From Spring 2021, Scottish Sculpture Workshop (SSW) will be working with artist Jack Tan on a Fieldwork to develop new ideas and approaches to how arts organisations can be governed and run, through sculpture and performance making.

Jack will facilitate a series of workshops at SSW, in which an invited diverse group of SSW’s community stakeholders will practice ceramics, blacksmithing and bronze casting in tandem with exploring SSW’s policy, legal and constitutional documents. Together they will create what Jack calls “policy performance scores”, which will be tested and performed in the day-to-day running of SSW.

‘Performance scores’, like music or dance scores, are a set of instructions that detail gestures, sound, speech and/or movements, that are interpreted by a performer to produce performance art. ‘Policy performance scores’ are performance scores that prescribe the gestures, verbal articulations or movements of corporate bodies, such as companies, associations or charities.

Working with Jack and the skilled technicians at SSW, participants will learn to mould metal, while for example, discussing what conditions are necessary to mould and train employees. The group may attempt to understand risk management through making and repairing large hand-built or Raku-fired ceramics. The process of shaping hollow moulds in bronze casting could inform how an organisation can define and fill organisational voids through recruitment of human (or more-than-human) resources.

By working together to form a workshop-boardroom counterpoint, Devising Governance seeks to bring together organisational knowledge, material knowledge and collective decision making.

The project will culminate in the integration of the groups’ policy performance scores with SSW’s Staff Handbook, alongside a public presentation.

About Jack Tan

Jack Tan (UK) uses law, social norms and customs as a way of making art. He creates performances, sculpture and participatory projects that highlight the rules that guide human behaviour. Jack trained as a lawyer and worked in civil rights NGOs before becoming an artist. Recent projects include Four Legs Good (2018) a revival of the medieval animal trials for Compass Festival Leeds and V&A London; his Singapore Biennale presentation Voices From The Courts examining the vocality of the State Courts of Singapore (2016), Law’s Imagination (2016) a curatorial residency at arebyte exploring legal aesthetics; his solo exhibition How to do things with rules (2015) at the ICA Singapore; and Closure (2012), a year-long residency and exhibition at the UK Department for Health looking at the liquidation of their social work quango.

Jack’s Ph.D at Roehampton University explored legal aesthetics and performance. He will be co-editing a special issue of the Law & Humanities journal in 2022 on art-law practice and processes. Jack has also taught sculpture at the Royal College of Art and University of Brighton, politics at Goldsmiths and is a tutor in ‘Law as Art’ in the New School of the Anthropocene. Jack is based in Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland. Read more about Jack’s practice on his website: http://www.jacktan.net/

Corneous Stories is an interdisciplinary and intergenerational artistic research project that asks the question “What do we see if we look at society and history through nail care and cosmetics?” 

Corneous Stories reveals surprising links between different work regimes, migrations, genders, social classes, identities and their aesthetic coding, as well as connections of the chemical, film, auto and war industries with forced labor, exoticism, marginalization and racism. Departing from an artistic research and art collective initiated in 2018 in Berlin (n * a * i * l * s hacks facts fictions), Corneous Stories opens up and further develops towards a sedimentary historical experience from the Southeast European perspective. 

At the intersection of methods of artistic research, artistic production and pedagogy, as well as humanities and social research approaches, the aim of Corneous Stories is to create through a collaborative and collective practice, different formats of participation, representation and transfer of knowledge. The project thus includes a fieldwork research phase led by Katja Kobolt, a four months transdisciplinary research with and by students of various faculties (in the frame of ŠIPK program), four creative workshops with highschool students, new local and international artistic productions, an international group exhibition with a discursive program and a collective publication. 

The project is being developed within the European project Be Part and will be presented to the public at the 26th International Festival of Contemporary Arts – City of Women (Ljubljana, October 2020).

Anna Karasinska is a Polish artist and dramaturg. She focuses more on creative processes than outcomes, and she will present a site-specific project during Santarcangelo Festival 2022. The performance is realised as one of the fieldworks within BE PART – Art BEyond and takes place at the abandoned Buzzi-Unicem, an immense cement factory on the outskirts of Santarcangelo. It will result from a process of mutual discovery, without a precise inspiration – originating from the exchange and the work with the performers – but bearing the traces of this evocative space. Anna will accompany a group of non-professional performers on a path to find a way of sharing their lives and experiences through the artistic language, people who are ready to get involved without being afraid of being seen.

Working through Covid-19

Group photo of URB 20 festival’s young curators (from left to right): Walle Kiikeri, Niko Wearden, Simeoni Juoperi, Ria Andrews, Sasu Koivisto.
Photo credits: Finnish National Gallery / Petri Virtanen

The third of four international assemblies taking place across Europe as part of the project Art Beyond Participation – BE PART (2019–2023) is hosted by VIERNULVIER in the framework of the festival OPENBARE WERKEN in Ghent, Belgium. OPENBARE WERKEN is a surprising journey of discovery in which artistic practices intertwine with the city, its periphery and its inhabitants.

Difficult times call for well-thought-out curatorial and organisational strategies. More than ever, there is a need for horizontality, shared leadership, co-creation and imagination. For this edition of OPENBARE WERKEN we put our heads together with a host of artists, colleagues and partners to come up with a challenging and diverse programme. In doing so we kept the values of transparency, reciprocity, sustainability and respect at the forefront of our minds.

With this festival we are interested in exploring ‘the public’, in the sense of both the audience and the public space. We are guided by the following questions:

How do we as artists form a community in the current societal context, which threatens to destroy any trace of a collective dynamic? In doing so, how do we involve the widest and most diverse possible audience?

How can we as artists reclaim pseudo-public spaces, and how do we turn our stages into public places of encounter, difference and protest?

How do we ensure that the arts sector itself becomes more inclusive and that all voices have their place in the broader public debate?

The program of the festival presents several public events, including fieldwork-presentations by Vincen Beeckman, ATLAS, Elly Van Eeghem and Mara Oscar Cassiani. As part of the International Assembly a workshop of Cards On The Table hosted by Sophie Hope and Henry Mulhall and a meeting of the ten project partners that will continue working on the protocol on which a more equal (re)distribution of power between organisations, artists, and communities could be based in the art world and the cultural sector at large hosted by the critical network (Marwa Arsanios, Lotte van den Berg and Roland Gunst) is happening.

OPENBARE WERKEN is organized by: VIERNULVIER, de Koer, Manoeuvre, CAMPUS Atelier, Villa Voortman, Kunsthal Gent, Rest for the Wicked and CAMPO – with the support of: KASK School of Arts, LUCA School of Arts, Jong Gewei, Kunstenplatform PLAN B, Walpurgis, Trage Wegen, Boerderie/Hof te Nieuwenhove Zarlardinge and Design Fest Gent.

More information about the program can be found here.

VIERNULVIER has selected three young participants from its community: Adel Khelifi, Andy Sarfo & Chryssoula Zerva to follow, monitor and report back on the research project How To Be Together, one of the fieldworks hosted by Santarcangelo Festival.

During the project a temporary camp by a community of 50 participants will investigate possible forms of togetherness and new relational geographies.

How To Be Together sounds like a question obsessively asked by the pandemic crisis in 2020, which deeply atomized the social fabric by emptying public spaces, relegating them to the sphere of forbidden desire and confining bodies into the private and individual sphere. Aware that collaborative practices can overthrow the critical scenario generated by the current neoliberal system, the village aspires to become a place for creating alternative scenarios, an exercise in worldmaking, a speculative act allowing to transform the cacophony of the present into the chorus of a unison. The camp is conceived as a turbine of multiple voices, bodies and perspectives, an imaginative site to cultivate and accelerate possible responses to current, urgent questions.

The aim of the report is to bring back critical perspectives of younger people on these questions of togetherness back to VIERNULVIER in Ghent, Belgium.

In unexpected places around Marseille, Moun Fou engages with “voiceless” citizens who are excluded from political debate to create festive and poetic performance events. Artistic expertise and community engagement work together towards a common goal.

The Rara Woulib collective makes public space in Marseille an arena for interactions and experiments that have given rise to four “artistic initiatives” over the past year. The latest is an event created during the Festival de Marseille 2019 and open to all: local residents, homeless people, the underprivileged, artists, etc. This unique, off-the-beaten-track community initiative forms the basis for Moun Fou, involving a core group of diverse actors who travel around the city bringing local populations on board. This unique initiative will ask questions about community life, our relationship with others, the role of artists in society, and the sharing of knowledge and experience beyond social barriers. 

Theatre / dance / music

Production Cie Rara Woulib Coproduction Festival de Marseille ; Lieux Publics, centre national de création en espace public (Marseille) ; In Situ, Plateforme européenne de création en espace public ; BE PART – Beyond Participation : un projet européen pour la co-création avec les citoyens En collaboration avec Festival d’Aix-en-Provence En dialogue avec Le Carillon de Marseille ; Equipe MARSS : Mouvement et Action pour le Rétablissement Sanitaire et Social (APHM) ; Association des Marseillais Solidaires des Morts Anonymes ; Habitat Alternatif Social ; Alternative à l’Incarcération par le Logement et le Suivi Intensif ; Le Lieu De Répit ; Habitat Alternatif Social : « Maison Relais Claire Lacombe » (APHM) ; CoFoR, Centre de Formation au Rétablissement (APHM) ; Pôle Psychiatrique Centre (APHM) ; Membres de l’équipe du CMP Belle de Mai (CH Edouard Toulouse) ; Arpsydemio, Association de Recherche en Psychiatrie et en Epidémiologie ; SAMSAH, Service d’Accompagnement Médico-Social pour Adultes Handicapés / France Handicap 04 ; Les Groupes d’Entraide Mutuelle : Les Nomades Célestes, LEO (Lieu d’Échange et d’Ouverture / dépend de l’association S.A.R.A : Service d’accueil et de reclassement des adultes), Sentinelles Egalités ; L’Unafam, Union Nationale des Familles et Amis de Personnes Malade et/ou Handicapées Psychiques ; Boutique Solidarité Belle de Mai ; Nouvelle Aube

Show dates, place and prices: TO BE CONFIRMED

The ATLAS Collective brings together fifteen artists, critical thinkers and cultural workers from Belgium. ATLAS is their platform where socially engaged and collaborative art practices are discussed in the context of specific sites and audiences as well as changing power dynamics and political shifts. In a time of worsening working conditions, ATLAS offers the space for artistic work and reflection, shared meals, and having fun together with curators, young artists, students and cultural workers.

ATLAS is co-created by May Abnet, Leontien Allemeersch, Dominique Collet, Evelyne Coussens, Akın Fatih De Vos-Şahan, Elly Van Eeghem, Samah Hijawi, Marieke De Munck, Niké van Os, Chris Rotsaert, Andy Sarfo, Lieselot Siddiki, Michiel Soete, Robin Vanbesien and Matthias Velle, always in collaboration with local partners and artists.

In the framework of BE PART ATLAS is one of the fieldwork projects at viernulvier.

The Rural School of Economics is a travelling classroom to connect and share local knowledge made in rural communities across Europe for now. The classes happen in the same places that rural culture and economies are made: in small workshops, in kitchens, in fields, in streets and in village halls.

The Rural School of Economics is multilingual, intergeneration and trans-local. It connects communities who might be far apart, but who are working on similar issues. Everyone involved is both a learner and a teacher. It’s powered by mutual knowledge exchange, cultural co-production and everyday economies.

The Rural School of Economics was set up by Kathrin Böhm and Wapke Feenstra from Myvillages.

As part of BE PART the school opened a Community Making Space and introduced Lumbungsden at Scottish Sculpture Workshop. More information about the Rural School of Economics in Lumsden can be found here.

Visiting performance In the Name of Love is an artistic work co-created with a local group of Latvian people who identify as LGBTQAI+ and who have lived a queer life in Riga during different political eras. The process of making the work is an investigation into how LGBTQAI+ people experience private moments in public space and how these experiences can be transformed into a performative situation of taking ownership of one’s own image. In the Name of Love invites you to experience a transit from safe distance to close proximity with strangers over a course of 4 days in several locations in Riga. The audience participate in the show with their presence. The event takes place at three different spots in the Vidzeme Market. The viewers are invited to move between them and scan the QR at each location with their phones. The location’s map and additional information will be provided on site.

How can we establish a new system to define the value of the objects that surround us? Guči fabrika is an investigative durational performative exercise, a joke, an unproductive production chain, a poor gift shop, a performative party where we investigate how to build a fabrika that can become an alternative production space with other working conditions and that can generate a product without apparent commercial value. It seeks to reflect on concepts such as value, cost and labor conditions in a system of mass production, and also proposes to investigate barter or exchanges instead of the use of money. The invitation is to be part of this exercise where production, materials and labor routines will be put in check, in search of understanding how to transform the vision associated with the product, value and collective participation.

Following a first experience in the form of an experimental workshop as part of the Art and Education program, the French-British choreographer and dancer Andrew Graham is in residence from March 2022 to October 2023 at L’art Rue.

It encourages children from 7 to 16 years old to invent new forms of solidarity through dance. Together, amateurs, semi-professionals, disabled, non-disabled and with various dance experiences, they experiment using the articulation of the individual body as well as the movement of the group in space.

The line figure, as a group formation in a certain space, allows to explore the diversity of its individuals, its experiences, its imaginary and its body. Hand in hand, the line allows us to connect, to be complementary and to evolve together in the space. This form is also a playful way for young people to explore issues of complementarities and to allow each person to find his or her authentic dance in a supportive and caring group.

How to be oneself while belonging to a group? How to be a group in the diversity of its bodies? So many questions that are raised in this workshop of research and experimentation, but also and above all of encounters and exchanges.

Graham presented a first step of work during Dream City 2022, the final performance will be presented during Dream City 2023 in Tunis (TN).

In the framework of the festival Openbare Werken hosted by VIERNULVIER in April 2022 the collaborative work Publiek Plan Gent N°1 (‘Public Plan Ghent N°1’) was made. Initiated by Elly Van Eeghem a question­naire was sent out to a group of people who, like herself, had been in­volved in the ‘Stadsatelier’ of VIERNULVIER, which supports artistic work about and in the city.

Where do you find public water?
Where are you unwanted public?
Which private space should become public (again)?
…

With these fellow artists, cultural workers and partici­pants, Elly Van Eeghem looked into the ‘publicness’ of the city’s public places. What are the shared beloved or less beloved places, and why?

Publiek Plan Gent N°1 is a mapping of various meanings of ‘the public’. The plan re­mains unfinished and can be completed by whoever holds it. During the festival various plans were gathered and assembled into one gigantic cartographic patchwork. It was walked on, sat on, discussed by and lived by the attending public. Later on, the XL-plan travelled through the city for further conversation on public space with involved city officials.

With contributions by: May Abnet, Peter Aers, Simon Allemeersch, Vincen Beeckman, Dominique Collet, Evelyne Coussens, Katinka De Jonge, Marieke De Munck, Fatih De Vos, Maarten Devrieze and truckers of 22 Herz Hotel, Jorik De Wilde, Ewout D’hoore, Renée Goethijn, Roland Gunst, Paoletta Holst, Naomi Kerkhove, Arnold Reijndorp, Andy Sarfo, Jaco Sette, Michiel Soete, Peter Vanden Abeele, Danielle van Zuijlen, Anyuta Wiazemsky, de Koer, CAMPUS Atelier, Manoeuvre and students of KASK School of Arts.

Concept and graphic design: Elly Van Eeghem

Copy editing: Evelyne Coussens

Proofreading and feedback: Leontien Allemeersch, Marieke De Munck, Evelyne Coussens, Jos Coussens

Translation: Jonathan Beaton

With the support of: VIERNULVIER, KASK School of Arts Ghent, BE PART – Art BEyond PARTicipation -, the Creative Europe programme of the European Union

Dr Sophie Hope will make a qualitative evaluation of the entire project through the development of 10 Social Art Maps created at the end of a selected fieldwork project. Social Art Map is a method for facilitating and capturing multiple, contrasting experiences of socially engaged art. By bringing together artists, participants, collaborators, curators and commissioners around a long piece of paper, participants trace the diverse experiences together of the beginnings, middles and ends of a process.

During these evaluative workshops, Dr Sophie Hope will encourage honesty and diversity of opinion, acknowledging there are different interpretations and perspectives around the table. These maps help share that there is no single way of commissioning, curating and carrying out this kind of work, and help to create transparancy within the fieldwork processes. The qualitative evaluation will be approached with curiosity and sensitivity – acknowledging that there are forms of cultural engagement that may be hidden and just not visible through more traditional data gathering efforts.

sophiehope.org.uk

Zoe Laureen Palmer is an artist, co-creator and human ecologist working at the intersection of the arts, health + ecology.

Her award-winning work spans live performance, installation, text + participatory events and has been programmed across the UK and internationally. Her regenerative practise explores our relationship with the more than human world, centering underrepresented narratives + knowledges through a decolonial lens. Currently she is exploring collective dreaming methodologies, care, reciprocity + future rituals.  A gentle beekeeper for 15 years, Zoë is cultivating an afrofuturist apothecary – a part real part speculative british african herb garden in response to climate breakdown.

The trajectory of Zoe is one of the fieldworks hosted by Artsadmin. Her project What Shall We Grow Here? will explore biodiversity in the area around Toynbee Studios.

Within the framework of the Tunisian Queer Play project initiated by the Mawjoudin Association in April 2021, the Tunisian director and playwright Essia Jaïbi is invited to develop a theatrical creation during two writing and dramaturgy residencies of one and two weeks in November and December 2021 at L’Art Rue.

This project, the first of its kind in Tunisia, is an attempt to approach Queer as a culture, a movement, an orientation through a theatrical creation, based on a Tunisian reality and which will develop through a process of research, writing and fictional creation.

A co-production of the Mawjoudin Association and L’Art Rue, and co-financed by the Drosos Foundation.

Hospitality is a reciprocal gesture, one where both the host and guest have to collaborate on both explicit and implicit rules of engagement.

Artist Jennie Moran and her nomadic cafe Luncheonette come to Toynbee Studios for a three month residency from September to December 2022 to lead an enquiry into how hospitality works at the hearth and heart of our home – the Artsadmin Canteen.

Jennie Moran (she/her) is a Dublin-based artist who uses her practice to create opportunities for hospitality. She has gathered knowledge through a degree in sculpture at the National College of Art and Design; international residencies at NES Iceland, Fondazione Ratti, Italy and Galleria Blanda, Buenos Aires, and through her ongoing hospitality business/ art project Luncheonette, Dublin.

In the framework of BE PART Artsadmin hosts the fieldwork project Say Yes to Who or What Turns Up by Jennie Moran.

www.jenniemoran.com

For the co-creative project Splendid, which ran from 2018 to 2022, photographer Vincen Beeckman worked together with the residents of Ghent’s Zuid neighbourhood (Belgium). Beeckman visited them to share coffee and cake and to gather countless stories, memories and anecdotes. Based on these conversations he wrote poems, collected photographs and took some of his own.

He brought all this together in a book of the same name, which gives a modest insight into the diverse neighbourhood. The book Splendid will be presented together with a walk through the neighbourhood as part of the festival openbare werken 2022.

For the book, Beeckman collaborated with Meindert Peirens (design/drawings).

AiR: Artist in Residence is a unique residency pilot project and employment contract for one artist to join Artsadmin from September 2023 – August 2024 for a year of deeply-embedded artistic research within our team and the local communities of East London.

The AiR pilot emerged as a response to feedback we had been hearing from artists for a long time about the inequity between salaried arts workers and precarious freelancers, as well as a desire to invest in deep, collaborative and ethical relationships with the diverse communities that live and work in and around our local area. AiR is a very specific opportunity, for a UK-based artist whose work is primarily performance-based, collaborative and live, who has an active interest in the communities local to East London, and an established approach to working with people that is rooted in mutual respect and ethical collaboration.

AiR: Artist in Residence wants to support long-term deep artistic research, building sustainable trusting relationships within the diverse communities that live and work in the Whitechapel, Spitalfields, Aldgate areas; and in supporting an artist with the kind of contract that allows them the time to develop collaborative practice and research, and allows us to form a relationship with them at the same time.

After a lengthy and considered selection process the artist Abel Holsborough is selected as the Artsadmin AiR: Artist in Residence for 2023 – 2024.

Read more about AiR here.

QUEEREEOKÉ is a project born out of love for a good show, singing and bonding over a night full of self-expression. Danny Banany and their friends are using the format of karaoke to redefine a fabulous party night with self-empowerment by blurring the lines of audience and artist, but also to provide a space where expressive queerness is central and real – and not a marketing gag.

QUEEREEOKÉ is one of the fieldwork projects hosted by Homo Novus Festival. On Friday the 8th of September 2023 they hosted in collaboration with members of the Baltic Drag King Collective the Symposium Closing Party of the International Assembly IV in Riga.

Bebe books questions if there can be a queer temple. As Sarah Ahmed wrote, “Space is not a container for the body: it does not contain the body as if the body were ‘in it’/ Rather bodies are submerged, such that they become the space that they inhabit.”

If they suppose a temple for queer bodies, its shape and function must have been formed by the queer bodies that it encompasses, while it will queer those bodies spontaneously. Bebe books decided to call this The Off-temple: A temple that is not aligned. During Santarcangelo Festival , they will construct a prototype of The Off-temple using our queer bodies as a form of collective and hands-on speculation for ten days.

The construction of Off-temple is the practice of the commons, involving uncountable queer hands stacking bricks, making embroideries, holding one another, and performing rituals. They anticipate The Off-temple to be a carrier bag built at an architectural scale. Through the porous brick wall, it will sense global precarity and absorb queer bodies and their vulnerable stories. The Off-temple will be soon filled with their emotions, relations, and interactions, and will let stories emerge. Bebe books gathers the crumbles of the queer history articulated in ambiguous and fragmented languages, sew their edges together, and create a patchwork. The Off-temple will become a symbol of this formation and narration of history while resisting the temptation for scale and spectacle.

The Off-temple is one the fieldworks hosted by Viernulvier and was on view during Santarcangelo Festival 2022.

CREDITS

Concept: Bebe Books
Structure design and construction: Every Island
Costume Design: Mark van Hoek

This project was generously supported by Viernulvier Gent and the Flemish Government Department of Culture

What Shall We Grow Here? will explore radical kinship with nature, looking at biodiversity in and around Toynbee Studios.

Planting is a practise in dreaming based on the belief that future generations will be around to reap the harvest. With this in mind, What Shall We Grow Here? is an open space to envisage what we might grow, both literally and metaphorically, to support our inner and outer gardens.

Transform your love into a piece of art!

Scout Wölfli and Danny Banany (DE) are teaming up with the Baltic Drag King Collective and other local artists for the ultimate musical exploration experience in a pop-up art studio. Bring your favourite song or sound and let the team guide you through the depths of your own love of music. Feel free to express it any way you desire: You can sing, remix, record, draw, write or just deep talk about it, but it’s all about your own experience and dedication.

How deep is your love? is presented at Homo Novus festival 2023. More information can be found here.

Using core themes from their performance ‘Western Society’ the Gob Squad will run a 6-day workshop, approaching each day sharing different strategies for co-creation, guiding participants through social tasks; walking, cooking, karaoke, rituals, slideshows and storytelling, all framed by the concept of ‘wrong families’ and notions of collectivity, to queer the images of the hetro-normative family and celebrate the families we choose.

Wrong Families runs during Homo Novus festival 2023 within the framework of the Symposium and International Assembly IV. Every day from Wednesday, September 6 to Saturday, September 9 at 17:30, the Gob Squad Festival School will have a public debrief at the Festival Centre. Join the team as they process the day’s events and give us an insight into their collective process. More information can be found here.

Elly Van Eeghem works as an artist on the imagination of urban development and the co-creation of public space. For six years, she did research in the streets, presented documentary shows in vacant buildings, set up local neighbourhood workspaces and built public installations, together with diverse residents. The entire working process is reflected in her book (Dis)placed interventions: Making public space in urban landscapes (2019).

In an intimate lecture performance, Elly brings the book to life: she talks about the slow start of each participatory project, about the many surprises along the way and about what is left behind when the work seems to be finished.

The performance is intended for a small audience: a maximum of 10 people sitting around the table with Elly. From students and professionals in urban planning, the arts or community work to those interested in inspiring forms of cooperation.

With few means, Elly transforms the classroom, meeting room or living room into a place that turns out to be bigger than we thought.

(Dis)placed interventions – Table performance from elly van eeghem on Vimeo.

Tastoe by Leentje Vandenbussche is a question and search game with drinking mugs. Join us and we’ll print your profile picture on a mug! Every week a one sympathetic multiple-choice question was asked via Whatsapp. “Do you prefer blue, yellow or green? A Blue, B Yellow or C Green.” The answers on these questions were presented with mug towers at a window in the street. Thus, passersby discovered the faces that make the neighborhood unique and #tastoe players find out something small but nice about each other.

Tastoe is one of the fieldworks hosted by viernulvier.

How do we understand where we are through listening? Witness Stand is an unlikely place to listen. Across a city, in water bodies, restricted and forgotten sites, Witness Stand Rīga is an invitation to gather and listen together to works that respond to the ancient, recent, and future stories of the city. On a series of bespoke seating tiers extending from the Beach at Bolderāja to the ancient Oak at Sarkandaugava, seated alongside local musicians and poets, audiences will experience a series of specially commissioned works from across the communities of Riga.

Together, we direct our gaze towards sites of contestation, cultural potency, and sites for celebration, listening towards the future:

Daugavgrīva beach, witnessed by music bands “Alejas” and “Toms Vītiņš & Uģis Vītiņš”, poet Fyodor Dzevaltovsky

Vanšu bridge, witnessed by harpsichord player Ieva Saliete and poet Ilmārs Šlāpins in honor of the 40th anniversary of Vanšu Bridge.

Former radio jamming towers, witnessed by sound artist Andris Indāns and poet Sergei Timofeyev.

An old Oak tree, witnessed by kokle player Laima Jansone and poet Agnese Krivade. 

Benches in the Great Cemetery, witnessed by composer Olesya Kozlovska and poet Elvīra Bloma with live music performers Jāni Frīdenfeldu (trumpet) and Sarma Gabrēna (cello).

Former Central Committee of the Communist Party, witnessed by Jēkabs Nīmanis, Maksims Šenteļevs together with poet Inga Gaile and audience.

In Desire Lines, artist Maarten De Vrieze looks at the cultivated landscape. With a concrete mixer behind his bicycle, he undertakes actions along the way, meeting people and listening to their stories, in a landscape in full change. Along the way he discovers what often remains invisible: walking lines that tell us something about how we experience shared spaces.

Maarten gathered all the experiences in the urban landscape, stories of people, photographs, maps, drawings, internet links to audio and video fragments into a publication. In this way he shares his views on society and on his artistic practice, layered in quotes as well as in reflective essays. This publication, ‘newspaper’, frames his nomadic process and is grafted on Desire Lines in the form of a handout for the people that he met during his interventions. The publication can be read here.

Desire Lines is one of the fieldworks hosted by Viernulvier.

Maarten De Vrieze worked in factories as an electro-mechanic and autonomous designer, traveling the world on his bicycle before becoming an artist. He then studied Autonomous Design at KASK Ghent and collaborated with various artists and collectives such as Haider Al Timimi, Simon Allemeersch and Lucinda Ra. The research he undertakes as an artist relates to the everyday “being” of man within a larger whole. Through film documentaries, public space interventions, exhibitions and scenography, he makes tangible which dominant forms of power remain invisible, and how this shapes society.

In the framework of BE PART he works on the fieldwork Desire Lines hosted by viernulvier.

I think we need to talk is an interactive performance with lots of wool and few words. You are invited to find a place in the pink wool universe that unrolls before your eyes. In this collective experience, you literally knit a story about connection. Through a pink thread, Collective Elan(d) moves, interweaves and knots generations together.

Prior to the performance, an open studio takes place in the public space or in a community or cultural center. These workshops are conceived and carried in collaboration with Manoeuvre. Many hands continue to build this pink universe. By knotting, crocheting and finger crocheting together, an entirely new woolen sculpture is created, which grows throughout the entire tour. Each studio leaves its own imprint. Herein, process and encounter are central.

I think we need to talk is one of the fieldworks hosted by Viernulvier and was presented during the International Assembly III in Ghent, Belgium.

CREDITS

Made by: Katrijn De Cooman, Chloé Geers (research) Carli Gellings & Jitse Huysmans
Play: Katrijn De Cooman & Jitse Huysmans
Coach: Seppe Baeyens & Benjamin Vandewalle
Production/co-creation: Collectief Elan(d) & Manoeuvre atelier
Co-production: workspacebrussels, C-takt, viernulvier, 30CC, STUK, Kunstencentrum BUDA & DURF2030
Support: City of Ghent and The Flemish Government
Thanks to: De Grote Post, KAAP, De Brakke Grond, Veerman, Het Paleis, CAMPO and all the chance passers-by or participants during work in progress/open studios

Scottish artists Neil Callaghan and Simone Kenyon are spending six weeks in Aizpute, Western Latvia creating an audio work with local people from across generations. Responding to and working within Misiņkalna parka estrāde where the woodland meets the remnants of an outdoor theatre space. This is a contemplative work that explores how we individually experience place and what we can learn from other perceptions, ways of seeing and imagining.

Guxxi Fabrika is a sarcastic and ironic exercise: an unproductive production chain, a performative party during which the collective investigates how to build an alternative fabrika, creating products without apparent commercial value. Guxxi Fabrika challenges the concepts of value, cost and the working conditions within the capitalist system, proposing barter instead of using money. This adventure began in Riga in 2021, during Homo Novus Festival as one of the fieldworks in the framework of BE-PART, stemming from the desire to experiment with a project in total creative freedom. Piazza Ganganelli will host Guxxi Fabrika for the entire duration of Santarcangelo Festival. The public is invited to participate however they wish: they can choose to help the performers prepare materials to create new accessories, try their hand at cutting and sewing by following set patterns to realise their own projects, or simply negotiate to obtain something. Creativity and generosity are always appreciated, but no money is accepted: only an exchange of objects and experiences. By contributing to the activities, participants will meet stories and people, understand the origin of their surroundings and, in the repetitiveness of mechanical work, become performers of The Guxxi Fabrika.

The collective is composed of four women of different ages and professions – Cote Jaña Zuñiga, Klinta Šinta, Anta Pole and Marta Rubene – whose aim is to question traditional models and visions by proposing political and social alternatives based on fun, in the belief that having fun while working is a right. Two of the members have children, and the other two have dogs; three team members live in Riga and one in Berlin. They speak several languages, including Latvian, Italian, English and Spanish. They enjoy working together, in silence or with music, and most of the team loves the same kind of music: 80s rock and big hits.

More information can be found here.

Eszter Nemethi (1987, Budapest) is a theatre maker, curator and researcher. She is interested in the space between people, contexts and ideas and creating structures (practical, dramaturgical and spatial) that can be inhabited by others.

Coming from a background in documentary theatre, over the last years Eszter has been developing a site-responsive practice of reading ‘border metaphors’ and the liminal spaces of border zones in collective ways, trying to both highlight and queer the narratives constructing them. This often combines play, pedagogy and reading as methodologies, inviting the audience to activate and inhabit the work. She is interested in exploring the relation of public spaces and border zones in the way in which they are sites of the emergence of narratives of communities regarding themselves.

The trajectory To Be What We Are by Eszter Nemethi & Claire Murphy is one of the fieldworks hosted by Cork Midsummer Festival.

Par Hasard Collectief was created in 2020 as a two-legged non-profit organization of three people based in Ghent, Belgium. On the one hand, Par Hasard makes work (theater) from text, image and sound. In its own work, Par Hasard Collectief always tries to question reality in a playful, funny and strongly verbal way. The collective also runs a Platform through which it curates the work of young talented artists. The Platform takes the form of a tour through the work of colleagues we always reach through an open call. They connect their own work to people, people to each other; and make the connections between their work and colleagues, out of faith in each other and out of a curiosity about the other. Par Hasard Collectief searches and rooting frantically, thinks along, makes, shows, shares and is in this way an active player in the cultural landscape.

Par Hasard Collectief is runned by Mira Bryssinck, Fred Libert and Laura Vroom.
In the framework of BE PART they collaborate with Manoeuvre on the fieldwork Zet U! hosted by viernulvier.
Discover more about their work here.

Can a club be considered an entire habitat of diversity? According with their own poetry of the “unity in the raveology” and crossing it with the power of the traditional elements of the ball groups, Mara Oscar Cassiani co-creates a group dance with a crew from Santarcangelo. It is a way to celebrate identities and diversity: the group dance becomes the tuner and the choreographic sign of union of our stories and bodies. We will dance together again!

Be Water, My Friends is one of the fieldworks hosted by Santarcangelo Festival. The project was presented during the International Assembly III in Ghent, Belgium and International Assembly IV in Riga, Latvia.
More information can be found here.

No matter how different you are, We are a whole habitat of diversity. 

Danced by the wind, touched by the water, fed by the clouds.

We will wear many different colors and live together in the same dance.

Maybe, We can move without you, but we can dance better with you. 

Crossing the paths, sharing our stems, 

Danced by the wind, touched by the water, fed by the clouds. 

Hugged  by a leaf, touched by the bees, danced by the drops, watched by the sky, we’ll look extra fly

We will be Water, We will be River, We will be the same Dance. 

We may have no Shape, but we may also have the same Shape.

We will be Different, but we will also be Equal.

We will be separated, but we will be united.

If you put the water in a cup, the water becomes the cup.

If you put the water in a cup, the water becomes the cup.

If you put the water into a dance, the water becomes a dance. 

Water can flow, Water can split. Be Water, My friends.

Magical protection and herbal cure mixed with evocative music and soaring vocals as well as apparitions and strawing traditions; this is the digital artwork Day of the Straws, created by artist Marie Brett in collaboration with writer Katie Holly and in dialogue with historians, people of faith, spiritualists, Elders and other interested members of the community.

Join us for a specially made film screening about Day of the Straws with interviews from the creative team and community drawn from across Cork county and beyond. Also sample the Day of the Straws online artwork in situ. This is an experience to be remembered, a response to the collective healing of hope required in these unprecedented times.

All activities are in adherence to current Covid-19 government guidelines.

Please see a full length interview with artist Marie Brett and Curator Miguel Amado (Director of Sirius Arts Centre) in the latest edition of Visual Artists Newsheet.

Day of the Straws is commissioned by Cork Midsummer Festival, in partnership with SIRIUS.  Day of the Straws is part of BE PART, a project created with the support of the Creative Europe programme of the European Union and The Arts Council.

selma banich is an artist and an activist. Her socially engaged art practice is grounded in explorative, process-oriented, and activist work, and is politically inspired by anarchism and feminism. She has worked independently and in collaboration with other artists, curators, groups, and initiatives in the Balkans, Europe, and the US. She has participated in numerous dance, theatre, and opera productions as a choreographer, and has also performed on film. She participates in local and transnational solidarity initiatives in relation to the ongoing feminist, anti-fascist, migrant, and workers’ struggles. Currently, those initiatives are Zagreb Solidarity City, Transbalkan Solidarity and For BREAD. Selma banich has been bestowed several professional merits in Croatia and Slovenia. Together with the Women to Women (2020) and Sloga (2021) collectives, she received the Nada Dimić Award.

As part of BE PART she collaborated on the fieldwork trajectory Politics of Touch hosted by City of Women.

ATLAS is an artistic and social laboratory that unites a collective of artists, critical thinkers and cultural workers. This temporary collective works around four central themes of the European project BEPART: power dynamics, collective policy, redefining the public, and the significance of a particular place. 

Their collaborative practice consists of two components:

• a book of mappings
• and a multimedia happening based on these mappings.

In turn, the practice also generates new mappings for the book.

ATLAS Teaser from Kunstencentrum Vooruit on Vimeo.

1. ATLAS is a book
   an ever-transforming document

ATLAS is a collection of mappings, a document that unites and makes visible a multiplicity of existing participatory practices, linking these with other artistic work, social initiatives of resistance and reflection on their layered meanings.

The point of departure are the participatory artworks that have been slowly taking shape in recent years, through the support of the Arts Centre Vooruit (Ghent, Belgium). The intention is not to create an exhaustive overview, but to document this evolving experiment of collaborative artistic and social practices. The aim of ATLAS is to make this work known to new

audiences and, in the context of the European project BEPART, to link it with artistic and social projects from other countries/contexts. ATLAS is a reflective tool that we hope will inspire cultural programmers, young makers, curators, students, etc. to re-think about the art and social engagement at a time when cultural practices have been confronted with very challenging conditions of working and producing.

In addition to this, ATLAS is an interactive and multidisciplinary artwork in itself: it has no fixed form but is an ever-changing blend of drawings, photos, sketches, mind maps, essays, poetry, lists, field notes, cartography and more. It is a visual and associative artist book that is continually added to and modified. ATLAS will land in 2023 at the closing symposium of BEPART in Riga, Latvia.

2. ATLAS is a multimedia happening
   a dynamic activation of its mappings

ATLAS is a like a guide book that calls for being embodied in performative, audio, text and visual outcomes. ATLAS develops in every collective encounter of the group. The meetings in different cities take place in relevant contexts with local initiatives of resistance, artistic and social. Each context breathes life and informs the practices and questions of the group. Action, reflection, poetry and participation will meet seamlessly in a multimedia and modular live event accessible to both local and international audiences in different cities where it is being organized.

Cypher by Ridha Tlili is the result of a meeting and an artistic residency lasting several months which began in October 2020 and continued until the end of 2022. The first stage of work was relocated in the city of Sidi Bouzid in the South-West of Tunisia. The meeting is between the independent filmmaker and producer Ridha Tlili with a group of young breakdancers from his hometown.

This project saw the birth of a performance and a short film with the participation of five young breakdancers. The video projected during the performance is divided into two parts: archival images representing the personal memories of the dancers (their city, the events that marked them); and images filmed during the residency. Mixing breakdance, contemporary dance, theatre and cinema, Cypher is a poetic encounter and an intense choreographic narrative. A strong work that was shown in the form of a work in progress in Sidi Bouzid on December 17, 2020 for the 10th anniversary of the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouaziz, an event which triggered the Arab Spring. The Tunis performance is set for February 2021.

In a second stage of work at the end of 2021 and during 2022, Ridha Tlili’s residency continued in the city of Sousse with the integration of breakdancers.

In February 2022, the Tunisian dancer and choreographer Mohamed Toukabri, who was introduced to dance through breakdancing at the age of 12, trained the dancers of Ridha Tlili’s Cypher project in the technical aspects of dance and will make his expertise as a choreographer available to the project. After training at P.A.R.T.S and performing with several international companies, Mohamed Toukabri has been developing his own choreographic path for several years. His first piece, The Upside Down Man, has been selected for the 2019 TheaterFestival in the #NewYoung category.

Zet U! is an auditory research into the elasticity of empathy. In collaboration with Sam David and with coaching from Wederik De Backer and Marieke De Maré, we move into the world of the podcast. Throughout six podcast episodes we meet someone whose life is marked by empathy; we meet a firefighter, an actor, a person living in poverty, an escort, someone with autism spectrum disorder and a young person.

Zet U! is one of the fieldworks hosted by Viernulvier and was presented during the International Assembly III in Ghent, Belgium.

CREDITS

Concept, text and play: Laura Vroom, Mira Bryssinck & Fred Libert
Coaching: Wederik De Backer
Dramaturgy: Marieke De Maré
Audiomontage: Sam David
Live music: Simon Raman
Technology: Lennert Boots
Decor: Manoeuvre
Production: Fred Libert
Co-production: viernulvier & Manoeuvre
With the support of: the City of Ghent and Villa Voortman
Thanks to the authors

As part of BEPART project activities, City of Women and Ljubljana Puppet Theatre have
joined hands in 2020 for the production of a participatory performance, currently entitled Vse
je v redu (Everything Is All Right) and scheduled for premiere in October 2021 at the 27 th City
of Women festival.

The performance is going to be directed by dancer, performer, choreographer, and teacher
Nataša Živković, and co-authored by Teja Reba and Tea Hvala. Preparations for this exciting
creative process began in October 2020 at the Krušče Creative Center residency where Nataša
Živković and Tea Hvala formed the artistic team. Among others, it includes director’s
assistant art pedagogue Sara Šabec, scenographer Urša Vidic, and musicians Neža Dobrovoljc
and Niki Lapkovski.

Between February and October 2021, the artistic team is going to collaborate with eleven
high-school students selected at an audition. Together, they are going to explore the unspoken
dimensions of schooling known as the “hidden curriculum” by asking: what else, besides the
things written in textbooks, did we learn in school; which knowledge and habits got under our
skin there so much that we no longer notice them; how would school classes look like if we
observed them from far distance, as if watching a film without sound or subtitles? And finally,
what kind of schools do we want?

What is the use of imagining? To build representations of the world, of relationships, of oneself. To multiply scenarios and possible alternatives. To escape from the tyranny of the now-here, to criticize it, to overthrow it. […] The imagination, however, is cultivated, trained, nourished, and when this does not happen it atrophies, becomes passive, discouraged. A person, a group, a people without imagination is automatically the victim of those who control the images for them. This is why imagining above all means doing politics.
– Matteo Meschiari, The great extinction. Imagining at the time of the collapse

How To Be Together is a research project investigating possible forms of togetherness and new relational geographies through a cohabitation experiment in a temporary camp by a community of 50 participants: an eco village that will appear like a summer mirage. The transformation of space was born as a real gesture of regeneration entrusted to the architect Matteo Ascani.

How To Be Together sounds like a question obsessively asked by the pandemic crisis in 2020, which deeply atomized the social fabric by emptying public spaces, relegating them to the sphere of forbidden desire and confining bodies into the private and individual sphere. Aware that collaborative practices can overthrow the critical scenario generated by the current neoliberal system, the village aspires to become a place for creating alternative scenarios, an exercise in worldmaking, a speculative act allowing to transform the cacophony of the present into the chorus of a unison. The camp is conceived as a turbine of multiple voices, bodies and perspectives, an imaginative site to cultivate and accelerate possible responses to current, urgent questions.

The participants will work in groups of 10 people, openly sharing visions and practices, supported by a facilitator that will accompany the workflow: starting from individual practices and experiences, we will try to formulate possible answers and collective actions. During this process, the question How To Be Together will widen and slowly shift to What can be done together that we could not do otherwise?

Each group will investigate How To Be Together starting from a specific perspective:

• Space Commoning: the spatial dimension as a ground to generate new postures and relations. Facilitated by Jozef Wouters and Bart Van den Eynde.
• Communication as a magic ritual: looking at communication as a ritual and a space-time opening able to channel invisible presences. Facilitated by Lotte Van Den Berg and Peter Aers / Building Conversation.
• More Than Human Ecosystem: investigating how we can be together with other beings, possible and impossible, unspeakable relationship with other species and presences in a more systemic and haunted Reality. Facilitated by Cristina Kristal Rizzo.
• Aesthetic and politics: the transformative power of art to trigger political change or create alternative political grounds. Facilitated by Riccardo Benassi.
• Wilderness as alternative knowledge: how to unlearn codes and behaviours by giving in to the power of children. Facilitated by Valentina Pagliarani and a group of 7 children.

Besides facilitators and participants, the camp will cross the artistic community of the Festival, constantly opening itself to the city, its people and the surrounding landscape, like a porous organism looking for impossible osmosis. The entire process will be constantly documented and monitored thanks to a team of young reporters from VIERNULVIER in Ghent.

MORE INFORMATION

Watch the live talk during Santarcangelo Festival about the project here.

CREDITS

A project conceived and curated by Chiara Organtini, Silvia Bottiroli, Frederik Le Roy, Sodja Lotker, Annalisa Sacchi, Enrico Casagrande and Daniela Nicolò – MOTUS

Organized by Santarcangelo Festival in collaboration with DAS Theatre in Amsterdam, KASK & CONSERVATORIUM School of Arts in Ghent, Haute École La Manufacture in Lausanne, Prague Performing Arts Academy, and Iuav – Theatre and Performing Arts in Venice

With support from BE PART art Beyond Participation, Embassy of the Netherlands, General Representation of the Flemish Community and the Region of Flanders, Muncipality of Ghent

Mara Oscar Cassiani is a wifi based visual artist who works in the field of performance, choreography, digital languages, ritual clubbing. Their research is centered on the creation of a contemporary visual iconography, in which new languages and rituals are borrowed from the world of the internet, memes, trans queer avatars, underground subcultures and from the brutal capitalism imagery. The relationship they maintain with their audience, in an expanded dimension – both live and mediated – is explored through those visual imaginaries, open space set ups and live streaming made up for stimulating the awareness of the discontinuity between visions, reality and the conscience of the user. A global snapshot, a “visual fast food” between kitsch, raw rituality and apocalypse.

In the framework of BEPART they works on the fieldwork Be water, my friends at Santarcangelo Festival.

SSW Community Making Space opens its doors with the Lumbungsden* project launch by Myvillages

Please join SSW as they open their new Community Making Space and introduce Lumbungsden, the collaborative project with artists Myvillages and their ongoing and multi-local Rural School of Economics.

The day will celebrate a new community making space for Lumsden, which will be shaped by local interests and groups over the coming 6 months. The programme, look and future development are to be decided by everyone who wants to share creative ideas and activities with the wider community.

The space is set in the former bakery shop front and most recently the SSW office, with a large window to the road, a small tea kitchen and areas for making and socialising. Until June 2023 the space will be a test site for a broad range of ideas from the local community and groups.

What will happen on the day?
1pm -7pm – Come along for tea and cake and take a look around the new space. What could happen here? What would you like to do or see? Find out more about our plans for running the space and how you can be part of it. As the night begins to draw in we will switch the SSW lights on and celebrate this new space together.

Myvillages describes *Lumbungsden:
“Lumbungsden” merges “Lumsden” and “Lumbung” . “Lumbung” was the motto for the 2023 documenta, one of the most influential international art events that takes place every 5 years in Kassel, Germany. “Lumbung” is an Indonesian term and means “shared rice barn”. The word was introduced by the collective Ruangrupa, the curatorial team behind this documenta. Sharing art, community and food was very important, and we want to continue “Lumbung” by bringing the motto to Lumsden = Lumbungsden.

SSW would especially like to thanks the funders who support and have made the Community Making Space possible: Aberdeenshire Council, Bently Foundation, Creative Scotland, Hugh Fraser Foundation, Kildrummy Wind Farm Community Benefit Fund and Foundation Scotland, William Grant Foundation and William Syson Foundation.

The programme is supported by BE PART, co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union. As well as Collective Architecture, Coldwells Building Company, Jane Robertson and the SSW team.

Mother and daughter visual artists Julie and Annie Forrester will lead a series of engagements with traveller families, exploring relationships and connections with local environs and with Cork Midsummer Festival’s cultural programmes. Over this time they will also explore with the families potential barriers to arts participation, using a series of critical questions that focus on “How can the festival be more accessible and welcoming for people from the Traveller community?”

Leanne McDonagh, a visual artist from a Traveller background will join the project as guest artist and adviser.

Beginning in February these activities are currently taking place remotely, with plans to move into socially distanced walks with the artists and a family group in March and April.  Once restrictions have eased the plan is to move into indoors workshops, visits and trails during May until July.

Annie Forrester is an illustrator and multi-disciplinary artist focused on capturing the magic and mundanities of daily life. Her drawings are fed by current social and political climates in Ireland, as well as nature and interconnectivity between peoples, landscapes and creatures.

Julie Forrester is a visual artist whose research based practice is concerned with the connective tissue that binds us to place.  She often works collaboratively where memory, habit and association are explored through a variety of process based approaches, from drawing to sound work, lens based media and the moving image.

Award-winning visual artist, teacher and Traveller woman Leanne McDonagh’s work features in both private and public collections nationally and internationally.  She is currently working on a % for Art public sculpture, the RTÉ Art project Illuminations and recently illustrated Why the Moon Travels of folktales written by fellow Traveller, Oein De Bhairduin, the first of its kind in Ireland.

This project is funded by The Community Mental Health Fund, supported by the Department of Health, the Creative Europe programme of the European Union, The Arts Council, Springboard Family Services, Cork Midsummer Festival and Cork City Partnership.

The artistic collective of the Politics of Touch project consists of Aber Gendy, Ana Lora, Ivana Lukić, selma banich, and Slavica Duričić. Contributing to the collective was also the recently deceased Mirjana Učakar. In collaboration with Ana Dana Beroš and Saša Nemec as well as women from many parts of the world who today call Ljubljana, Logatec and Zagreb their home.

As its theoretical starting point, the project uses the book ‘Politics of Touch: Sense, Movement, Sovereignty’ by Canadian theorist, political philosopher and artist Erin Manning, in which she explores the concepts of violence, gender, sexuality, security, democracy and identity. The author maps the ways in which touch informs the body, highlighting movement as an intervention of the sensory (body) in the political.

Politic of Touch created the ‘Erased Gazes’ protest canvas memorial. It was collectively made at workshops devised and run by selma banich, through collaborative research and workshop work they encouraged the exchange of experiences, knowledge, skills, ideas and resources, with the aim of strengthening ties between artistic, feminist and migrant communities in a local and transnational context. These workshops took place between July and December 2022 in Slovenia and Croatia.

Step into an alternative economy! Orient Express Yourself by Dafna Maimon is a participatory performance where the audience can buy portion of falafels from a food truck using personal experiences of family relations or of patriarchal society as payment. The price of a portion varies from 15 to 299 words, depending on questions asked by the salesperson. The conversation between customer and salesperson is transmitted via microphone to other customers, transforming the personal into a commodity. The society forming in the restaurant and its critical space can be empowering, although simultaneously emphasising the commercialisation of the private as one of capitalism’s strategies in the experience and commodity market.

The work is inspired by Orient Express, the first kebab and falafel restaurant in Helsinki, founded by Maimon’s family in the Forum shopping centre in 1985. Orient Express Yourself was first implemented at Lilith Performance Studio in Malmö in 2017.

The performance Orient Express Yourself was part of the URB22 festival program hosted by Kiasma.

Natural Contract Lab was founded in 2021 by artist Maria Lucia Cruz Correia in collaboration with a multidisciplinary group, including Marine Calmet (environmental jurist), Brunilda Pali (restorative justice), Lode Vranken (architecture/philosophy), Vinny Jones (sensory scenography). With the confluence of the Tejo River Margarida Mendes (research/sonic guidance) joined the collective in 2022.

Together they develop a body of care, as  water carriers searching for new forms of water justice through practices of reciprocal care, such as walking-with, water governance and stewardship, River Agora’s hearings, restorative justice  and grief circles, somatic and audio scores and other actions that move along with the water’s flow and its communities.

PARADE is a realist ballet. The 18 performers of the company L’Autre Maison parade through fabricated scenic dimensions, in which situations of disability, migration, gender and identity are upset. With references to Music hall, cabaret reviews, circus and Queer ballrooms, the 18 performers from L’Autre Maison company perform a futuristic parade in a very Marseille style.

Readaptation of the surrealist ballet, PARADE by Cocteau, Picasso, Satie, Massine for the Ballets Russes is a repertoire work, key in the initiation of the avant-garde art movements. A strange paradox that has sparked for the choreographer Andrew Graham the desire to reclaim this ballet in a parade that imagines futur modernities. The dancers set themselves out on stage on frictions of bodies, sounds, words, objects, propelled by the musician Martin Poncet, visual artist Mounir Ayache, dramaturg Béatrice Pédraza and choreographer Andrew Graham. A historic ballet as a pretext for the emergence of new forms and values, where differences between dancers entwine, generating connections bolstered by the richness and complexity those differences provoke.

Rope is a giant rope that travels the world, creating an unexpected bond with the people who meet it, who welcome it into their homes, into their neighbourhoods, who live with it. Rope was born in the frame of a previous European project in Belgium and Italy.  The Festival de Marseille extends and develops a new form to this project involving a larger network of partners among local communities during two years.

Rope is a handmade rope that is 60 metres long and 28 centimetres in diameter, and weighs 180 kilos. Although Rope represents only an impenetrable and elusive part of reality, its very presence is enough to grasp the world differently. Rope is part of a series of works that Ief Spincemaille calls social sculptures: disproportionately large objects with no intrinsic value that, when interacting with a given social context, take on new meanings and shed new light on their surroundings. After having crossed Marseille in August, a shorter Rope will continue to travel around Marseille and keep a travel diary on his blog with the help of the cocreators.

A participative project in collaboration with the Estaque nautical base, les Rameurs de Marseille, the Parc Kallisté 1 and 2 primary schools, ADDAP13, the Kallisté La Granière social centre, Coco Velten, La Cloche, Groupe SOS, l’Après M, the Grand Saint-Antoine social centre, Foresta, Alliance savinoise, l’association des locataires de Font Vert and l’association Dihya… Accompanied by IRTS and VOST Collectif.

Samah Hijawi is a multi-media artist (a painter, a performer, an astrologer, a story teller, a researcher and an academic, a cook—it’s up to you to decide). Regardless of the form through which she materializes her work, her projects are always deeply rooted in historical narratives which are used to re-imagine our contemporary life outside of the radicalized and polarized discourses that direct our lives today. In her recent project Kitchen. Table., she researches the movement of food practices over time and across geographies, and the body as a site of food memory. The research materializes in food map posters and performative dinners that map out the stories and spectacular trails of migration of plants, herbs and spices—to unfold the politics of the food on our tables.

Alongside the food research is an on-going project called the Aesthetics of the Political, an exploration of how a political position is embedded in the aesthetic choices in an artwork. This research has materialized in many forms (performances, podcast, curated program) and is also developed as a learning program for art students who are engaged with social and political issues in their work.

In the framework of BE PART Samah continues her research as one of the fieldworks of viernulvier.

The publication STADSATELIER – 10 years of artistic practices in and with the city gathers a series of reflections on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of STADSATELIER. Get lost in the cartopological map or dive into the field guide with a collection of Do It Together’s and some in-depth texts. 

STADSATELIER by VIERNULVIER supports artists, collectives, and partner organizations with a strong social commitment. Human interaction and co-creation are the main artistic strategies here. These practices are also transformative: they encourage critical reflection and offer new perspectives for action.

The map visualizes the ecosystem of STADSATELIER in a subjective, poetic way. You will discover locations where artistic practices and public actions have taken place and continue to do so. You will encounter statements from residents or passersby, as well as quotes from artists and policymakers. The map also includes some principles that are applied, mottos that are used, and important lessons learned or insights gathered.

In the field guide, you will find some in-depth texts written by artists, collaborators, and witnesses. They are not exhaustive but provide a glimpse into what has happened. Additionally, you will find the Do It Together’s, a series of imaginative contributions from artists and partner organizations. Let them inspire you and get involved!

Contributors: Peter Aers, Simon Allemeersch, Rasa Alksnyte, May Abnet, CAMPUSatelier, Evelyne Coussens, Maria-Lucia Cruz Correia, Marieke De Munck, Elly van Eeghem, Samah Hijiwai, Sarah Késenne, Menzo Kircz, Bauke Lievens, Christophe Meierhans, Chiara Organtini, Elien Ronse, Maarten Soete, Robin Van Besien, Kunstenplatform PLAN B, Kunsthal Gent, de Koer, KASK Projectweek, Manoeuvre, Rest for the Wicked, Robbert & Frank Frank & Robbert and School of Love.

“Leave the door open for the unknown. The door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself come from, and where you will go.” – Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

The publication was presented on the 6th of September 2023 with ATLAS: The Publication Party! This launch took place as part of the International Assembly IV of the Creative Europe network BE PART hosted by the Homo Novus Festival in Riga, Latvia. Soon, there will also be a local presentation; more information will be available at www.viernulvier.gent!

STADSATELIER – 10 years of artistic practices in and with the city is published in Dutch and English and is available at the VIERNULVIER ticket desk or during one of the STADSATELIER-activities.