Interview

Creating the Department of Civil Imagination — An interview with Peter Jenkinson and Shelagh Wright

Shelagh Wright and Peter Jenkinson, both based in London, have been supporting creative and cultural work for progressive social and political goals throughout the world for many years. Their current projects include ODD, an action research ad/venture exploring positive deviance within socially-engaged cultural practice and creative activism. They are also involved with the pan-European Laboratories of Care programme and with investigating the contribution of cultural and creative activists to the new global Municipalist movement. In the context of RESHAPE, they have been the facilitators of the Art and Citizenship trajectory, asking the question: How can art radically reimagine new forms of citizenship and empower us to act? Here, active citizenship is a central connecting point, on which we expound in this conversation.

Zeitgeist

Feminist Practices, Radical Politics

Feminism seems to be gaining momentum in many countries, but most organisations and groups are still working on the basis of patriarchal standards. The ‘feminisation of politics’ includes different elements, which all aim to change the way activism and politics (in a broad sense) are done. A feminist way of organising includes considerations such as gender balance, building power through cooperation, collective leadership, democratic decision-making, care (for peers, for dependent beings and for oneself), intersectional understanding of issues, and non-violence.

Zeitgeist

Museums: Essential or Non-essential?

In a crisis of survival in the aftershock of the novel Covid-19 pandemic, everything that we have taken for granted is questioned: is it considered ‘essential’ or ‘non-essential’? Museums are by no means a sacred institution any more than newspapers, educational systems, the music industry, the norms of governance and checks and balances in a democracy, the secular pillars of science, truth seeking and rational discourse, the preservation of the commons, public lands and spaces, good manners, common human decency and decorous behaviour, and so on. All these things hang in the balance right now along with our treasured museums. All of them turn out to be things we have to decide to fight for if we are to keep them, or that must be reinvented to find new relevancy and life.

Zeitgeist

Feminisation, Democracy, Labour: Towards a Socialised Cultural Institution

This essay is the programme document of a research project Porozumienie (Agreement) at the Powszechny Theatre in Warsaw, about the participatory transformation of the public theatre ‘Powszechny Theatre’ in Warsaw into a feminist cultural institution. A year of research and interviews with employees resulted in texts and practical steps, such as the establishment of an arts and programme board. The authors of the project were Agata Adamiecka-Sitek, Marta Keil, and Igor Stokfiszewski.

Zeitgeist

From Freehouse to Neighborhood Co-op: The Birth of a New Organizational Form

About twenty plus years of urban development and artistic research efforts initiated by artist Jeanne van Heeswijk in her native Rotterdam. The challenge of a neighbourhood culture that is organized through cooperative methods is to be exceedingly aware of how it changes and why. It must always be questioning what agendas are driving it forward and whether it is living up to its values.

Zeitgeist

Politicising Piracy — Making an Unconditional Demand

Pirate Care is a transnational project connecting activists, scholars, and practitioners working on the collective practices of care that are emerging in response to the current ‘crisis of care’: welfare cuts, rollback of reproductive rights, austerity, and criminalisation of migration and solidarity. These initiatives are experimenting with forms of self-organisation, alternative approaches to social reproduction, and the commoning of tools. They share a willingness to openly disobey laws and executive orders, whenever these stand in the way of safety and solidarity, and politicise that disobedience to contest the status quo.

News

Online workshop: more than fifty people had joined ‘The Gamified Workshop Toolkit’

Flanders Arts Institute, Ettijahat - Independent Culture and Pogon - Zagrebački centar za nezavisnu kulturu i mlade organized an online session of testing ‘The Gamified Workshop Toolkit: Values of Solidarity’ prototype. The prototype was developed by Anikó Rácz, Doreen Toutikian, and Dorota Ogrodzka, within the frame of the Solidarity Economies trajectory group. It was especially designed for teams that are just beginning their collaboration, primarily in the field of arts and culture, but also in other relevant sectors.

News

Values of Solidarity in the frame of Cultural Impact Now - a conference organized by TEH

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. 

Interview

On Mobility, Rituals, and Senses – Post- and Transnational Explorations — An interview with Marta Keil

Marta Keil is a performing arts curator and researcher who co-runs the Performing Arts Institute in Warsaw, Poland. She has collaborated as a curator and dramaturge with a number of artists and works on a regular basis in a curatorial tandem with Grzegorz Reske (ResKeil). She is also the editor of several publications on performance and politics. She has been the facilitator of the Transnational/Postnational Artistic Practices trajectory in RESHAPE, which engaged with questions of imagining an artworld ‘after the national’, starting from the broader notion of the political map and how it affects cultural practices. In this interview, she spoke to us from Warsaw, about some of the processes and outputs of her trajectory within RESHAPE.