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How do artists and practicioners who work in collaborative settings navigate their ways between co-creation and conflict?
In today’s contemporary art practices, many artists take on several parallel roles such as teachers, organizers, community leaders and facilitators. While terms such as participation, collaboration and co-creation have gained extreme popularity, they are hardly easy roads to take, and hold great potential for conflict and disconnectivity among the participating sides.
Unlike the practical or historical knowledge imparted in art education on community art practices, skills in conflict resolution and facilitation are often absent, leaving many practitioners to confront challenges unprepared. Drawing on Chantal Mouffe’s concept of ‘agonistic struggle’, which instead of asking for a consensus to take place opens up a discursive arena, as well as Donna Haraway’s idea ‘staying-with’, which recognizes our complicity in the current planetary crisis while also working to change it, this workshop will look for the possibility of a productive and dynamic space within the current socio-political-ethical ground.
Through reflections on personal experience and broader artistic practices, this symposium poses critical questions: How do artists and cultural workers deal with conflict and disconnectivity? How can they manage conflict without necessarily the need for consensus? What alternative methods of communication can be employed in collaborative settings? By addressing experiences and potential questions, as well as a hands-on knowledge focusing on practice and experience, the symposium will seek to reimagine artistic collaboration as a space where tensions become opportunities for recognition and growth.
Date: 27-28 March
Venue: Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect, Maria-Theresia-Str. 21, 81675 Munich
Organiser: Işıl Eğrikavuk
Please register here by 20 March.
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27-28 March, Breaking Bad … together. Navigating around disconnectivity and conflict in community art practices
How do artists and practicioners who work in collaborative settings navigate their ways between co-creation and conflict?
In today’s contemporary art practices, many artists take on several parallel roles such as teachers, organizers, community leaders and facilitators. While terms such as participation, collaboration and co-creation have gained extreme popularity, they are hardly easy roads to take, and hold great potential for conflict and disconnectivity among the participating sides.
Unlike the practical or historical knowledge imparted in art education on community art practices, skills in conflict resolution and facilitation are often absent, leaving many practitioners to confront challenges unprepared. Drawing on Chantal Mouffe’s concept of ‘agonistic struggle’, which instead of asking for a consensus to take place opens up a discursive arena, as well as Donna Haraway’s idea ‘staying-with’, which recognizes our complicity in the current planetary crisis while also working to change it, this workshop will look for the possibility of a productive and dynamic space within the current socio-political-ethical ground.
Through reflections on personal experience and broader artistic practices, this symposium poses critical questions: How do artists and cultural workers deal with conflict and disconnectivity? How can they manage conflict without necessarily the need for consensus? What alternative methods of communication can be employed in collaborative settings? By addressing experiences and potential questions, as well as a hands-on knowledge focusing on practice and experience, the symposium will seek to reimagine artistic collaboration as a space where tensions become opportunities for recognition and growth.
Date: 27-28 March
Venue: Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect, Maria-Theresia-Str. 21, 81675 Munich
Organiser: Işıl Eğrikavuk
Please register here by 20 March.
Continue Reading
23 January 2025
In Bertolt Brecht's work, “The Great Method” was usually read as a cipher for Marxist dialectics. However, viewed from the present day, his thinking is more reminiscent of innovators such as Antonio Gramsci or Stuart Hall than Hegel.
For Brecht, “The Great Method” is not a Marxist law of nature or philosophy of progress, but a “practical doctrine”: a tool for achieving the ability to act under constantly changing conditions. Brecht's program thus appears as “without guarantees” or “without warranties” and as a methodological challenge: curatorial, artistic, scientific, practical, political. For the Brecht Festival under Julian Warner's artistic direction, this meant from day one: when society changes, festival visitors and their traditional histories and customs become more diverse, technological means develop and material conditions change, the understanding of theater inevitably changes. The festival and audience took this realization into account when a parade carried the Brecht carpet from the Golden Hall across the Ulrichsbrücke to Lechhausen, local politics were turned into a wrestling match in the wedding hall of the Alevi community and the Lederle was transformed into a power club. What does it mean curatorially, culturally and politically to act according to the motto “Brecht without guarantees”?
The conference is part of the