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AWARD / PRIX COAL 2011

Description

The COAL Art & Environment prize was launched in 2010 by the French association COAL, the coalition for art and sustainable development, to reward a project about the environment by a contemporary artist.

The winner is chosen by a jury of personalities from the worlds of contemporary art, research, ecology and sustainable development, out of 10 finalists selected from an international call for entries.

The COAL Prize 2011, worth 10 000 euros, comes under the auspices of the french Ministry of Culture and Communication, the National Centre of Fine Arts (CNAP), and enjoys the support of PwC and a private benefactor.

Special mention : To mark 2011 the International Year of the Forest and promote entries on this theme in 2011, a second prize will reward entries that focus on forest issues.

Schedule

The application period closes on 30 April 2011.

The prize will be awarded in May 2011.

Environment

Today, environmental degradation represents a growing concern, covering a very wide field:

  • resource management and depletion: water, energy, waste…
  • crisis factors: system of production and consumption, pollution, demographics, land use…
  • environmental crises: climate change, rising water levels, loss of biodiversity…
  • conceptual framework: environmental law, shared assets, social justice, community harmony…

Jury and selection committee

The 2011 juryand selection committee are currently being assembled.

Are already confirmed :

Bernard Blistène, directeur du département du développement culturel du Centre Pompidou et directeur artistique du Nouveau Festival.

Dominique Bourg, philosopher;

Anne-Marie Charbonneaux, president of the National Centre of Fine Arts;

Patrick Degeorges, Biodiversity department, Ministry of ecology

Eva Hober, Art dealer;

Philippe Jousse, Art dealer;

Sacha Kagan, Founder Cultura21

Sylvain Lambert, PwC associate, sustainable development service

Laurence Tubiana, founder of the Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations(IDDRI)

Theresa Van Wuthenau, coordinatrice du réseau Imagine2020

Selection of entries

The entry selection criteria take stock of the artistic value, relevance (understanding the issues), originality (ability to introduce novel approaches, themes, and points of view), pedagogy (ability to get a message across, to raise awareness), a social and participative approach (engagement, testimony, efficiency, societal dynamics), eco-design, feasibility.

An artist’s specialisation on the environment is not a selection criterion. The aim of the prize is to encourage artists to focus on environmental issues.

An internationally renowned scientific committee

As part of the call for entries, COAL is organizing a meeting between artists and members of the scientific committee, with a view to providing tailored guidance. This scientific committee is made up of:

Edouard Bard, climatologist, Collège de France, science academy, CNRS

Nathalie Blanc, geographer, CNRS UMR LADYSS

Dominique Bourg, philosopher, IEP, UTT, member of the ecology watch committee of the Nicolas Hulot Foundation,

Denis Couvet, ecologist, MNHN, polytechnic,

Alain Grandjean, associate director, Carbone 4, member of the ecology watch committee of the Nicolas Hulot Foundation.

Coal prize award ceremony

The COAL Art & Environment Prize ceremony is a unique event held in a symbolic location, attended by the artist finalists and personalities from the world of art and sustainable development.

Entries by artist finalists are displayed to promote networking with bodies and authorities, which could facilitate the future realisation of projects.

Support for entries after the COAL prize

Beyond the award ceremony, the COAL prize is an opportunity to promote the entries and artists involved and to demonstrate the creative potential of fine arts with regards to the environment and related issues.

COAL fosters the networking of artists with scientists and stakeholders, and produces, encourages and promotes the numerous entries to the COAL Prize at exhibitions, events and commissions.

Application package

This should comprise the following documents, assembled in a single PDF file:

  • A Curriculum Vitae and artistic dossier;
  • A summary and illustrated description of the entry, detailing its artistic aspects and its relevance to the environment;
  • A note on the technical aspects of the entry, notably in terms of the construction and means of production;
  • An estimated budget.

Submission

Deadline 30 April 2011

All proposals should be submitted to the COAL FTP server at before 30 April 2011.

Particular conditions

By entering this competition, applicants expressly authorize the COAL association to publish, reproduce and display in public all or part of the elements of their entry, for any purposes linked to the promotion and communication of the COAL project, on all platforms, media, in all countries and for the LEGAL DURATION OF THE COPYRIGHT. Entries submitted but not selected will be held in the archives of the COAL association. They will, however, remain the property of their authors.

Participation in this call entails the full acceptance of the conditions laid out above.

Contact

COAL www.projetcoal.fr

For any further requests please write to contact@projetcoal.fr

AWARD / PRIX COAL 2011 : coal.

Design for the Other 90%

Of the world’s total population of 6.5 billion, 5.8 billion people, or 90%, have little or no access to most of the products and services many of us take for granted; in fact, nearly half do not have regular access to food, clean water, or shelter. Design for the Other 90% explores a growing movement among designers to design low-cost solutions for this “other 90%.” Through partnerships both local and global, individuals and organizations are finding unique ways to address the basic challenges of survival and progress faced by the world’s poor and marginalized.

Designers, engineers, students and professors, architects, and social entrepreneurs from all over the globe are devising cost-effective ways to increase access to food and water, energy, education, healthcare, revenue-generating activities, and affordable transportation for those who most need them. And an increasing number of initiatives are providing solutions for underserved populations in developed countries such as the United States.

This movement has its roots in the 1960s and 1970s, when economists and designers looked to find simple, low-cost solutions to combat poverty. More recently, designers are working directly with end users of their products, emphasizing co-creation to respond to their needs. Many of these projects employ market principles for income generation as a way out of poverty. Poor rural farmers become micro-entrepreneurs, while cottage industries emerge in more urban areas. Some designs are patented to control the quality of their important breakthroughs, while others are open source in nature to allow for easier dissemination and adaptation, locally and internationally.

Encompassing a broad set of modern social and economic concerns, these design innovations often support responsible, sustainable economic policy. They help, rather than exploit, poorer economies; minimize environmental impact; increase social inclusion; improve healthcare at all levels; and advance the quality and accessibility of education. These designers’ voices are passionate, and their points of view range widely on how best to address these important issues. Each object on display tells a story, and provides a window through which we can observe this expanding field. Design for the Other 90% demonstrates how design can be a dynamic force in saving and transforming lives, at home and around the world.

Design for the Other 90%: Cooper Hewitt Exhibition |About.

Sustainability and Contemporary Art Symposium Budapest

Sustainability and Contemporary Art: Hard Realities and the New Materiality
Central European University Budapest
2-6pm 26 March 2009

Janek Simon, Niszczarka

Janek Simon, Niszczarka

Since the last symposium on Sustainability and Contemporary Art held at CEU in February 2008, which took as its subject the Operaist dilemma of ‘Exit or Activism?’ and examined Paulo Virno’s idea of ‘exit’ as the ultimate form of resistance, the world has witnessed an intensifying fight for resources under the Arctic, the rocketing of food and oil prices, the Russian gas crisis, and the systemic failure of international financial institutions. These ‘hard realities’ have caused a switch from concerns of immaterial labour to recognition of the ‘new materiality’ of current circumstances.

This recent turn has been addressed by theorist Slavoj Žižek, who notes that while in the last decades it was ‘trendy to talk about the dominant role of intellectual labour in our post-industrial societies, today materiality appears in an almost vengeful way in all its aspects, from a future struggle for ever-diminishing resources (food, water, energy, minerals) to the degradation of the environment.’ The 2009 edition of Sustainability and Contemporary Art therefore brings together artists, theorists and environmental activists to investigate the implications of ‘hard realities’ and ‘new materiality’ for political action, artistic theory and practice, and sustainable living in the 21st century.

SPEAKERS

Marina Grzinić, Sustainability and Capital

Marina Grzinić is a philosopher, artist and theoretician. She is Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, Institute of Fine Arts, Post Conceptual Art Practices and a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy in Ljubljana. She is a founder of Reartikulacija (Ljubljana) and recently published the book Re-Politicizing art, Theory, Representation and New Media Technology.

Tamás St.Auby, The Subsistence Level Standard Project 1984 W.

Tamás St.Auby was born in 1944 and lives in Budapest. In 1968 he founded IPUT (International Parallel Union of Telecommunications). He was censored for his artistic radicalism, promotion of art strikes and questioning of ideology and forced to leave Hungary in the mid-1970s. Since returning from Geneva in 1991, St.Auby has lectured at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts.

Tadzio Müller, It’s economic growth, stupid! On climate change, mad-eyed moderates and realistic radicals

Tadzio Müller lives in Berlin, where he is active, after many years of being a counterglobalist summit-groupie, in the emerging climate action movement. Having escaped the clutches of (academic) wage labour, he is currently writing a report about ‘green capitalism’ for the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, and otherwise doing odd translation jobs. He is also an editor of Turbulence – Ideas for Movement

www.turbulence.org.uk

Janek Simon, How to Make a Digital Handwatch at Home

Janek Simon was born in 1977. Studied sociology and psychology at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow. His artistic activity began around 2001. He is author of interactive installations, videos, objects. Simon takes inspiration from computer games, Internet and the archive (in its multiple meanings).

Sebastjan Leban, Silent Weapon of Extermination

Sebastjan Leban is an artist and theoretician from Ljubljana. His artistic practice involves the collaboration with Stas Kleindienst, the group Trie and the group Reartikulacija. He is one of the editors of the journal Reartikulacija and has exhibited in numerous national and international exhibitions, participated in many symposiums and lectures and published texts in several different publications.

Alina Asavei, A Sustainable Aesthetics: Contextual and Ethical Beauty

Alina Asavei is from Romania and currently she is a PhD candidate in Aesthetics (Department of Philosophy, Central European University, Budapest). She works principally in the areas of social philosophy, cultural studies, art and disability, the politics of aesthetics, forms of artistic engagement during and after totalitarian regimes. She published articles in the domain of Art History, Aesthetics and Social and Cultural History.

Alan Watt, Sustainability in the Face of Hard Reality

Alan Watt is a lecturer in environmental philosophy and the development of environmental thought at the Department of Environmental Science and Policy at Central European University.

Maja and Reuben Fowkes The Environmental Impact of Contemporary Art

Maja and Reuben Fowkes are curators and art historians who deal with issues of memory, ecology and translocal exchange.  They have curated and written extensively on the issue of contemporary art and sustainability.

http:// www.translocal.org

The programme of the Symposium on Sustainability and Contemporary Art is devised by Maja and Reuben Fowkes (Translocal.org) and co-organised with the Department of Environmental Sciences and Policy and the Centre for Arts and Culture at Central European University.

For further information and booking details please see the project website:

www.translocal.org/sustainability