Re-Imagining Socially Engaged Art Building New Ecologies in a Planetary Crisis

Summer School of the Innovative Training Programme FEINART

23. – 24. September 2022

The Summer School invites researchers, curators, practitioners, artists and advanced students at the Master level and PhD candidates to participate in two days of intense discussions and exchange. During this two-day event, developments and theoretical approaches emerging around Socially Engaged Art will be discussed and reconsidered.


In times of multiple planetary crises, it is essential to fundamentally re-explore the human relationship to the world and to gain a new understanding of the human/non-human condition. Worldwide there is a growing need for places of alternative theoretical and practical work where new epistemes, new forms of living together in solidarity and new social infrastructures can be explored. Facing these developments, artistic practice also takes on a new role. Building on Socially Engaged Art practices, new alliances beyond the field of art have emerged; economists, anthropologists, sociologists, and artists collaborate in search of self-determined forms of coexistence and modes of collective production and engage with practices of care, new commons, interdependence, and radical imagination.


Against this backdrop, theorists, artists and experts from Africa, Asia and Europe will shed light on recent theoretical and institutional developments and explore the role of socially and politically intervening art in times of climate emergency, dangerous geopolitical shifts, and mass migration. The focus will be on questions of institutionalisation and forms of organisation, experimentation and knowledge production in Socially Engaged Art.


Speakers, workshop contributers and artists are:

Fahyma Alnablsi, Massimo de Angelis, Maria Hlavajova, Elke Krasny, Nomusa Makhubu, Marina Naprushkina, Ahmet Öğüt, Carolina Rito, John Roberts, Christoph Schäfer, Lara Scherrieble, Caique Tizzi, tryniti, Karen van den Berg, Jeanne van Heeswijk, Yet Chor Sunshine Wong, Mi You

Feinart Summer School
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Schedule

In four lectures, discussion panels, and five parallel workshops, activists and internationally renowned experts invite participants to take part in workshops on the topics of collective learning, institution making, community building and local knowledge production, self-governance and commoning, as well as exploring social ecologies.


Check-in and Registration

Thu | 17:30-19:00

Fr | 8:15-9:00


The Summer School takes place at the Zeppelin University, Friedrichshafen (Germany), Fallenbrunnen 3, Graf von Soden Forum


More information concerning your journey

Friday 23rd September 2022

08:15 - 09:00 CEST

Check-in and Registration


09:00 

Public Opening by Karen van den Berg & Rahel Spöhrer


09:30 – 10:45

Keynote by Elke Krasny (Academy of Fine Arts Vienna)

Mourning an Exhausted Planet. On Care, Healing, and Futurity in Eco-Social Art Practices


10:45 – 11:30

Discussion Circles


11:30 – 11:45

Coffee break


11:45 – 12:00

Little Pieces: Messages from the Field I


12:00 –13:15

Keynote by Carolina Rito (Coventry University)

The Infrastructures of the Exhibitionary: Re-Imagining the Epistemic and Aesthetic Functions of Art Spaces


13:15 – 14:15

Lunch Break


14:15 – 15:00

Discussion Circles


15:05 – 15:35

Little Pieces: Messages from the Field II


15:35 – 16:00

Break


16:00 – 19:00

Workshops Part one

Workshop I: Critical Pedagogy & Collective Learning (with Ahmet Öğüt & Fahyma Alnablsi)

Workshop II : Instituting Otherwise (with Maria Hlavajova & Jeanne van Heeswijk)

Workshop III : Community Building & Local Knowledge (with Christoph Schäfer)

Workshop IV: Self-Governance & Commoning (with Massimo de Angelis, Marina Naprushkina & Mi You)

Workshop V : Exploring Social Ecologies (with Elke Krasny & Yet Chor Sunshine Wong)


19:00 – 20:00

Apero and Exhibition Tour


20:00 – 22:00

Concept Dinner with Caique Tizzi


22:00 - 24:00

DJ-Set by tryniti

Saturday 24th of Semptember 2022

09:00 – 12:00 CEST

Workshops Part two

Workshop I: Critical Pedagogy & Collective Learning (with Ahmet Öğüt & Fahyma Alnablsi)

Workshop II : Instituting Otherwise (with Maria Hlavajova & Jeanne van Heeswijk)

Workshop III : Community Building & Local Knowledge (with Christoph Schäfer)

Workshop IV: Self-Governance & Commoning (with Massimo de Angelis, Marina Naprushkina & Mi You)

Workshop V: Exploring Social Ecologies (with Elke Krasny & Yet Chor Sunshine Wong)


12:00 – 12:45

Lunch Break


12:45 – 13:45

Panel Discussion: Reflexion Workshops


13:45 – 14:00

Little Pieces: Messages from the Field III


14:00-14:15

Break


14:15 – 15:30

Keynote by Nomusa Makhubu (University of Cape Town)

Cultural Nomadism in African Social Practice Art


15:30 – 16:15

Discussion Circles


16:15 – 16:45

Coffee Break


16:45 – 17:30

Panel Discussion: Reflexion Discussion Circles


17:30 – 18:15

Closing by John Roberts (University of Wolverhampton)


18:15-19:15

Break


19:15 - 20:00

Falling To No Ground

Concert and Auditory Exploration by Claude Nassar

Speakers

Elke Krasny

"Mourning an Exhausted Planet. On Care, Healing, and Futurity in Eco-Social Art Practices"


How do we think our lives in times without future? How do we mourn anthropogenic destruction and and ecocidal and genocidal pasts, in the wake of which we live, as the historical ruinations have put at risk the present? How can art institutions be dedicated to imagining collectively, how freedom to care for planetary hope, coexistence, and peace can be organized, so we can mourn, heal, survive, and, hopefully, even thrive? How can art spaces provide sites and infrastructures for rituals of collective mourning and for imagining futurity differently? How can independent art spaces counteract and overcome the epistemic cultural legacies of coloniality, imperialism, sexism, and patriarchy that constituted the modern museum? How can institutions be transformed into environments of care? Art making and culture, broadly understood, are seen as key sites of expressing mourning as healing and of articulating visions of futurity. This lecture looks at the legacies of socially and ecologically engaged art practices and seeks to understand how independent art institutions can become relevant to transformation as they share and learn with such practices.


Elke Krasny is Professor for Art and Education at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She is a feminist cultural theorist, urban researcher, curator, and author. Krasny’s scholarship addresses questions of ecological and social justice at the present historical conjuncture with a focus on caring practices in architecture, urbanism, and contemporary art. Together with Angelika Fitz, she edited Critical Care. Architecture and Urbanism for a Broken Planet together (MIT Press, 2019). Together with Sophie Lingg, Lena Fritsch, Birgit Bosold, and Vera Hofmann she edited Radicalizing Care. Feminist and Queer Activism in Curating (Sternberg Press, 2021). Her forthcoming book Living with an Infected Planet. Covid-19 Feminism and the Global Frontline of Care develops a feminist perspective on imaginaries of war and realities of care in pandemic times.

Elke Krasny

Nomusa Makhubu

"Cultural Nomadism in African Social Practice Art"


Nomusa Makhubu discusses the shaping of (fluid) solidarity, creative care-work, knowledge-sharing and strategies for the redistribution of resources which have been realised through creative interventions across various countries on the African continent. Social practice art, as spatial praxis, necessarily probes questions about the role of the contemporary African nation-state, citizenship, and the concept of individual rights. Reflecting on contemporary art collectives, networks and schools, which operate mostly through intra-Africa trans-border movement and collaboration, Makhubu examines the modalities cultural nomadism in African social practice art. Through this, she evokes the concept of never settling/unsettling, which is also captured in Marquis Bey’s concept of transness. Movement is transformative since it potentiates fluidity. As the world continues to be defined by territories and boundaries, mobility and migration is further politicised and regulated. This positions transnational itinerancy and nomadism by artist collectives centrally in understanding the material realities of space as experienced and lived.


Nomusa Makhubu is an associate professor in art history and deputy dean of transformation in Humanities at the University of Cape Town. She was the recipient of the ABSA L’Atelier Gerard Sekoto Award in 2006 and the Prix du Studio National des Arts Contemporain, Le Fresnoy in 2014. She received the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) African Humanities Program fellowship award and was an African Studies Association (ASA) Presidential fellow in 2016. In 2017, she was also a UCT-Harvard Mandela fellow at the Hutchins Centre for African and African American Research, Harvard University. Recognising the need for mentorship and collaborative practice in socially responsive arts, she founded the Creative Knowledge Resources project. She co-edited a Third Text Special Issue: ‘The Art of Change’ (2013) and with Nkule Mabaso co-curated the international exhibition, Fantastic, in 2015 and The stronger we become in 2019 at the 58th Venice Biennale in Italy.

Nomusa Makhubu

Carolina Rito

"The Infrastructures of the Exhibitionary: Re-Imagining the epistemic and aesthetic functions of art spaces"


The Infrastructures of the Exhibitionary is part of an ongoing curatorial project exploring the critical tools for the future of institutions of display under an expanded notion of contemporary art and curating. This presentation acknowledges the current crises of institutions of display, from museums to galleries, and how it has affected their foundational value systems. The ongoing calls for the decolonisation of museums and galleries shed light on the colonial genealogies of these institutions and their role in consolidating the colonial/modern paradigm of knowledge production, disciplines, and discourses. The call for a more inclusive and plural approach to programming, workforce and audience development has collided with the increasing neoliberal imperative of business management in museums. This business model is premised on the imperative of entertainment, arguably pushing programming away from critical and exploratory practices. This business model has been also responsible for the increasing precarisation of the sector, the outsourcing of funding, and the imperative of growth in line with capital value system. In that way, the Infrastructures of the Exhibitionary asks the question: How can the cultural sector mobilise its exhibitionary skills and tools to devise a decolonial and de-liberal response to reimagine its futures?


Carolina Rito is Professor of Creative Practice Research, at the Research Centre for Arts, Memory and Communities (CAMC) Coventry University; and leads the centre’s Critical Practices research strand. Rito is a researcher and curator whose work explores ‘the curatorial’ as an investigative practice, expanding practice-based research in the fields of curating, visual arts, visual cultures and cultural studies. Rito is the co-editor of Institution as Praxis – New Curatorial Directions for Collaborative Research (Sternberg, 2020), Architectures of Education (e-flux Architecture, 2020), and FABRICATING PUBLICS: the dissemination of culture in the post-truth era (Open Humanities Press, 2021). Rito is editor of “On Translations” (2018) and “Critical Pedagogies” (2019) issues (The Contemporary Journal). Rito is Executive Board Member of the Midlands Higher Education & Culture Forum; Research Fellow at the Institute of Contemporary History (IHC), Universidade NOVA Lisboa; Founding Editor of The Contemporary Journal; and member of EARN (European Artistic Research Network)’s curatorial studies working group.

Carolina Rito

John Roberts

"Final Statement"


John Roberts is Professor of Art & Aesthetics in the Faculty of Arts, Business and Social Sciences, and leader of the Research Cluster ‘Art Philosophy and Social Practice’. His research has covered three main areas since the early 1990s: art’s critical autonomy, the possibility of realism in art (as a claim on ‘truth’ as opposed to realist ‘aesthetics’ or ‘resemblance’) and emancipatory technique. In this sense he sees himself working within a critical theoretical tradition, that sees art as a mode of becoming that defies the normative order of capitalist reason, without assuming that the special dispensations of art and creativity miraculously escapes commodity relations; art’s emancipatory logic is immanent, rather than transcendent. As such in his writing over the last thirty years he has placed a strong emphasis on the connection between this logic and negation and non-compliance.

Karen van den Berg

Karen van den Berg is Professor of Art Theory & Curating at Zeppelin University since 2003 and since 2006 she is academic head of the university’s artsprogram. She studied Art History, Classical Archaeology and Nordic Philology in Saarbrucken and Basel, where she completed her doctorate in 1995. She is regularly active as a curator since 1988. Teaching and guest residencies have taken her to the University of Witten/Herdecke, the Chinati Foundation in Texas, Europäisches Kolleg Jena, Stanford University and the IKKM at Bauhaus University Weimar, among others. Van den Berg’s research focuses on art and politics, socially engaged art, the theory and history of exhibiting, educational architecture, and studio research. Van den Berg is currently chairwoman of the supervisory board & training coordinator of FEINART.

Karen van den Berg

Workshops and art projects

Critical Pedagogy & Collective Learning

This workshop is led by Ahmet Öğüt & Fahyma Alnablsi and taking place in two parts on both days of the FEINART Summer School from 16:00 – 19:00 on Friday and from 09:00 – 12:00 on Saturday.


A Meeting Beyond a Workshop: The Silent University

The Silent University is an solidarity based knowledge exchange platform by displaced people and forced migrants, operating outside of the restrictions of migration laws, language limitations and the other bureaucratic obstacles in multiple cities over a decade. Since 2012 the Silent University has involved those that have had a professional life and academic training in their home countries, but are unable to use their skills or professional training due to a variety of reasons related to their status. Ahmet Öğüt, initiator of The Silent University, and Fahyma Alnablsi, coordinator of The Silent University Stockholm, will lead the gathering, sharing practical and ideological principles of The Silent University. Main motivation of the platform is the belief that everybody has the right to educate and that systemic failure is no excuse to outlaw those who are seeking asylum.


Fahyma Al Nablsi is the founder of the Language Café in 2012 at Tensta konsthall in Stockholm. As part of The Silent University, a solidarity-based knowledge exchange platform for asylum seekers, refugees and migrants initiated by the artist Ahmet Ögut, the Language Café fosters the Swedish and Arabic exchange of language skills, experiences, and ideas. Fahyma Al Nablsi has been active as an educator and host within several organizations and is the founder of various local initiatives, such as the women's café and a Nordic walking course during the pandemic. In 2021 she was awarded the honorary prize by the Workers Movements' Cultural Fund in Stockholm.


Ahmet Öğüt born in 1981 in Diyarbakır, is an artist, sociocultural initiator, and lecturer. Working across a variety of media, including photography, video, and installation, Öğüt often uses humor and small gestures to offer his commentary on rather serious or pressing social and political issues. Öğüt is regularly collaborating with people from outside of the art world to create shifts in the perception of common. He has exhibited widely, more recently with solo presentations at MoCA Skopje – Museum of Contemporary Art, Kunstverein Dresden, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Chisenhale Gallery, and Van Abbemuseum. He has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, including FRONT International - Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art (2022); Survival Kit 13 - Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art (2022); Asia Society Triennial: We Do Not Dream Alone (2021); In the Presence of Absence, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2020); Zero Gravity at Nam SeMA, Seoul Museum of Art (2019); Echigo Tsumari Art Triennale (2018); the British Art Show 8 (2015-2017); the 13th Biennale de Lyon (2015); Performa 13, the Fifth Biennial of Visual Art Performance, New York (2013); the 7th Liverpool Biennial (2012); the 12th Istanbul Biennial (2011); the New Museum Triennial, New York (2009); and the 5th Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art (2008). He co-represented Turkey at the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009).

Workshop Critical Pedagogy & Collective Learning
Fahyma Al Nablsi
Fahyma Al Nablsi
Ahmet Öğüt
Ahmet Öğüt

Instituting Otherwise

This workshop is led by Maria Hlavajova & Jeanne van Heeswijk and is taking place in two parts on both days of the FEINART Summer School from 16:00 – 19:00 on Friday and from 09:00 – 12:00 on Saturday.


What (art and culture) institutions do we want and need, and how to make them? The workshop pivots around this seemingly simple question and engages “instituting otherwise” as a relational, embodied, and situated practice of collective institution making. It begins from an inquiry into this practice through a number of concrete artistic and theoretical endeavors of aesthetico-political experimentation ¾ simultaneously the practices of institution- and worldmaking ¾ which take place not merely against but also in spite of the present condition of the world shaped through perpetual catastrophes and back-to-back crises. For this, the first part of the workshop builds a collective understanding of notions such as “critique-as-proposition” and “imagination-as-practice” in order to think about in what ways the extant institutional infrastructure insufficiently meets the world; to imagine the institutions otherwise; and to seek ways of enacting ¾ or living ¾ this imaginary, as if that were possible. Driving this conversation is a yearning for a possibility, with and through art, of a livable life in common.

The second part of the workshop engages this yearning through a hands-on training on “be longings.” [1] What are “be longings”? They describe a movement from the individual self toward others and the world: human and non-human, living and non-living, organic and non-organic. Building on this idea of fluid movement of sociability, the training probes the spatial, contextual, and relational “be longings” through ¾ somewhat paradoxically ¾ the prism of the institution. Concepts such as “learning otherwise,” “radicalizing the local,” “deep listening,” “creating sanctuary,” and “becoming collective” are activated through collective exchange, all the while drafting the contours of a we and the protocols of the institution we want and need.

For the workshop, Jeanne van Heeswijk and Maria Hlavajova draw from their respective artistic and curatorial practices as well as their long-term collaboration at BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht. This includes Trainings for the Not-Yet, “an exhibition as a series of trainings for a future of being together otherwise” that van Heeswijk convened together with BAK in 2019/2020; the publication Toward the Not-Yet: Art as Public Practice, edited by van Heeswijk and Hlavajova together with Rachael Rakes, and published in 2021 by BAK and MIT Press; as well as their ongoing thinking and concrete efforts to practice the institution as a “community portal.”


[1] See Aimee Carillo Rowe, “Be Longing,” in Toward the Not-Yet: Art as Public Practice, Jeanne van Heeswijk, Maria Hlavajova, and Rachael Rakes, eds. (BAK/MIT Press, 2021), pp. 209 - 211.


Jeanne van Heeswijk is an artist who facilitates the creation of dynamic and diversified public spaces in order to “radicalize the local.” Her long-scale community-embedded projects question art’s autonomy by combining performative actions, discussions, and other forms of organizing and pedagogy in order to assist communities to take control of their futures. Her work has been featured in numerous books and publications worldwide, as well as internationally renowned biennials such as Liverpool, Shanghai, and Venice. She was the 2014–2015 Keith Haring Fellow in Art and Activism at Bard College, Annandale-On-Hudson, NY; received the Curry Stone Prize for Social Design Pioneers, 2012; and the Leonore Annenberg Prize for Art and Social Change, 2011. Van Heeswijk was a BAK 2018/2019 Fellow and convened   Trainings for the Not-Yet, 2019/2020, together with BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht. She is the co-editor, with Maria Hlavajova and Rachael Rakes, of Toward the Not-Yet: Art as Public Practice (BAK/MIT Press, 2021). She lives and works in Rotterdam.


Maria Hlavajova  is founding general and artistic director of BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht, since 2000. In 2008–2016 she was research and artistic director of FORMER WEST, which she initiated and developed as an internationally collaborative research, education, publication, and exhibition project, culminating with the publication   Former West: Art and the Contemporary After 1989   (co-edited with Simon Sheikh, 2017). Hlavajova has instigated and (co-)organized numerous projects at BAK and beyond, including the series   Propositions for Non-Fascist Living   (2017–ongoing),   Future Vocabularies   (2014–2017),   and   New World Academy   (with artist Jonas Staal, 2013–2016), among many other international research, learning, and exhibition projects. She has edited numerous publications, including, together with Jeanne van Heeswijk and Rachael Rakes, Toward the Not-Yet: Art as Public Practice (BAK/MIT Press, 2021). In 2011, Hlavajova organized the Roma Pavilion titled   Call the Witness   in the context of the 54th Venice Biennale, Venice, and in 2007 she curated the Dutch Pavilion titled   Citizens and Subjects at the 52nd Venice Biennale, Venice. In 2000, Hlavajova co-curated Manifesta 3 in Ljubljana, titled   Borderline Syndrome: Energies of Defense . In addition, Hlavajova is co-founder (with Kathrin Rhomberg) of the tranzit network, a foundation that supports exchange and contemporary art practices in Austria, Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovakia. Hlavajova lives and works in Amsterdam and Utrecht.

Workshop Hlavajova & Jeanne van Heeswijk

Community Building & Local Knowledge

This workshop is led by Christoph Schäfer & Margit Czenki and is taking place in two parts on both days of the FEINART Summer School from 16:00 – 19:00 on Friday and from 09:00 – 12:00 on Saturday.


Local Knowledge: Intervention, Translation and Deception
"Local knowledge" challenges the claim to truth of institutionalised knowledge and the given hierarchies. Local knowledge emerges in social situations, it deviates from the mainstream of the dominant society. Local knowledge can be suppressed knowledge. It has a different quality than knowledge that sees itself as universal, it is not clean, it is entangled, close to everyday life, neither reproducible nor easily scalable. For the arts (and institutions), it becomes interesting in moments of crisis when the dominant narrative no longer has any solutions in store, becomes boring or loses its audience. In the search for "new audiences" in a "diversifying society" that no longer wants to passively listen to the privileged voices of classical authorship, local knowledge is also coming into focus - in cultural institutions, NGOs and toyotist businesses.

For us, "local knowledge" is antagonistic, resistant knowledge. We present our own projects that work with local knowledge: Park Fiction (from 1994), ContainerUni (2011-2013), Planbude (from 2014), Fabric (2017-2021), parklabyr (2022). We will introduce the context of these works, terms, techniques and methods. We would also like the participants to present examples from their practice, preferably their own projects or projects they have visited, researched, succeeded or failed, that relate to local knowledge.

What we are particularly interested in in this workshop are the complexities of authorship, the moments of translation and exhibition (in other contexts) and the moments of deception.


Christoph Schäfer lives in Hamburg. Since the early 1990s, the artist has worked on urban everyday life and the production of spaces for and by collective desires. This interest is mirrored in a wide range of work, that often reflects and sometimes intervenes, in unusual drawings, installations and collective projects. His main contributions include the independent urban-planning-as-art-and-activism project Park Fiction(1994-2005, shown on documenta11 in 2002), the Film Installation Revolution Non Stop (2000), the drawing series and book The City is Our Factory (2010) heavily entangled with the Hamburg Right to the City movement and policies of the radical left, the programmatic development of temporary University Campus ContainerUni (2012 with Margit Czenki and quartiervier), the drawing series Bostanorama (Istanbul Biennial 2013), the co-founding of the transdisciplinary planning office PlanBude (since 2014), a benchmark of credible participation in urban planning, the conceptual framework of Brombach Dreaming / FABRIC - Planning As Platform (2017-2021), and recently parklabyr for Museum Morsbroich, many of these in collaboration with Margit Czenki.


Margit Czenki is a filmmaker and artist. Her debut, the feature film Komplizinnen / Accomplices (1987 with Pola Kinski and Therese Affolter) was shown in cinemas and festivals worldwide and broadcast on television. She participated in documenta11 in 2002 with the collective project Park Fiction. In 2003 she curated the congress Unlikely Encounters in Urban Space in Hamburg (with Christoph Schäfer). Also jointly produced was the work Videotaxi in 2007, a rolling analysis of Hamburg's neoliberal urban development policies. In 2012, together with Christoph Schäfer and quartiervier architekten, Czenki designed the ContainerUni for Zeppelin University in Friedrichshafen. As a founding member of the interdisciplinary planning team PlanBude, Czenki has organized community participation in the replanning of the ESSO-Houses on St. Pauli, and in September 2016 she co-curated the Hamburg section of the festival Urbanize - Housing the Many - Stadt der Vielen (with "dérive - Zeitschrift für Stadtforschung", Vienna). With the team of FABRIC - Planung als Plattform in Lörrach near Basel, she conceived and planned a new urban district. Latest in the makig is parklabyr, a participatory workover for a deteriorated rococo-garden around Museum Morsbroich, also with Christoph Schäfer.

Photo Credits: M. Czenki / C. Schäfer 2021
Photo Credits: M. Czenki / C. Schäfer 2021
Photo Credits: M. Czenki / C. Schäfer 2021
Photo Credits: M. Czenki / C. Schäfer 2021

Self-Governance & Commoning

This workshop is led by Massimo de Angelis, Marina Naprushkina & Mi You and is taking place in two parts on both days of the FEINART Summer School from 16:00 – 19:00 on Friday and from 09:00 – 12:00 on Saturday.


The workshop will explore how the commons and the democratic forms of social cooperation they rely on are a key driver of radically transformative social change. Commons are transforming our subjectivities, our relations to each other and to the non-human natural environment and by remaking the social and cultural context in which we operate. Together with participants Massimo di Angelis we will explore the relation between the commons and the contemporary crises, by addressing central questions such as what is commoning and what are commons? What is the measure of things, social reproduction, and self-government? What are the differences between commons and enclaves and in which way are commons not only contingent on the art of consensus making but also confronted with the problem of scaling up?

Mi You will draw on the development process of commons.art (initiated by Binna Choi and Aiwen Yin) to think of a maintance and care-taking based ecosystem for socially-engaged art which connects the artists with other artists, art institutions and agents from the wider society. In contrast to the show-biz logic of the contemporary art circle and also the preservation model of musuems, we will shift our attention to the embeddness of art in the society, its socio-economic conditions and its contribution to the capabilities of communities. Through modelling alternative economic systems and engaging seriously with the question of liquidity in such systems, we will speculate on how a commons-based art ecosystem can look like.

Marina Naprushkina will introduce the work of the Neue Nachbarschaft/Moabit initiative in Berlin and Moabit Mountain College as an example of building a commons space based on migrant self-organization where art became a key means of communication. The introduction of the cartoon newspaper "Self-Governing" developed by Naprushkina in cooperation with activist organizations and distributed in Belarus and abroad will serve as another example before the content of the workshop will be reflected through artistic work: the participants work together on a visualization of commons in a transformative sculptural work as well as a graphic form of a wall newspaper.


Massimo de Angelis is Emeritus Professor, University of East London. Until September 2020 he was Professor of Political Economy and Social Change, University of East London. For over thirty years, he has been researching, writing and teaching on issues around the commons, social conflict and contemporary capitalism and its many crises. His obsession is to think through the question of social change, of how we can collectively crack open the current mode of social cooperation hegemonized by capitalist rationality, and move to a post-capitalist society in which we can all live in dignity, mutual recognition and social justice, and construct models of social cooperation that are deeply democratic and respect the biophysical boundaries set by our planet earth. He is the founder of the web journal The Commoner in 2001, editor of the book series in Common for Zed Books, member of the Commons Observatory of the city municipality of Naples (2019-2021) and author of numerous publications, among which three research monographs, the last two dedicated to the question of the relation between commons, global capitalism and post-capitalist transformation (The Beginning of History, Value Struggles and Global Capital - Pluto 2007; and Omnia Sunt Communia. On the Commons and Post-Capitalist Transformation - Zed 2017).


Marina Naprushkina is an artist, feminist and activist. Her diverse artistic practice includes video, performance, drawings, installation, and text. Naprushkina is mostly working outside of institutional spaces, in cooperation with communities and activist organizations. Naprushkina is focusing on creating new formats, structures, and organizations based on self-organization overlap in theory and practice. 2007 Naprushkina founded the Office for Anti Propaganda. It concentrates on power structures in nation-states.
2013 Naprushkina initiated the initiative Neue Nachbarschaft/Moabit. The initiative grew up to one of the largest initiatives in Berlin and built up a strong community of people with and without migrant and refugee background.
Naprushkina was awarded the ECF Princess Margriet Award for Culture (2017) and the Sussmann Artist Award (2015). She participated a.o. at the Kyiv Biennale (2017), the 7th Berlin Biennale (2011), 11th International Istanbul Biennale (2009). Naprushkina teaches at the Universität der Künste Berlin.


Mi You is a professor of Art and Economies at the University of Kassel / documenta Institute. Prior to joining the University of Kassel, she was a research associate in the Art and Media Studies department at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne (2014-2021). She has also held lecturer positions in the Visual Cultures, Curating and Contemporary Art program of the School of Art, Design and Architecture, Aalto University (2019-2020), in the Roaming Academy program of the Dutch Art Institute (2018-2019) and in the Media Art program of the University of the Arts Bremen (2016-2017). Dr. You is trained in media theory and science and technology studies. Mi You has curated shows and programs at Asian Culture Center in Gwangju, South Korea, Ulaanbaatar International Media Art Festival, Mongolia (2016), Zarya CCA, Vladivostok (2018) and with Binna Choi, she is co-steering a research/curatorial project “Unmapping Eurasia” (2018-). She is one of the curators of the 13 th Shanghai Biennale (2020-2021) and co-initiated (in 2011) the EU-funded project “Transnational Dialogues” 4 , an exchange platform between China, Europe and Brazil. She is a fellow of Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Bonn), Zentrum Paul Klee (Bern) and Independent Curators International (New York), and serves as director of Arthub and advisor to Institute for Provocation.

Marina Naprushkina
Marina Naprushkina

Exploring Social Ecologies

This workshop is led by Elke Krasny and Yet Chor Sunshine Wong and is taking place in two parts on both days of the FEINART Summer School from 16:00 – 19:00 on Friday and from 09:00 – 12:00 on Saturday.


Imaginaries and realities of care have emerged as central to socially and ecologically conscious artistic and curatorial practices. Many recent artist-run and self-organized curatorial initiatives, projects, exhibitions, manifestos, and publications attest to the centrality of care.

This workshop invites the collective reflection of critical and transformative practices in order to better understand the visibility of care at our global historical moment. Starting with what it means to ‘care about’ and to ‘care for’ what we care about, following Joan Tronto’s terminology, the workshop seeks out the gaps and omissions in the current turn to care. Questions raised include but are not limited to the following: What does the pandemic imperative of the frontline imaginary of care mean? How does breathing bring together dimensions of ecological and social care? What are the effects of the invisibility narrative, through which care has been addressed in critical feminist scholarship across social reproduction theory and ethics of care? How can the concept of colonial care (Riika Prattes) be developed further? What are the implications of care violence?

We will open the workshop with an embodied reading group, selecting a number of texts to set the tone and scene for collective inquiry. Different modes of working and thinking together will be used over the two days to complicate the notion of care and to speculate its place in social ecologies.


Elke Krasny is Professor for Art and Education at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She is a feminist cultural theorist, urban researcher, curator, and author. Krasny’s scholarship addresses questions of ecological and social justice at the present historical conjuncture with a focus on caring practices in architecture, urbanism, and contemporary art. Together with Angelika Fitz, she edited Critical Care. Architecture and Urbanism for a Broken Planet together (MIT Press, 2019). Together with Sophie Lingg, Lena Fritsch, Birgit Bosold, and Vera Hofmann she edited Radicalizing Care. Feminist and Queer Activism in Curating (Sternberg Press, 2021). Her forthcoming book Living with an Infected Planet. Covid-19 Feminism and the Global Frontline of Care develops a feminist perspective on imaginaries of war and realities of care in pandemic times.


Yet Chor Sunshine Wong is an art worker of many hats. She was an art teacher in her native Hong Kong before moving to Berlin where she completed her MA at the Universität der Künste Berlin and curated live art events. She continued to freelance upon moving to the UK, eventually completing her doctoral thesis on socially engaged art practices. Extending from the rigour of affect and embodiment in her queer reading of ‘socially negotiated art’, Sunshine’s current practice is situated in infrastructures, critical care approaches and co-vulnerabilities in urgent times. She is Curator at Bloc Projects in Sheffield, UK and irregularly convenes TL;DR, a slow reading group that questions how contemporary art makes a place for itself in public life.

Yet Chor Sunshine Wong
Yet Chor Sunshine Wong

Concept Dinner with Caique Tizzi

Dinner by artist Caique Tizzi on the first day of the FEINART Summer School

from 20:00 – 22:00.


Caique Tizzi is an artist, cook, and event organizer who lives and works in Berlin. The focus of his practice revolves around an artistic approach to food, where the kitchen becomes part studio, part laboratory. His culinary experiences aim to create rituals around the table, dramatizing the ordinary and mundane acts of eating together. In 2011, Tizzi co-founded Agora Collective in Berlin and developed its artistic and food platforms until 2019. Since 2017, Caique Tizzi has been organising Babes Bar together with Adam Fearon. Tizzi has collaborated and contributed with his work for organisations like the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlinische Galerie, Julia Stoschek Collection, Martin Gropius Bau, Kunsthalle Osnabrück, Medialab Prado Madrid, Berlin Art Week amongst others.

Caique Tizzi

DJ tryniti

A DJ-Set by tryniti in the evening of the first day of the FEINART Summer School.


Somewhere between hardstyle lovesongs, UK grime, nostalgic guilty pleasures, and contemporary remixes – tryniti blends what they find along the way with gems of queer and femme producing.

In the context of the FEINART Summer School tryniti provides experimental hiphop, softpop and soulful trashcore to fade out long days and dwell in twilight at the roof top of that building that used to be a university.

tryniti is, among other things, co-founder of fam, an artistic collective and dj-label focusing on femxle produced music and safer spaced entertainment beyond genre-boundaries.

https://soundcloud.com/some_lane

Photo Credit: Lea Hopp
Photo Credit: Lea Hopp

An auditory exploration by Claude Nassar

Falling To No Ground

An auditory exploration of future crises in liberated worlds

By Claude Nassar


Falling to no ground is an auditory exploration of futures when dreams of liberation had already happened, highlighting the possible forms suffering can take in such ‘best case scenario’ worlds.

If we are falling through time with no ground to catch us, then a concrete world—a static understanding of what the world is and how the world should be—is an attempt to produce a stable ground. A ground that we never reach, but nevertheless gives us a reference in relation to which we make choices, and according to which we quantify, and keep track of our collective fall through time. Falling To No Ground is an auditory exploration in dwelling on the ground of the ideal worlds we imagine, and in the lived, tension, crisis, and violence, that sustains the concrete order of a stable world. An exploration in the recurrent process of solidification of chaos into deterministic structures as rhythms, and the dissolution of rhythms into chaos as resonance, dissonance, delays, and reverberations.


Claude Nassar is a filmmaker, researcher and writer from Lebanon, currently based in Iceland. Claude works at the intersection of philosophical research, film making, and sound production, to think about the resonance between digital worlds and actual worlds, currently conducting his PhD research at the University of Iceland as part of the FEINART research program.

Falling to no ground

Registration

The Summer School is free of charge. Accommodation, food, and travel costs must be covered by the participants. Upon successful registration we have reserved a contingent of hotel rooms. The number of participants is limited to 100. For participation it is necessary to register by 30 July.

For PhD candidates it is possible to earn 4 ECTS by submitting a paper (1500 words conference review). To take part in the Summer School is necessary to register for one of the workshops by 30 July.


To the registration form

FEINART Network

The international research project FEINART (The Future of European Independent Art Spaces in a Period of Socially Engaged Art) is the first major research and doctoral training programme for socially engaged art. It promotes research into prospects, forms of work and organisation, economies, and the democratic function of socially engaged art in Europe. FEINART is supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions of the Horizon 2020 European Training Programme and is jointly run by the Universities of Wolverhampton (coordinator), Zeppelin University (leading the training programme) University Iceland and University of Edinburgh. For more information, please visit our website: https://feinart.org/.


FEINART attaches great emphasis to being on learning-through-participation and collective research.

The Summer School serves the public presentation and discussion of research results on the developments of socially engaged art in Europe, which were developed in the framework of the research project and PhD training programme FEINART.

Zeppelin University is providing two Travel Grants for PhD candidates for 750 euros each, to make it possible for people who do not have the opportunity to receive travel funding in their home country to travel to Lake Constance for the FEINART Summer School. Please send applications to rahel.spoehrer@zu.de by 30 July 2022.

The application should include a short statement (300 words) explaining why the Summer School is relevant to the applicant's own research and why support is needed. A short letter of recommendation from a Professor should also be included.

Feinart funding
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