the coming community

strategies of collectivity
COMMUNITY AS A RESISTANCE TO IMMANANTE
POWER (JEAN LUC NANCY)

How to act together, how to think differently about

« official » narrative, how to consider the different
forms of history (oral, body, different forms of
« archive » ) as a form of resistance?

How to unlearn (decolonise) the patriarchal and

colonial structures?

How to shape another possible world, how work within

the today’s « conflicts »?
Begging of Culture Studies

In the summer of 1983, the Jamaican scholar Stuart Hall, who

lived and taught in England, travelled to the University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign, to deliver a series of lectures on
something called “Cultural Studies.” At the time, many
academics still considered the serious study of popular culture
beneath them; a much starker division existed, then, between
what Hall termed the “authenticated, validated” tastes of the
upper classes and the unrefined culture of the masses. But Hall
did not regard this hierarchy as useful. Culture, he argued, does
not consist of what the educated élites happen to fancy, such
as classical music or the fine arts. It is, simply, “experience
lived, experience interpreted, experience defined.” And it can
tell us things about the world, he believed, that more
traditional studies of politics or economics alone could not.

(centre) stands on the heat-sensitive floor of her Turbine Hall
commission at Tate Modern. Photograph: Guy
Bell/Rex/Shutterstock, 2019.
Rather collective than individual
Avantgarde movements such DADA, Russian futurist,
impressionists, or even Nazarens in Rome 1810-30
(according to Angelika Nollert) - worked against an
academic understanding of what happened before
Since the 1990s, art continued to force these
traditions by expanding the exhibition framework and
discovering itself as a « social space » and developing
participatory approaches
creating a new situations, micro-utopias:
Relational aesthetics; artists as producers of
situations, a kind of ongoing long-term process with
an unclear begging and end (Dominique
Gonzalez-Foerster, Jorge Pardo, Carsten Holler, Philippe
Parreno, Liam Gillick, Rikrit Tiravanija, Angela Bulloch,
Maurizio Cattelan) = artists proposing social methods of
exchange, different communication process, and
audience is often co-producer, participant
IS IT ART (REALLY) USEFUL? HOW IT ACTS WITHIN REALITY OF
SOCIETY?

Arte Útil roughly translates into English as 'useful art' but it goes
further suggesting art as a tool or device. For the past ten years
the artist Tania Bruguera has been teaching and researching Arte
Útil through an academy in Havana; the Arte Útil lab at Queens
Museum, residencies at Immigrant Movement International, New
York and most recently the Museum of Arte Útil, in the Old
Building of the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven.

Whether through self-organised groups, individual initiatives or

the rise of user generated content people are developing new
methods and social formations to deal with issues that were
once the domain of the state. Arte Útil case studies show how
these initiatives are not isolated incidents, but part of a global
movement shaping our contemporary world.
The notion of what constitutes Arte Útil has been arrived at via a
set of criteria that was formulated by Tania Bruguera and
curators at the Queens Museum, New York, Van Abbemuseum,
Eindhoven and Grizedale Arts, Coniston.

SOURCE : https://museumarteutil.net/about/
From a Museum to a Social Powerplant

The old building of the Van Abbemuseum reopens as the

Museum of Arte Útil, a place where art's use value and social
function is put to the test. The Museum of Arte Útil presents
an archive of over two hundred case studies that imagine,
create and implement beneficial outcomes by producing
tactics that change how we act in society.

How can we 'use' the museum? How can it become a civic

institution for production and output? Through this project,
the ambition is to transform the museum into a Social
Power Plant, where spectators become users and collective,
transformative energy can be generated for use in the world
outside. The case studies from the archive provide the fuel
for the Social Power Plant, the presentations are a toolkit for
users to re-purpose tactics and methodologies to their own
ends.
The Arte Útil archive presents a Arte Útil archive nr:
growing archive of over two hundred 167
case studies that imagine, create and
implement beneficial outcomes by Initiator:
producing tactics that change how we Michael Clegg and Martin
Guttmann
act in society.
Location:
Michael Clegg and Martin Austria, Germany
Guttmann installed The Open
Public Library by placing Category:
weatherproofed, unlocked pedagogical, economy
bookcases in three different
Users:
neighbourhoods of Graz, Austria. Michael Clegg, Martin
The artists established direct contact Guttmann, citizens of Graz,
with the community through Hamburg, Mainz, and Firmini
collecting donated books
door-to-door. Each bookcase held Maintained by:
those books donated by the Michael Clegg and Martin
community. Guttmann

Certification:
Neighbours could borrow the books Implemented
for a few days and then return them
to the cabinet. Neither registration Duration:
nor a library card was needed. 1991 - 1993
SOCIAL TURN (Claire Bishop)

“social turn”: Social turn was first used in 2006 to describe

the recent return to socially engaged art that is collaborative.
The growing attention of artists for collaborative
practices, and for the participation of the public, that
leads to an art “in which people constitute the central
artistic medium and material, in the manner of theater and
performance.”
As well as attempt to “elimination” of spectator position

Social turn rethink art collectively aligned with political

upheaval (according to Bishop) :

The historic avant-garde in Europe cca 1917

neo-avantgarde leading to 1986 Participatory art in 90s
leads to posit to end of communism in 1989
documenta fifteen

ruangrupa has based documenta fifteen on the

idea of “lumbung”, which directly translates as
“rice barn”, and refers to a communal building
where a community’s harvest is gathered and
distributed as a collective resource

There are art education collectives such as

Another Roadmap Africa Cluster from
Uganda; activist collectives like the
international Arts Collaboratory; and artists
collectives like Aotearoa’s Indigenous queer
collective FAFSWAG, Pari from Sydney’s
western suburbs, or the Syrian-based film ruangupa & Gudskul, Kassel, 2022.
collective Komîna Fîlm a Rojava (The Rojava
Film Commune).
documenta fifteen, ruruHaus, Fridericianum, Kassel, 2022.
Gudskul, Kassel, 2022.
Dormitory, Fridericianum, Kassel, 2022. Photo: Nicolas Wefers.
Tania Bruguera, under the rubric of the Instituto de Artivismo Hannah
Richard Bell
Arendt (INSTAR),

Skulpturen des haitianischen

Kollektivs Atis Rezistans aus
Port-au-Prince in der Kirche St.
Kunigundis - Foto: Frank Sperling

Many of the works at Documenta address

contested histories.
documenta, held every five years in Kassel, is the world’s
most influential show of contemporary art. On 19 June, a day
after the opening, an eight-metre-high banner titled People’s
Justice, painted by the Indonesian art collective Taring Padi,
was hung from a scaffold in Friedrichsplatz, Kassel’s central
square. It was a massive piece of agitprop, a cartoon-like
version of a Diego Rivera mural, depicting perpetrators and
victims of the Suharto regime, beginning with the genocidal
campaign of 1965-66 against real and imagined members of
the Indonesian Communist Party, leftists and ethnic Chinese.

Some demanded the end of Documenta altogether.

The German president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier,
responded by warning ‘there are limits’ to artistic
freedom when it comes to political issues.
Dismantled Taring Padi exhibition piece at Dokumenta, Friedrichsplatz Kassel @Baummapper C BY-SA 3.0 de
The policy of biennialization contributes not least of all to
the construction of local, national, and continental
identity. Its format is thus a direct descendant of the
world fairs that supported the inner nation-building of
colonial and industrial nations of the nineteenth
century.

Many Western biennials, museums, and exhibition

institutions have yet to bid farewell to the legacy of
exoticism and nationalism.

current forms of ideological nation-building by museums

and biennials
Curatorial Ethics ; Situated research, situated knowledge
(Donna J. Haraway)

The “curatorial”, a term used by scholars like Irit Rogoff or Beatrice

von Bismarck, is not identical with the job of curating. While
“curating” is widely seen as a professional set of skills, techniques,
activities and practices, used to create a product (like an event, a
exhibition, a festival), the curatorial is considered by Beatrice von
Bismarck as something wider into which the activities of curating
feed: “Curating is a constellational activity. By combining things
that haven’t been connected before – artworks, artefacts,
information, people, sites, contexts, resources, etc. – it is not
only aesthetically, but also socially, economically, institutionally,
and discursively defined. I understand it less as representation
driven than motivated by the need to become public.”
Interdependency,

“Independence” in culture sphere and field

The ways of how we working cannot be separate from the content

Social injustices in our field, Importance of exchange with artists with place
ect

With art we can really affect and change social and political sphere ;
Stuart Hall did together with Raphael Samuel and Eric Hobsbawn, who later
were described as pioneers of cultural studies. They were convinced that if
we changed culture, we could change the world,
“Decisive here is the idea of an inessential
community, of a solidarity which in no way
concerns an essence”

Giorgio Agamben

What is a collective exhibition under the

conditions of isolation? How do we host each
other, how are we each others guests in
increasing privatisation processes of both
physical and digital spaces? How do we work
together, build and understand community
against, within and beyond capitalist
structures?