RESEARCH home >
RESEARCH STRAND #1
2020/22 SHARING OF/AS INFRASTRUCTURE
A CONTEXTUAL NOTE ON OUR RESEARCH THEME:
Throughout the last 20 years in the fields of dance & performing arts there has been a focus, both economically & discursively on developing international co-operations, touring, cultural exchange. Artists then need to travel in order to earn a living, maintain and gain opportunities, often causing them to be only ‘based’ in Berlin, compromising our commitment and responsibility to our community. The effects of such a transient lifestyle which also plays into a Neo-liberal one, renders people everywhere and nowhere at the same time. But is this the only way?
In addition, the climate crisis, the awareness of our individual co2 footprint, reflectionson our modes of transport become more present in public discourse. So what happens when an artist decides or has to remain at home? Are there other ways of producing and doing work more locally? Can we think of another model & rhythm of generating relations?
Besides touring or networking, what structures can we work towards? What can we gain from other non artistic modes of being local? What can we learn from living and working in the city we call home? W hat types of social lives are we arranging? How do we condition our living together?
Dealing with the complexity of the idea and reality of being local is the ongoing concern and focus for our collective neue häute, formed by international artists and curators based in Berlin. We are currently developing a cooperative artist run space at Uferstudios (Wedding) that opened on November 1st 2020.
Our artistic program, focussed on process-oriented, collaborative, interdisciplinary practices, responds to the identity and physicality of 2 spaces: a community café/artist-run bar and a Kitchen/lab-room.
RESEARCH AIMS:
to reflect on the dynamics of local production, to understand “how the work works” by looking from the point of inscription in the context of different practices or positions.
to open the process of artistic & social research and make it accessible to local audiences, expanding the process of knowledge generation being receptive to wider audiences through local alliances.
to act on the work space as an area of symbolic production and exchange in which different logics may rule beyond the material value, fixing a landscape of oral or organic transactions running along with the process.
to produce affections and new symbolic links in the context of the community where we are embedded (professional, social, geographical), superposing new imageris to the daily practices, producing communality as public good, negotiating different levels of knowledge: sedimentation - poetics of distribution and circulation.
to reformulate the concept of curated venue from a paralized & prescribed institutional logic towards a perception of space as a shared resource, as a shared infrastructure enhancing the local scene, acting as a mediation tool to communicate to wider audiences discursive & economic contemporary approaches in art which critically address burning social issues affecting Berlin’s ecology of work.
to enrich our individual artistic pathways through the intersection with other fields in and outside of art, taking artistic research as a context in itself for experimentation, learning and collaboration across disciplines.