Friday
PANEL DISCUSSION — DVORANA OHRID / 10 – 11:30 H
VALERIA GRAZIANO ~ moderator
SANJICA BURLOVIĆ ~ panelist
KAĆA KRSMANOVIĆ ~ panelist
KIKE ESPAÑA ~ panelist
Autonomous centers
A panel discussion about autonomous cultural centers and the possibilities opened by the innovative policy framework of civil-public partnerships.
In the last decades, a new breed of cultural institutions established itself as the cornerstone of emergent contemporary practices and new audiences. These new cultural hubs can be described in a variety of ways, including “from below”, “off”, and “independent.” Their animators engage in a wide range of ongoing activities, fostering worldwide connections while promoting research and productions, drawing in students and scholars, amateurs and artists. Sound and media art, experimental music, dance and performance, but also radio, design, citizens’ science and relational arts are only a few of the diverse languages and practices that cross them. By exposing new and varied audiences to the cultural tools required to understand the societal, technical, and environmental accelerations of our times, these independent cultural institutions create pathways to full citizenship and cultural democracy. Yet, institutional acknowledgement and support for these experiences is still lacking. The recently introduced “civic-public partnerships” is a policy framework that could help remedying this situation.
WORKSHOP I — DVORANA OHRID / 12 – 14 H
LYDIA CHATZIIAKOVOU & BILAL YILMAZ
Creative Craft Platform — Building Creative Communities and Networks around Crafts
In the context of their project Creative-Craft Platform, artist Bilal Yilmaz and curator Lydia Chatziiakovou aim to establish networks and communities of crafts and creatives in the post-industrial society. Based on an art-for-social-change approach, they design tools to create a collective dynamic archive of craft culture through participatory action research; offer a platform for creatives to think and take action on the potential of crafts; transform the creative cumulative actions to build a basis for authorities to introduce cultural craft policies; and document transformation of crafts’ know-how in the contemporary context.
The workshop will introduce Creative Craft Platform, the overall approach, background and experiences behind the project.
“Craft is a wedge that reveals stark distinctions within ideologies of taste and value. Craft polarises and collapses theoretical positions about what making means today. Craft is contemporary because it is the pivot between art and commerce, between work and leisure, between past and future. There is no such thing as ‘the contemporary’, and there is no such thing as craft. With all its complexities, with all its different registers of meaning across history, across class, across gender, across institutions, craft is all of these things, some of these things, none of these things.”
Julia Bryan-Wilson, “Eleven (Contradictory) Propositions in Response to the Question: What is Contemporary Craft?”, in Craft, ed. Tanya Harrod, Whitechapel Gallery, 2018, p. 68.
WORKSHOP II — DVORANA OHRID / 12 – 14 H
IVA ČUKIĆ
Governance models in common spaces
Bearing in mind all challenges and questions in regard to urban commons, the ambition with this workshop will not be to offer any definite answers to all of them, but to rather give an overview of possible perspectives and frameworks that will spark current and future debates on governance models in commons spaces. It will discuss potential spatial practices and governance models that can be examples of collective actions which are challenging the existing capitalist regime and power relations.
WORKSHOP III — DVORANA OHRID / 12 – 14 H
ARBA HATASHI & VULLNET SANAJA
Building Communities
In this workshop we will be looking at practical approaches to building active communities of cultural spaces through program design. We will be working in designing inclusive bottom up education and cultural programs that respond to the needs of the immediate communities surrounding the cultural centers. We will be exploring the relationship between spaces, communities and artistic tools and means that contribute to the democratization of cultural public infrastructure.
EVENING LECTURE — DVORANA OHRID / 16 – 17:30 H
BRANISLAV DIMITRIJEVIĆ
Beyond representation: art as a research-based social intervention
Although traditionally understood in connection to the notions of mimesis (imitation) and diegesis (narration), one feature of contemporary artistic practices is an attempt to go beyond this representational confinement. Also, instead of continually revising and reaffirming the very notion of “art”, in contemporary art there is a motion towards art understood as a social tool: instead of an inquiry into what art is, the weight is set on the question what can we do with it. However, if we simply narrow down artistic practices to their social functionality, the distinction between art and social activism may get indistinct, the artistic valorisation may become obsolete, and the notion of the autonomy of art could become redundant. This talk will address the question how to maintain art as an autonomous mode of thinking and acting without subsuming it to its representational role, and how to draft new models of cultural policy that would support emancipatory and research-based cultural processes.