Paradox in Granada

Meeting of the ELIA Fine Arts Section
Facultad de Bellas Artes, Granada, 24-25 June

Loosing your luggage is never a good way to start a meeting overseas but such is life. After 13 hours traveling, including a delayed flight from Heathrow, I was checking into the hotel without my bag, which was probably languishing somewhere in Madrid. What was surprising was the ‘mater-of-fact’ness with which the Iberian staff in Granada treated the 6 travelers from the same flight in the same situation, as if it was only to be expected! Later that evening, during a stroll into town, I bumped into Kevin Atherton (Dublin) and Christine Pybus (Cork) – what are the chances of that in the crowed streets of a major city…

Day 1

The first meeting wasn’t scheduled until late afternoon, which gave us time to explore the town during the day. Despite our host leaving each of us a full conference-type bag of goodies at the hotel reception we still weren’t quite sure of where we were going. So meeting at reception meant at least we’d all get lost together. As it happened, Isidro Lopez-Aparico (Granada) met us half way across Fuente del Triunfo and led us to our meeting point. Juhani Jarvinen (Lahti) was already there and before too long we were joined by Maia Mancuso and Maria-Antonietta Malleo (Palermo). Sean Cummins (Nottingham) and Enrique Martinez Leal (Cuenca) and Ana Garcia Lopez (Granada) complete the steering group for this meeting … time for business.

Publics and purposes at GradCAM

The conference arts research: publics and purposes opened yesterday in Dublin, and to our eternal regret, we can’t be there. Organized by GradCAM, the Irish institute for research in the arts, it addresses a question that so far has rarely been asked: how are artist researchers going to find an audience? For who is this made? And why? Combining the search for a public with reflection on the purposes, and five days of sessions with a range of exhibitions and performances, the conference comes with the most concise rationale I have ever seen:

who for? what for?

This could well be a landmark event where the discussion gets beyond mere discussion. At any rate, the search for a public seems to be rather succesful, for almost every event of the week is fully booked.

www.gradcam.ie

Where do we go from here?

The artist as researcher, The Hague, 5-6 February

Yesterday’s discussion was largely about visual culture and embodied, de-centered modes of thinking. Today’s was much more about institutions and curating. Kitty Zijlmans, in her opening keynote, described how she got ten tons of textile scraps from China to Leiden for Li Haifeng’s The Return of the Shred. Stephan Dillemuth described his own Werdegang from artistic pubescence to bohemia to academia, which appears as a research career only in retrospect. Henry Jacobs, who is researcher in residence at the Rietveld Academy, spends his days there in a glass cube. And at the closing panel, course leaders sat next to curators, discussing where do we go from here.

The artist as speaker

The artist as researcher, The Hague, 5-6 February

When I started working for ELIA two years ago, I hadn’t heard yet of artistic research. That wasn’t uncommon then. Even two months ago, I still had to explain it to a group of philosophers and historians of science with an interest in discipline formation, unaware of this new department at their university. Since then, two large articles appeared about it in a national newspaper, announcing the first Dutch doctor of the arts and the Artist as Researcher conference, and that probably reduced the number of innocents in the Netherlands.

There are still not too many people directly invoved in it.  PhDarts, the visual arts programme of the Royal Academy in The Hague, has 6 PhD students; DocARTES around 30 but that’s coordinated from Ghent. Those numbers, however, don’t say everything. Today, the Artist as Researcher Conference started in The Hague, and the attendance was overwhelming.

Do it yourself

Live blogging from the Neu/Now Festival (6)

Floor Plan

Last night Open Batch Theatre performed Floor Plan. They could only do one show because today they flew back for their graduation; Millie, who is doing the blog on neunow.eu, was there in time to have a short interview with them.

Patchmakers and handmade orchestras

We can’t wait. 18 days to go until the Neu/Now Festival opens in Vilnius, Lithuania. In the Jotta Magazine, you can already read interviews with Marloeke van der Vlugt and Karen Skog, both of whom will be presenting their work there.

NEU/NOW

We are inviting all members of ELIA and partner networks to nominate their graduating and freshly graduated student talent for the NEU/NOW Festival, an event that will first take place in virtual space and then live in Vilnius, Cultural Capital of Europe.
NEU/NOW is intended to become a yearly recurrent event that presents the best of the new generation emerging now from art schools around Europe, in all disciplines. Schools can nominate up to two students in each of the five discipline categories.

Deadline for nominations: 10 June

www.neunow.eu