, Switzerland | Art & Education.

The Slave Business and Its Material and Moral Hinterlands in Continental Europe

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Conference at the International Slavery Museum, Liverpool (UK), April 20-22, 2012

The history of transatlantic slavery is one of the most active and fruitful fields of historical research worldwide. As scholarship in this field is increasingly global, it opens up unique possibilities for international collaboration. More particularly, the most recent research which looks beyond the familiar Atlantic axis and the principal slave-trading nations has made clear the scope for new kinds of comparative and trans-regional studies.

The conference revisits a number of key themes relevant to the relationship between slavery (outside Europe) and the dynamics of (European) metropolitan society, giving specific attention to developments in Continental Europe and in particular to the German-speaking regions. These themes include the impact of the slave business on capitalist development and the development of discourses around slavery and abolition in the public sphere. Behind that there lie questions about private conscience – in the first instance about what was known and knowable about the implication of individual economic actors in one of the earliest globalised businesses.

By focusing our attention on regions which were physically and politically distant not only from the mines and plantations of the Americas but also from Europe’s ‘slave capitals’ like Liverpool, London, Nantes and Bordeaux, we hope not only to assemble new data and thereby better understand the material ‘reach’ of transatlantic slavery, but also to address wider questions about the ways in which location/space structures knowledge, values and interest by applying them to the particularly dramatic case of slavery in what are still seen as marginal places. How does the geographical status of ‘hinterland’ relate to conditions of economic and moral/discursive interchange?

The conference begins with a keynote lecture by Catherine Hall, Director of the UCL/ESRC project on British stakeholders in slavery and post-abolition compensation, and ends with a session on memory work in teaching, public art and public and community history.

Confirmed speakers

  • Sabine Broeck (University of Bremen): Bremen and the slave business: Notes on a Hermeneutics of Absence, and a Pedagogy of the Trace
  • Peter Haenger (Basel): Basel and the slave trade: from profiteers to missionaries
  • Dan Hopkins (University of Missouri at Kansas City): Julius von Rohr, an Enlightenment scientist of the plantation Atlantic
  • HMJokinen (Hamburg): The Slave Trader Heinrich Carl Schimmelmann and Cultures of Remembrance in Wandsbek: Vestiges, Myths and Protests
  • Craig Koslofsky (University of Illinois at Urbana): A German Diary of a Slaving Journey in the 1690s
  • Jochen Meissner (Humboldt University Berlin): Southern European and Latin American Responses to British Abolitionism
  • Kwame Nimako (University of Amsterdam): The Peace of Westphalia, Slavery and the Berlin Conference: A Continuum
  • Anne-Sophie Overkamp (Viadrina University, Frankfurt a.d.O): The German backcountry and the Atlantic exchange: The participation of textile merchants from the Wupper valley in the Atlantic trade, 1760-1810
  • Allan Potofsky (University of Paris-Diderot): Paris as Atlantic Hinterland, from the Ancien Régime to the French Revolution
  • Alan Rice (University of Central Lancashire): Chair / comment
  • Barbara Richiger (Cooperaxion – Bern): A Swiss database of slave-trade stakeholders
  • Alexandra Robinson (University of Liverpool): A case study of the Earle family’s Leghorn business 1751 -1808
  • Klaus Weber (Viadrina University, Frankfurt a.d.O): ‘All the Negroes cloathed with German Linen’: Central European Implications with the Atlantic Slave Trade, 15th-19th Centuries

Art Installation

  • HMJokinen, Gordon Uhlmann:  projection posthum: Heaven above Wandsbek – Guinea – St. Croix

Cultura21 is a transversal, translocal network, constituted of an international level grounded in several Cultura21 organizations around the world.

Cultura21′s international network, launched in April 2007, offers the online and offline platform for exchanges and mutual learning among its members.

The activities of Cultura21 at the international level are coordinated by a team representing the different Cultura21 organizations worldwide, and currently constituted of:

– Sacha Kagan (based in Lüneburg, Germany) and Rana Öztürk (based in Berlin, Germany)
– Oleg Koefoed and Kajsa Paludan (both based in Copenhagen, Denmark)
– Hans Dieleman (based in Mexico-City, Mexico)
– Francesca Cozzolino and David Knaute (both based in Paris, France)

Cultura21 is not only an informal network. Its strength and vitality relies upon the activities of several organizations around the world which are sharing the vision and mission of Cultura21

Go to Cultura21

Conference: Radius of art

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Berlin

8th – 9th of February 2012

The international conference „Radius of art: Creative politicization of the public sphere /Cultural potential forces for social transformation“ takes place in Berlin on the 8th and 9th of February. It puts artistic and cultural projects into the focus of of the political discourse. The purposeful choice of speakers and creative artists from all over the world as well as the contribution of renowned cultural foundations, promoters of culture and innovative approaches promise an inspiring exchange.

On behalf of Cultura21, Dr. Sacha Kagan collaborates with the Heinrich Böll foundation in the conception and coordination of the conference stream  “art toward cultures of sustainability”.

On the 8th of February 2012 at 7.30 p.m. an event open for the public takes place at the HBS Berlin.More information: click here

Furthermore, some sessions at the conference will be made available for the public at large through a live stream.

Further information can be found on the conference website: http://www.radius-of-art.de/conference/

Cultura21 is a transversal, translocal network, constituted of an international level grounded in several Cultura21 organizations around the world.

Cultura21′s international network, launched in April 2007, offers the online and offline platform for exchanges and mutual learning among its members.

The activities of Cultura21 at the international level are coordinated by a team representing the different Cultura21 organizations worldwide, and currently constituted of:

– Sacha Kagan (based in Lüneburg, Germany) and Rana Öztürk (based in Berlin, Germany)
– Oleg Koefoed and Kajsa Paludan (both based in Copenhagen, Denmark)
– Hans Dieleman (based in Mexico-City, Mexico)
– Francesca Cozzolino and David Knaute (both based in Paris, France)

Cultura21 is not only an informal network. Its strength and vitality relies upon the activities of several organizations around the world which are sharing the vision and mission of Cultura21

Go to Cultura21

Radius of Art Conference

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This post comes to you from Cultura21

Creative politicization of the public sphere – Cultural potential forces for social transformation

February 8th and 9th 2012 – Heinrich Böll Foundation, Schumannstr. 8, Berlin

The registration for the international conference „radius of art“ by Heinrich Boell Foundation has been opened: The number of places is very limited, and a selection process will take place.  If you wish to participate, please fill out the online registration at http://www.radius-of-art.de/conference/index-e.php (click on “registration”). The website has also more information about the conference.

Cultura21 is a partner of this event. Sacha Kagan is advising the Heinrich Boell Foundation for the conference’s thematic window “Art toward Cultures of Sustainability”. The conference’s other thematic windows are: “Art for Social Transformation”, “Public Art” and “Cultural Policy Strategies and Funding Structures”.

Cultura21 is a transversal, translocal network, constituted of an international level grounded in several Cultura21 organizations around the world.

Cultura21′s international network, launched in April 2007, offers the online and offline platform for exchanges and mutual learning among its members.

The activities of Cultura21 at the international level are coordinated by a team representing the different Cultura21 organizations worldwide, and currently constituted of:

– Sacha Kagan (based in Lüneburg, Germany) and Rana Öztürk (based in Berlin, Germany)
– Oleg Koefoed and Kajsa Paludan (both based in Copenhagen, Denmark)
– Hans Dieleman (based in Mexico-City, Mexico)
– Francesca Cozzolino and David Knaute (both based in Paris, France)

Cultura21 is not only an informal network. Its strength and vitality relies upon the activities of several organizations around the world which are sharing the vision and mission of Cultura21

Go to Cultura21

Artist Commission: Nils Norman – Loughborough University Arts

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“Public Workspace Playscape Sculpture Loughborough” is a prototype for an outdoor public play/workstation, composting unit, a roof planter, wifi-hotdesking area and rocket oven.

The design embodies 5 core concepts – play, organisation of the work place, DIY-eco design, defensive street furniture, and the public sphere. Creating an absurd prototype for a new kind of creative industry workstation, public sculpture and piece of street furniture. Expanding the work place into public space, conflating the modern factory space with the urban space of the public park.

As innovations in creative industry workspaces ape those of traditional public spaces: The Agora, the Market Place, the Street and Boulevard so too the privatised and enclosed spaces of the city and its various civic spaces: the Museum, the University, the Park, etc begin to reproduce the conditions and design of the factory. With gates, surveillance, controlled usage, prescriptive recreational areas and productive activity zones.

In order to capture and maximise those moments between work, those lost minutes having lunch,time-out, between class, walking home, weekends, cigarette breaks, family time… a new space and design is required to potentialise those seconds that are the elements of profit. Enclosing creativity and leisure, its activities and spaces, in order to harvest value.

Nils Norman has developed his own mix of art and activism, examining histories of utopian thinking and ideas on alternative economic systems that can work within urban living conditions.

Recent solo shows include;

Surrounded by Squares, Raven Row, London, 2009

Degenerate Cologne, Galerie Christian Nagel – Köln 2006

The Homerton Playscape Multiple Struggle Niche, City Projects – London 2005

Hey Rudy!: A Phantom on the Streets of Schizz, Galerie Christian Nagel – Berlin 2003

The Geocruiser, the University of Cambridge Botanic Garden and The Institute of Visual Culture, Cambridge – England 2001

Recent group exhibitions include;

It Starts From Here, De La Warr Pavilion – Bexhill on Sea 2007

Revolution is not a Garden Party, Galerija Miroslav Kraljevi – Croatia 2007

British Art Show 6, Newcastle (touring) 2005/6

50th International Art Exhibition Venice Biennale – Italy 2005

via Artist Commission: Nils Norman – Loughborough University Arts.

Braziers International Artists Workshop

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In a departure from its usual structure, BIAW 2010 will focus on organising a 2 day extravaganza open to the public on 21st and 22nd August 2010.

We present Supernormal – a one-off, non-commercial festival investigating the power of arts practice to reshape and reinvigorate the public sphere through
collective action.

16 artists will be selected to work with the co-ordinators over 14 days to create a brilliant fusion of art, music, film, conversation and fun, playing host to a hand-picked line-up of exciting artists and performers.

We are calling for artists who, conscious of the social, economic, environmental and cultural challenges we face in the 21st century, are open to working together in a sustainable and inclusive way to explore arts practice in the context of the public realm.

Deadline for receipt of applications: Monday 3rd May 2010

Braziers International Artists Workshop.

Tactical Biopolitics: a review.

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“How can we know for sure these days that the truck driver repairing his exhaust at the crossroads in your neighborhood is not a silent conceptual artist engaging you in a thought-through performative experience? ” asks Jens Houser in “Observations on an Art of Growing Interest,” part of the collection of essays in Tactical Biopolitics. An engaging overview of scientists as artists, artists as ethnographers, activists as sociologists, and women who do agility trials with their dogs as philosophers, Tactical Biopolitics presents the words and works of people who profoundly engage their ethics with their craft.

Largely centered around issues of biology and bioethics, the book often wades deep into the waters of scientific jargon and academic word-whirlpools. When it emerges into common reality, however, it does so resonantly. While artist Kathy High gives a factual breakdown of her reasons for working with a group of former lab rats (they were predisposed to have her same health issues), we get caught up in the story of the rodents, their namings and personalities. Donna J. Haraway manages to make us forget agility trials as a means to make dogs literally jump through hoops and see them instead as an exercise in human-animal communication.

The book emerged from a conference on BioArt and the Public Sphere at UC Irvine in 2005. It is, write editors Beatriz de Costa and Kavita Philip, “a hybrid, made possible by two recent histories: the enormously creative practices at the intersection of technoscience, activism, and art; and the explosion of cross-disciplinary conversations following Michel Foucault’s articulation of biopolitics.”

We see artists confronted with the ethics of working with living tissue, witness the affect racism has on modern scientific research, and learn of the evolution of activist’s tactics for getting AIDS medicine to patients who need it. We hear artists talking about life in labs, and scientist talking about the craft of ethical living. It’s a smorgasboard of modern ethical thought, of challenges to the definitions of professional fields. It’s fantastic reading for anyone interested in cross-disciplinary work. But largely, it is the story of people using the tools they have at their disposal to positively engage with an increasingly complicated and manipulated world. So while the authors featured in Tactical Biopolitics might not be the truck driver in your neighborhood, they are, like him, attempting to fix what’s broken.

Go to the Green Museum