.:: November 2011 ::.
ACTFEST '11 - mobile structures for performative arts and education
11.-12.11.2011, Čakovec (Croatia)
Themes: free licenses in art, autonomy, nomadic practices
ACTFEST is a self-organized festival so that the work, performing arts, design, music, equipment etc. are organized by visitors. All organizers and participants are at the same time artists, technicians, PR etc. The entire program will take place in a 8 x 2,5 x 3 m container. Art center will participate at the round table about AiR/Mobility and art.
ACTFEST is a part of Transdisciplinary and new media culture in the development of cross-border area (New Media Cross-Border)under IPA Operational Programme Slovenia-Croatia 2007-2013.
More about the festival...
Study visit Academy of fine arts and design, University of Ljubljana
02.-04.11. 2011
more coming soon...
.:: October 2011 ::.
EmploYouth 2011; 6-13th October, Sremski Karlovci (Serbia)
EmploYouth 2011 is 7-days training course on video activism with participants from Serbia, Croatia, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, UK, Hungary, Macedonia, Portugal, Ukraine and Slovenia. It seeks to address three topics: youth unemployment, poverty and social exclusion, and to explore possibilities of addressing these issues in the form of video work, and video activism. Art center is one of partners in the project, sending 3 young participants from Slovenia to the training.
Project is co-financed by the EU 'Youth in action' programme.
Read more about the project here.
Check out one of the video works called Have a heart
.:: September 2011 ::.
Thursday, 15th September 2011 at 18.00, Artists' Asylum, Ljubljana
Series of lectures Material conditions of imagination:
Julij Borštnik - Interesting and boring periods in art
About the lecturer:
Julij Borštnik graduated at the Academy of fine arts and design, University in Ljubljana in 2007. Currently he's writing his Master's thesisin Philosophy at the Scientific research centre SASA. During his studies at the academy he received the International Essl Award and national Prešern award for fine art students. Since 2003 he has been actively involved in the Art center in Goričko, Prekmurje and Artists' Asylum in Metelkova Mesto in Ljubljana. At the moment he's focused on production of new art projects.
Organization: KUD Mreža
Co-organization: Art center
New Media Cross-Border - 1st Workshop
23.09 – 25.09. 2011 at the Autonomous center ACT, Čakovec (Croatia).
Theme: Transdisciplinarity - lecturer prof. Dr. Michael Punt, University of Plymouth
New Media Cross-Border - 1st Study visit
Open call for educational program in the field of transdiciplinary, new media and sustainable development of northern cross-border area of Slovenia and Croatia is now closed. Selected participants of the project are Maja Kohek, Simon Poldauf and Vita Žgur (ONEJ/Art center).
Between 9th and 11th September the first study visit will take place in Bratislava, Slovakia.
Thursday, 1st September 2011 at 18.00, Artists' Asylum, Ljubljana
Series of lectures Material conditions of imagination:
David Verbuč - Ethnomusicology of rock'n'roll: Alternative home concerts in the U.S.
House concerts, fairly common phenomenon in the U.S., are public or semi-public musical events organized by people in their homes. There are different types of house concerts. Some focus on classical music, jazz, or "folk" music. David Verbuč is mainly interested in the research of those house concerts, organized by the youth and cover a wide range of music. There you can hear everything from alternative rock and punk to experimental and improvised music (and occasionally live electronic music or hip-hop). In this way the youth aims to establish alternative music and social scenes and ways of life, running past the conventional, commercial or institutional channels.
In doing so, organization of concerts is partly a necessity, because this kind of music and musicians usually find no place in traditional concert halls and commercially-oriented bars, and partly derives from the need for independence and "do-it-yourself" ideology and aesthetics. Such self-organization of youth, which represents a unique response to neo-liberal and (neo) conservative politics in the United States, often works in close formation with local student or independent radio station that offers support and is an integral part of the scene itself.
The author's research focuses on the U.S. west coast, but in theory he looks at how space, music and social engagement within the alternative house concerts scene contribute to the establishment, maintenance and transformation of communities and scenes, and vice versa, and balance of power, which they produce. The study focuses on the U.S. alternative house concerts for two reasons:
(a) such concerts offer an insight into the cultural politics of everyday life and the creative practice of contemporary American youth, which contributes to a better understanding of contemporary American culture and society in general, and
(b) because studies neglect the "domestic" cultures in ethnomusicology and on the other hand, the lack of intensive ethnographic approach to popular music in popular music studies.
About the lecturer
In 2010, David Verbuč received his MS from the University of ethnomusicology at UC Davis (California), where he continues with doctoral studies. He graduated at the Academy of Music, where he specialized in the field of ethnomusicology. Between 2003 and 2006 he was music editor of the editorial office of Radio Student, Ljubljana. He wrote for magazines Muska, Youth, Deloskop, and is still occasionally active as a music journalist in the Slovenian media. Between 2000 and 2001 he recorded, compiled and documented around 1000 folk songs in Upper Savinjska valley (around 100 singers), the selection of which was published on the double CD Gorse is not people in the world: field recordings of folk songs in Upper Savinjska valley (Mozirje, 2008).
Organization: KUD Mreža
Co-organization: Art center
.:: July 2011 ::.
Personal–Collective Festival
The personal aspect of involving oneself in artistic practice is always being shaped also through the collective one. And since especially in a simultaneous group activity such as improvisation the opposite is true as well, the two can't be thought about separately.
This is the presumption on which the festival Personal – Collective, now running for the second year, is founded upon. Its main purpose on one side is the interweaving of the "personal" and the "collective" artistic practice, but also artistic genres on the other. Alongside improvising musicians this time there will also be participants coming from the fields of painting, visual arts, dance, performance, theatre and sound art.
The two day event will bring together twenty-one artists from various European countries. They will perform as solo artists, in prearranged formations and combinations put together on the spot. There will also be some special events during the festival: a duo performance by Jean-Luc Guionnet & Seijiro Murayama, solo sets by Eric Cordier and Annette Krebs and a lecture by Jean-Luc Guionnet about the architecture of listening (in co-organization with the Series of sound events and lectures Bitshift).
The initiator of the festival is Seijiro Murayama, the Japanese percussionist currently residing in Paris, who in the recent years has frequently performed locally with Slovenian and foreign artists (Tomaž Grom, N'Toko, Marko Karlovčec, Martin Küchen, Renato Rinaldi, Enrico Malatesta...).
Participants of the festival Personal – Collective 2011:
Nikos Veliotis (Greece), Dimitra Lazaridou Chatzigoga (Greece),
Renato Rinaldi (Italy),
Annette Krebs (Germany), Ivan Palacky (Czech Republic),
Eric Cordier (France),
Seijiro Murayama (Japan),
Enrico Malatesta (Italy),
Franz Hautzinger (Austria),
Jean-Luc Guionnet (France),
Marc Perron-Bailly (France),
Gaël Leveugle (France),
François Bidault (France),
Nhandan Chirico (Italy),
Neža Naglič (Slovenia),
Irena Tomažin (Slovenia),
Tomaž Grom (Slovenia),
Ryuzo Fukuhara (Slovenia),
Paul Wenninger (Austria),
Miro Tóth (Slovakia),
Slavo Krekovič (Slovakia).
Locations: Open theatre of SEM, Menza pri koritu, Kiberpipa
Producer: KUD Mreža
Coproducer: Art središče
Coorganization: Bitshift, series of sound events and lectures, Menza pri koritu.
Financed by: Ministry of culture, French institute Charles Nodier, Ljubljana
Read more about the festival...
Eric Cordier is on residency at the Art center as a part of this years' Personal-Collective Festival where he will participate as a musician and lecturer.
Eric Cordier (1963) has studied fine arts, body-art & music. He began body-art performances/tape music between 1986 and 1994 under the name of Nadir, with Jean Luc Guionnet and Cécile Maupoux. As a sound engineer he has collaborated with groups coming from more popular musical genres as well as working at concerts of contemporary classical music and in theatre. Later on he started composing electro-acoustic pieces at his own studio. He plays hurdy-gurdy in various formations: as an improvisator (with Seijiro Murayama, Jean-Luc Gionnet, Dominique Regef …) and as a member of several improv, free-rock or industrial bands: UNACD, Schams, Phéromone, Tore, Enkidu. His interest in plastic arts and music is conjugated in sound environment exhibitions.
Express the value of art! Show your support for culture!
On Friday the 24th June at noon local time, we need you to join this initiative in shrouding art locations across the world in coloured smoke. This visual act will be a sign of resistance against the growing disdain for the arts within societies and governments worldwide, and a sign of support for colleagues who face major cutbacks. Now is the time to act to show your appreciation and the necessity of the arts!
ARTBOMB is a peaceful art intervention initiated in The Netherlands. The Dutch Government is about to cut 40% of all cultural funding. This will result in the disappearance of a multitude of organizations that excel internationally in their field. This loss will be felt not only by the Dutch public but by the international community.
One signal, one moment, one act to show support. You can contribute visual ammunition against the disproportionate cuts to the arts budget. This visible intervention will rise up around the world where people value the arts and want to express their support for artists and cultural organizations.
Everybody who joins the ARTBOMB intervention will become part of this chain reaction and is invited to upload the photos and films of their own intervention to the website www.artbomb.nl as a token of solidarity and a symbol of strength.
Read more...
Material conditions of imagination
Sunniva Skjøstad Hovde (Norway): Improvisation, power & migration. Evaluation of music.
The best music in the world?
When people move around so does music. How do people in France look at Bosnian music? Where does Senegalese music become a bestseller? Does hip hop music everywhere mean ghetto music? Why Indonesian music isn't a huge success in Europe? How do we recognize something as good music? Why do some music seem "smart and intelligent" and another "simple and banal." Does it have to do with musical events, such as improvisation? Does improvised music add more or less "quality"? What kind of improvisation is then good and which not?
With the increasing number of migration and as one of the effects of globalization, more people are facing a different understanding of music, including improvised music, and its features. These people have different value scales, which also classify improvisation. Power and the effects of these hierarchies vary within individual cultures, classes, ethnicities and similar categories depending on who provides them and when. What happens to this valuation when people migrate? Does it melt with the environment? Are there any dominants? How to create a new hierarchy and on what basis? Whose music is "worth something" and whose not? How are values and understanding taken into account with different tastes of music? How does this relate to the political context, geographic area, social class, ethnicity, gender, etc.?
What is the relationship between flexibility of migration, the rapid changes under the influence of globalization and the need for stability and predictability within the nation-state, and national identity? How do these components interact?
Different genres of improvisation are also subject to hierarchies. Among the general audience some types of improvised music are more respected. On what criteria? Starting from the premises which, when we think through improvisation and what kind of glasses we wear when we look through them? What is considered to be improvisation in the tradition of folk music in relation to improvisation in jazz? What about the status of improvisation, on one hand European art music and, on the other hand, in Turkish art music?
In winter semester 2010/2011 Sunniva Hovd was a visiting lecturer at the Department of Musicology, Faculty of Arts. She graduated in ethnomusicology at the Department of Musicology at the University of Trondheim in Norway and is currently writing her doctoral thesis entitled "Globalization, music and channeling hierarchies", which she partly wrote in Artists' Asylum in Ljubljana. Her areas of scientific interest include applied ethnomusicology, minority studies, popular music and gender, and globalization in relation to music education and training.
www.myspace.com/sunnivahovde
www.myspace.com/tangoting
www.myspace.com/trondheimworldmusicensemble
Organization: KUD Mreža
Co-organization: Art center
We'll be discussing the possibilities what art can offer within the field of ecology. We'll be looking into examples of eco-art projects during the past up to now. As we take a look at the info available to us through different sites, books and documentary films, we'll be discussing one of Art center's eco-projects: becoming a recycling center - both in terms of trash (we have been collecting plastic bottles, cans, glass bottles, car-tyres) and art.
New media - the term can be found everywhere but do we really know what it means and what does it apply to? We'll be talking about new media, it's applications within contemporary art and culture and checking out different events, readers and theory behind it. Also we'll be discussing where Art center fits inside this topic, both on local and international level.
Deej Fabyc who has already exhibited an art video in Ljubljana as a part of a group exhibition of the International feminist and queer festival Red Dawns, is now staying in Artists' Asylum at Metelkova Mesto as an artist in residence. During this time she will have a lecture and a presentation of her artistic and curatorial work at the Centre for Contemporary Arts SCCA-Ljubljana. In the middle of June 2011, she will return to Ljubljana for a few days to realize a set of performances and an installation as part of her solo exhibition at the Alkatraz Gallery. For the presentation at SCCA - Ljubljana Fabyc will present some stories about her earlier works and ask the audience to engage with her in the current investigation. This lecture is also a call for information connected to her father, Paul Duncan Jones.
Process and research are important for her engaged performance/video presentations. In the case of the work in progress for her forthcoming exhibition at the Alkatraz Gallery she takes as a starting point, the fact that she lived in Ljubjana for a few months as a child. As a child she believed that her father might have been a spy, since he was travelling a lot and worked in several "Eastern Block" countries during the late 60's and 70's. As a consultant statistician for the Tito's administration in 1970 he worked in Ljubljana. It was the only time he brought his family with him on these consultancies. During her stay in Ljubljana in 1970 she was living at the Bellevue Hotel with her family. Her plan is to disclose concealed traces of public and private histories through which we inhabit and see the city. She will trace the childhood memories on a journey taking a path as a cartographer both of her own memory and potential made up details, layering an alternative history onto the city. The search began at the Archive of the Republic of Slovenia, and now continuing further.
The artist's opus addresses psychological dimension of a personal and political experience of trauma. She is an artist who is fascinated by the resonance of personal histories in the context of a wider public concern and an engagement with social systems. Her work takes up "the personal is political" as read and does not differentiate between art and life. Having worked with large scale performative installations and video in the 1990's in the last decade she has focused more on film and live engaged performance. Deej Fabyc has exhibited widely Internationally since the early 1990's. Key exhibitions include "Dialogue" curated Theo Tegalaars at W139 gallery in Amsterdam, Contempora at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne Australia and the touring exhibition "Don't Call it Performance" curated by Paco Barragan which premiered at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid and concluded at El Museo Del Barrio in New York. She is also committed to exhibiting and working with other artists as part of her practice and produces this through her directorship of Elastic Residence in London since 2004 and as a part of KISSS a group of artists interested in issues concerned with surveilliance. She has curated numerous exhibitions in London and Australia. The artist lives in London, and is the current visiting lecturer in Time Based Media at London Metropolitan University.
http://www.londonmet.ac.uk/companyinfo
http://www.fabyc.co.uk
Production: KUD Mreža / Galerija Alkatraz
Co-production: Art center, SCCA Ljubljana
What is community art? How can Art center participate in local environment? What can we offer and why? We will be looking into different examples across the globe and developing new ideas in our specific local context and environment, such as transformation of a border watchtower in Hodoš/Hodos.
Brainstorm in March will focus on Art center - our history, present and the future. We'll be thinking about Art center from within (who we are, what we do, what do we want, how and why) and trying to understand ourselves from an outside point of view. How do we need to think about our past and turn a new page for the future? How do we translate our role and work into public sphere and what tools do we need to use and why? What do we need to change and why?
Second meeting of Art center and Gallery Octave Cowbel took place. We are preparing a pilot AiR project as a starting point of future co-operation between similar organizations dealing with artistic production and especially AiR programs in Europe.
February brainstorming will focus on different ways of visually presenting the state of cultural politics in Slovenia. The problems of cultural politics in Slovenia are best known to those focused on production - artists and NGO's working in the field of art and culture. Art center will therefore continue with a series of visualisations (installations, video and animation, graphics, ...). Based on ideas and graphical samples we will set up a new visual statement.
What are the possible creative approaches and strategies? What is a visual statement? How to inform wider public about current cultural policy and why? With national cultural holiday coming up, these are the questions we will focus on the second brainstorming.
Brainstorming about a music documentary with film enthusiasts, working under the name Poslednji pionirji. Poslednji pionirji are an organization that is researching and creating in film, photography, music, literature and similar fields. Joining forces will be Tomaž Zaniuk, managing editor at RŠ, and Dragan Vuković, music journalist and editor of radio show 'Anatomija zvuka' Radio Bosna 1, who works as organizer of music festivals and concerts + the team of Art center.
