Although the professionalization of the arts sector continues to rise, and global budgets for art are also growing, alarm bells warning about the precarious socio-economic position of artists are ringing louder than before.
Unfortunately, we are canceling the public programme of the Reshape Intensive Zagreb that includes lectures by Renata Salecl, Vincent Liegey, Juliette Hennequin and Pascal Gielen, as well as announced walks and talks. The programme of the Intensive was primarily aimed to the participants of the Reshape project that are coming from various countries across the EuroMed region. Due to the current situation of the spreading of Corona virus across Europ, travelling and larger meetings represent an additional threat of the spreading of the virus. Although we wish not to contribute to the panic presented in some media, we are convinced that we should take the responsibility for the prevention of the further spreading of the infection. We apologise to all of those who planned to attend the Reshape Intensive Zagreb programme and announce that the lectures will be held as a part of other Reshape activities. The working part of the Intensive will be held online.
The notion of transnationality/postnationality offers a tempting perspective. It inspires to change the mindset for a while; to get rid of currently dominating patterns of thinking and operating, that most often represent the dominant structure of national states. However promising it may sound, to most of art workers it would be a misleading fantasy: for the actual political map does influence our professional and private lives on the every day basis, shaping our ways of thinking and enabling or interrupting relations.
A conversation about the socio-economic conditions of cultural work and the policies and support structures for culture in Romania. We analyse the main challenges that artists and organisations face and explore the models and practices that enable their resilience.
A brief radiography of the performing arts scene in Romania, with a focus on the independent art scene: its fragile structures, their restless struggle to establish and maintain spaces for creation and production and their taste for socially and politically engaged practice.
Listen to the radio talk about the Reshape project that was made in Barcelona during the Art and Citizenship workshop. The radio talk took place at Lleialtat Santsenca and was guided by La Fundició and Radio Cava-Ret.
To be an artist without a political responsibility is also a statement. The artists gathered in the group emphasize their citizenship; social and political dimension of their individual, as well as collective work. The main focus of this group is to find that space of creativity, where they could use the imagination in the most expandable manner, but also keep active. Due to the recent COVID 19 crisis, the artists stress the importance of their activist work, but also of collaboration/empathy as one of the most powerful tools of art in general.
DutchCulture asked researcher Errol Boon to respond to DutchCulture’s colloquium on translocality in the arts, reflecting on the upcomming challenges of international cultural collaboration after the coronacrisis. His response is valuable for RESHAPE, especially trajectory "Transnational/Postnational artistic practices"
Under the title ‘Lockdown Theater’ Schauspielhaus Zürich gathered theoretical thought experiments on theatre and performance during the Covid-19 pandemic. ‘How do a virus, a pandemic disease, and theatre affect each other? The texts do not address the crisis head-on, but touch it tangentially, without submitting to the information and opinion regime that it entails.’
According to the author, art institutions mirror today’s dominant powers. Sarah Vanhee wants a plurality of institutions connected to different, heterogeneous forms of living and being. A longing for a feminization, decolonization and queering of the art institutions. Looking for art institutions that do politics instead of presenting art programmes about politics, that take care of the people who work there and engage with them, support them on the basis of equal dialogue and lend themselves as tools.
Professor Pascal Gielen (Antwerp University) did research on the biotope around artistic careers, on the role of institutions, and how the transnational creative industries and the longing for a monotopic European identity put pressure on this biotope. Gielen formulates a number of suggestions on how a healthy artistic biotope may be maintained in the future, and how artists can offer us a more complex heterotopic understanding of Europe in a globalising world.
How can one fathom the implications and values of smaller arts institutions within the greater art ecosystem? One key aspect is their ground-breaking approach to relations between art and society, education, and the formation of public spheres. Another is their important role in local communities whilst maintaining a constant dialogue within the international arts context. But how can we create dialogue around the values that are being built – beyond visitor numbers and media coverage? What cooperative processes can be adopted so that artists and culture, small and large institutions, municipalities, regions, states, and federal politics all cooperate to encourage art’s potential?
Finally together on-site!The Reshape team has been working hard during the months of pandemic - and the results are here! Tangible, intangible, in the form of ideas and concepts, but also games, cards and publication.
'The Gamified Workshop Toolkit' is an online workshop about solidarity in collaboration developed in the framework of the RESHAPE project. During this workshop, we will test ‘The Gamified Workshop Toolkit’, which is a card game that is especially designed for teams from different cultures, backgrounds, or personal situations, who are just beginning their collaboration.
On June the 2nd members of the Reshape community represented their work and results in the frame of conference that gathered a broader audience of the European performing arts practitioners and experts. Twice a year, TEH organizes meetings and conferences to exchange knowledge, to start conversations and to connect with other cultural changemakers. These events serve as a hotbed of new ideas and collaborations, reflect diversity of the network and explore topics that matter to cultural workers all around Europe.
During the weekend of 11th - 13th June, Reshaper Petr Dlouhy and his colleagues from Prague based Studio Alta went out of the town and settled in a small camp in the countryside to have a plenary meeting whose main aim was to identify the collective vision of the institution’s future.After sunset, Petr gathered the core team of Studio Alta counting 10 culture workers for a tarot session by the fire. He provided the team with a special reading which was focused on embracing the potential of collective imagination to deal with the current issue(s).
Pedro Costa is professor at the Department of Political Economy at the ISCTE – Instituto Universitário de Lisboa and director of DINAMIA’CET-iscte (Research Center on Socioeconomic Change and Territory). An economist with a research specialization in urban and regional planning, Costa works on areas of territorial development and cultural economics. In the context of RESHAPE, he was the facilitator of the trajectory Value of Art in the Social Fabric, where the question of how to better understand the impact, tangible and intangible, of artists and their work on the local context was raised. In this conversation, we explore some of the processes and outputs of this trajectory.
[BLOK] is a curatorial collective which operates at the intersection of art, urban research and political activism. Their projects are designed and realised as platforms for collective work of artists, curators, researchers, political activists and anyone interested in the politics of space, production of commons, democratisation of culture and reflection of artistic practices from the perspective of their social and production conditions.
Clubture Network is a non-profit, inclusive, participatory network of organizations working on strengthening the independent cultural sector through program networking, raising public visibility, encouraging organizational development of the sector and strengthening its influence on the institutional framework in which it operates.
Domino is an NGO dedicated to independent art and activism focusing on LGBTIQ minorities and women's rights. Domino produces several festivals in Croatia and internationally and commissions / co-produces 35 - 40 artistic projects per year, is publishing 1 - 2 books per year, has a regular queer film program once a month and organise arts management and curating educations and seminars.