UPCOMING ONLINE SERIES
ASSEMBLE: TOOLS NOT ARTEFACTS // Talk
6. NOV 2024. 11:00-13:00 CET // Sign up here.
The talk will explore the way in which Assemble have employed and appropriated the tools of architecture, art and social practice in their work with communities and organisations in Glasgow, Liverpool and Oslo. Baltic Street Adventure Playground is a child-led playground in East Glasgow created by Assemble in the area where the Commonwealth Games venues were being constructed in 2014. The project is a permanent, free to access playground where children can play freely and deeply and come and go as they choose. Granby Four Streets is a partnership between Assemble and the Granby Four Streets Community Land Trust, one of the UK’s first community housing groups. In 2013, a group of residents, who had for 20 years resisted Council plans to compulsorily purchase and demolish their homes, began working with Assemble. Together they have developed an approach that expands community ownership and supports a resident-led renewal of the Granby Triangle neighbourhood by using the transformation of the Victorian terraces to start a new local manufacturing business, constructing new community spaces, and much-needed affordable housing. Art in Hovinbyen was a project to redesign the way in which the City of Oslo and KORO, the Norwegian organisation responsible for commissioningpublic art projects, realise art projects in public spaces.
Assemble are a London-based group that work across and in-between the fields of architecture, art and design. We have made buildings, fabricated furniture and facades, produced artworks, planted gardens and curated exhibitions and events. We develop business plans and initiate organisations where available resources can be more impactfully employed as new forms of social rather than spatial infrastructure. We design, construct and manage workspaces. We curate and teach, give talks and lectures, write books and publish research. Founded in 2010 by a group of friends to undertake a single self-built project, Assemble’s organisational structure has changed shape over the years. We work together co-operatively, valuing consensus, debate and collaboration. Our organisation functions as a constellation of different activities and businesses that are interconnected but which enable and support growing specialism in fields including the provision of light industrial workspace in the city and spaces that enable children’s free play.
NEW VISIONS: INSIDE(R)/OUTSIDE(R) IN COMMUNITY ENGAGED ART // Workshop
4. DEZ 2024. 11:00 - 13:00 CET // Sign up here.
The workshop is created for artists and creatives of different disciplines who work or aspire to work with communities. It is designed as a space for exploring the role of arts in fostering social justice, reflect on the impact of (social) positions, personal life journeys, and power dynamics on artistic practice, and tapping into tools and insights for creating meaningful, context-sensitive and equitable relationships and connections, when engaging with communities (in a broad understanding of this term).
The workshop is based on interactive and self-reflective exercises to facilitate introspection processes and conversations about building relationships across differences, with a particular focus on community-engaged artistic practices. Participants are invited to explore their life-journeys and positionality, reflect on their previous community oriented artistic practices, work with different case studies of community-engaged art, and exchange and learn about tools and practices that can be applied in working with diverse communities and entering spaces as an “outsider”.
new visions is an art&education collective that creates learning spaces and performative experiences rooted in queer-feminist and decolonial approaches to strive for more equitable, caring and power-sensitive ways of “doing” arts and culture. We support art practitioners, culture makers, grassroots movements, change-makers, communities, and social justice organizations by researching and creating gatherings, and retreats and conducting research and programming solutions. The workshop will be facilitated by Agnieszka Bułacik and Nat Skoczylas.
ENSAYOS: REHEARSING THE END - Collective Research as Multispecies Dialogue // Talk
18. DEZ 2024. 17:00-19:00 CET // Sign up here.
Ensayos is a collective research practice centred on multispecies dialogues, coastal health and peatland protection. Initiated on the archipelago of Tierra del Fuego in 2010 by curator Camila Marambio, Ensayos (meaning “inquiries”, “essays” or “rehearsals” in English) first focused solely on the ecopolitical issues impacting the Fuegian archipelago and its inhabitants–past and present, human and nonhuman. Now, other archipelagos have come into view, with research “pods” growing in Norway, New York and Australia. The mission of Ensayos is to do eco-cultural conservation work in Tierra del Fuego and other archipelagos through collaborative art, science and community projects in partnership with existing decolonial, ecological, and cultural conservation initiatives.
Art as Social Practice is a programme for artists of all disciplines who want to situate and expand their practice within social fields. How can artistic practices connect with the concerns of cultural, socio-cultural and political education and their existing pedagogical and systemic dimensions? How can we generate and weave alternative knowledge in collective artistic processes?
The programme invites participants to discuss the hopes and challenges of artistic processes in social practices together with other practitioners and guest lecturers, and to imagine future forms of working and relating across different groups of knowledge.
Art as social practice takes place in a variety of constellations and moves within different political and social contexts and their specific conditions. Exemplary fields of work are collaborations with schools and daycare centres, neighbourhood work, artistic work with different age and interest groups, actionist interventions in public space and many more. Initiating and moderating participation and collaboration as artistic processes in these different contexts requires not only a high degree of sensitivity and interprofessional understanding from artists, but also a great deal of inventiveness in order to encounter different settings and groups of knowledge.
The programme invites artists who already have some initial experience working artistically in social fields or cultural education. In the framework of four dialogue-oriented modules, the programme offers the opportunity to learn from and with guest lecturers from different contexts of cultural, socio-cultural and socio-political work and to exchange ideas about their own practices and disciplines. In addition to studying transferable skills and teaching tools and strategies, the programme aims to stimulate exchange and networking between arts practitioners and (para-)institutional structure and to create a platform for collaboration. As a complement to an artistic Master's degree or an artistic practice recognised as equivalent, Art as Social Practice imparts knowledge and (self-)awareness to enable artists to cooperate on an equal footing and responsibly with actors and institutions of societal and social contexts as well as within fields of cultural education.
Art as Social Practice is being initiated and supported by Crespo Foundation and offered by the Hessian Theatre Academy and the Frankfurt University of Music and Performing Arts in dialogue with the Hessian art academies and is aimed at artists of all disciplines. In distinction to a formal degree, the programme serves as a platform for exchange and networking in an experimental sense, enabling free discourse with experts and colleagues and equipping artists with more self-confidence and ability to act in cooperation with educational and art institutions.
Art as Social Practice will begin its second round in October 2024. Between October 2024 and March 2025 participants will meet in the context of four modules lasting several days (see below for dates) at various locations in Frankfurt, Hesse and the surrounding area. Suitable accommodation will be provided and travel expenses will be reimbursed as part of a lump sum. Between the modules there will be a series of online workshops.
Setareh Alipour, Larissa Bertonasco, Anne-Sophie Brunhold, Nina deLudemann, Gregor Glogowski, Saskia Henning von Lange, Sonja Drolma Herrmann, Haytham Hmeidan, Lara Jakobi, Donata Koschel, Jule Kriesel, Naho Matsuda, Ira Melkonyan, Ana Clara Montenegro, Lisa Peil, Colette Utama Sarjano McDonald, Marc Szpuner, Tristan Marie Trotz and Azad Yesilmen
Dates:
MODULE 1: LISTENING
24. - 27.10.2024 / GEBHARDSHÜTTE, ODENWALD
MODULE 2: COMMUNITIES OF SUPPORT / RADICAL PEDAGOGIES
20 - 24.11.2024 / FRANKFURT AM MAIN
MODULE 3: STRATEGIES AND METHODOLOGIES
11 - 17.01.2025 / PERFORMING ARTS FORUM ST. ERME, FRANCE
MODULE 4: SOCIAL IMAGINARIES
26 - 30.03.2025 / FRANKFURT AM MAIN
The dates for the online workshops will be announced later.
You can download last year's 23/24 curriculum here.
To participate, please apply until 12th June 2024 with the following documents:
The application can be submitted in writing (as one pdf document) or as an audio or video message. If you are submitting videos or audios, upload them to Vimeo, YouTube or SoundCloud and send us the respective links. Please send your application documents to kasp_at_orga.hfmdk-frankfurt.de.
We offer two Infosessions on Zoom:
On 13th of May at 11am and 3rd of June at 5pm
Link sent on request (kasp_at_orga.hfmdk-frankfurt.de)
If required, suitable accommodation will be provided for overnight stays during the modules; meals will be provided during the module days. Travel costs to attend the modules will be reimbursed. The programme will take place in German and English spoken language as agreed. Sign language interpreters can be organized if required. Unfortunately, the Gebhardshütte is not wheelchair accessible. All venues have all-gender toilets. Participants are welcome to bring their children to the modules. Unlearning ableist and discriminatory structures is part of the curriculum; nevertheless, the programme still acts in a world that continues to dis-able. We rely on feedback to break down existing barriers. If you need assistance or support, or have questions about or feedback on accessibility, please be in touch via kasp_at_orga.hfmdk-frankfurt.de.
Frida Laux, MA in Choreography and Performance, works as artist, educator and curator in the field of social practice. Through transdisciplinary and process-based collaborations, she engages with art as a collective and (con)textual practice that explores how we relate as a wider ecology of knowledge. She has worked on accessibility and accountability as relational and generative practices and engages in the co-organization of the Performing Arts Forum in St Erme (France). Her collaborative works have been invited and shown at festivals and venues such as Künstler*innenhaus Mousonturm Frankfurt, Teatro Il Lavatoio Santarcangelo, Queer Zagreb Festival, MOT Festival Skopje, Act Festival Bulgaria, Hessische Theatertage and Festival Implantieren Frankfurt. Since 2023, she has headed the Art as Social Practice program at the HfMDK Frankfurt, which brings together artists who are involved in social contexts. Forthcoming is the publication Access and Exhaustion, exploring practices and perspectives that seek to expand the concept of accessibility in art and beyond.
E: frida.laux_at_hfmdk-frankfurt.de
Janka Visky studied political science, discourse and ideology analysis and social and cultural anthropology at Babes-Bolyai University Cluj-Napoca, University of Essex and Goethe University Frankfurt. She is interested in how the aesthetics of participatory theatre can contribute to democratic processes and currently she is writing her master's thesis based on the case study of Kerekasztal Theatre in Education Company, Budapest. She workst as project assistant at Art as Social Practice.
E: janka.visky_at_hfmdk-frankfurt.de
For general inquiries and questions, please mail to kasp_at_orga.hfmdk-frankfurt.de