Open Call GATHERING SPELLS
DE.a.RE – DEconstruct and REbuild
Promoted by the international association BJCEM – Biennale des Jeunes Créateurs de
l’Europe et de la Méditerranée, and co-funded by the European Union (Grant Agreement Project 101052900), DE.a.RE is a three-year long research, public program, and educational platform supported by the Creative Europe Program. It comprises three iterations of online classes, conferences, surveys, advocacy, and awareness raising campaigns. Through these activities, it responds to the institutional, ethical, operational and sustainability issues confronting cultural organisations and practitioners in the expanded Mediterranean as they deal with increasing precarisation and radical transitions.
In alignment with BJCEM’s own efforts to become a vector for change, DE.a.RE facilitates spaces for collective study and self-reflective inquiry where artists, curators, art workers, artist initiatives, civil society organisations, local stakeholders and sustainability consultants share their competencies and discuss their challenges. These spaces are set up for participants to foster solidarity among their efforts and to strengthen their capacities to face structural vulnerabilities by learning about existing alternative strategies, and by imagining yet-to-come mechanisms of resource redistribution, transdisciplinary collaborations, instituting otherwise and commoning.
The first course Uncivilised Paradigms (2022) gathered fifty participants from thirty-nine different countries and through various online modalities and invited experts guided them through non-dualist understandings of art/activism, socially engaged practices, queer ecology, permacultural approaches to art production, design justice, participatory theatre, socially-responsive architecture, biomimicry, and regenerative institutioning through/as contemporary artistic practices.
Gathering spells is the title of the second online educational program and it will be built based on the survey completed by two hundred cultural and contemporary arts organisations, developed in collaboration with sociologist Bernardo Armanni.
GATHERING SPELLS
Gathering spells departs from the multifaceted difficulties and responsibilities cultural organisations face across Europe and the transMediterranean today. We are building a participatory educational platform for fifty cultural agents who wish to contribute to local socio-ecological transformation and trans-local solidarity through their organisations.
We invite participants to explore with us pluriversal perspectives and knowledge systems and how they shape their practices. We will share tools, tricks and rituals that will contribute to a collective ideation and experimentation of alternatives that respond to deeply-rooted political and economic structural issues. In addition, we will critically reflect on what it means to implement a sustainable operational framework as a cultural organisation by acknowledging and including pluri-geographical perspectives. Gathering spells will also delve into how organisations could become agents of regeneration for their local multispecies (human and more-than-human) communities.
Beyond the local, how can just, trans-local networks be cultivated sustainably in an era of hypernationalist rhetoric and urgent energy transition? And in terms of a just energy transition, how could the increasing dependence on digital infrastructure for promoting artists and exhibiting art align with the sector’s significant carbon footprint? How does increasing online circulation of art and the globalisation of culture impact precarious cultural producers and marginalised sites of artistic production? These questions, along with the answers we receive from the survey will become the building blocks for Gathering spells.
STRUCTURE
Gathering Spells is a fifty-hour long online program open to fifty participants. The program is separated into modules presented in different modalities and inspired by diverse practices of assembling and collaborative study. The first twenty hours of the program will be reserved to invited presenters while the remaining thirty hours will be co-planned together with the participants and shaped by the needs raised in the survey. Multiple conversations, developed in the perspective of an agora of voices, will be coordinated by facilitators with the aim of building translocal alliances and discussing new models of sustainable management of cultural institutions.
The course is in English.
PARTICIPANTS
Cultural operators, art workers, institutional and independent professionals who are
interested in, or with experience in the programs’ themes are encouraged to apply.
- Fifty people will be selected to participate in the course.
- All the cultural operators, including BJCEM members and partners can apply to this call.
THE TEAM
Alessandro Castiglioni
Alessandro Castiglioni is Senior Curator and Deputy Director of Museo MA*GA, Gallarate. He is Lecturer of Art and Design History at Istituto Marangoni, Milano. He has collaborated with many institutions such as: Galleria Nazionale, San Marino; MUSE, Trento; Gamba Castle, Aosta; Italian Cultural Institute, London; MCA, Valletta; National Gallery of Iceland, Reykjavik. In 2019 he was co-curator of San Marino Pavilion at the 58th Biennale di Venezia. Since 2014 he co-directs with Simone Frangi, A Natural Oasis?. With Simone Frangi he was also Senior Curator of School of Waters – Mediterranea 19, San Marino. Among his publications: Exercises for a polluted mind (Postmedia books, 2019); Kerouac Beat Painting (Skira, 2017), Urban Mining (Corraini, 2016); The Voices of the Sirens (Mousse Publishing, 2015).
Simone Frangi
Simone Frangi is a researcher and writer working at the intersection of critical thinking, curatorial research, and education. He holds a French-Italian Ph.D. in Aesthetics and Theory of Art, and he currently serves as Professor of Theory of Contemporary Art at Fine Arts and Design Academy in Grenoble (FR), where he founded and coordinates with Katia Schneller the Research Unit”’ Hospitalité artistique et activisme visuel pour une Europe diasporique et post-occidentale” (2015-ongoing). He co-directs Live Works – Free School of Performance at Centrale Fies (Trento, IT) and runs “A Natural Oasis?” A Transnational Research Programme with Alessandro Castiglioni. In 2021 he became Senior Curator of School of Waters – Mediterranea 19. In 2021 he also co-published with Lucrezia Cippitelli the anthology “Colonialità e Culture Visuali in Italia” (Mimesis, 2021).
Denise Araouzou
Denise Araouzou is a curator and researcher. Following an MA in History of Art at the University of Glasgow (2011-2015), she is currently pursuing an MA in Education for Sustainable Development at the University of Gothenburg (2021-2023) and Collective Practices II: Symbiotic Organizations (2021-2022) at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. At the intersection of these two programs, she is working on a research project titled Learning on a damaged planet, supported by KONE Foundation, that actively explores the theoretical, conceptual and practical possibilities of developing eco pedagogies through artistic and curatorial practices, and within their institutional frameworks in Cyprus, Italy, Sweden and Finland. She was one of the members of the curatorial team of School of Waters – Mediterranea 19 and was also a member of the second edition of A Natural Oasis? (2018- 2020).
Svetlana Racanovic
Svetlana Racanović is art historian, contemporary art critic and curator from Montenegro. She holds Ph.D. in Transdisciplinary Studies of Modern arts and Media. Since 1996, she has been active as art critic and as curator of a number of art exhibitions in Montenegro and abroad including two presentations of Montenegro at the Venice Biennale in 2005 and 2011. She published two books, one that relates Marina Abramovic’s oeuvre (Marina Abramović – Od reza do šava (2019), Geopoetika, Belgrade, the other that relates Montenegrin art scene around 2000 (Milenijumski bag?! – Crnogorska umjetnička scena oko 2000: (2009), CSU, Podgorica. She was a Fulbright Scholarship Grantee (Research Scholar) in New York City in 2014.
BJCEM
BJCEM is a network of 47 members, ranging from cultural institutions to independent organisations located in 16 countries across the Mediterranean and Europe. BJCEM aims at fostering mutual understanding, intercultural dialogue, and collaboration in the arts among young creators, around the Mediterranean. Its projects and activities provide training, mobility, and exchange opportunities that, in turn, support artists’ creative processes, through personal and professional growth.
PROGRAM
The results of the course will feed into a day-long conference organised in collaboration with Fluks – Centre for Young Art in Kristiansand, Norway, the upcoming fall 2023.
APPLICATION PROCEDURE
Requested application material:
- Letter of intent outlining (max. 1 page):
-
- reasons for your interest in attending the course;
- what you would like to offer in terms of know-how, tools, tips etc. to the group of participants;
- what you would like to receive through this educational platform;
- who from your local community inspires you these days;
- who from abroad inspires you these days;
- your preferred day and time availability;
- any accessibility requirements.
- Application form: to be downloaded HERE
- Respond to the survey
- Updated CV (max. 2 pages)
All material should be sent to masterclass@bjcem.org not later than May 14, 2023. The results are announced on May 29, 2023. Any application not complying with the requirements will be rejected.
SELECTION PROCEDURE
The applications will be selected by Executive Director of BJCEM Federica Candelaresi and the members of the Scientific Committee (Alessandro Castiglioni, Simone Frangi, Denise Araouzou, and Svetlana Racanović). We are committed to improving representation from ethnically diverse, marginalised and lower socio-economical communities and those with a disability.
COURSE SCHEDULE
The detailed program is to be published upon the results of an international survey. The survey is to be disseminated to more than 200 institutional and independent cultural operators.
TERMS
No registration fee is requested for the application or taking part in the course.
The selected participants will be contacted by email. Final results will be communicated on
BJCEM’s website.
PRIVACY
Each candidate authorises the processing of personal data in accordance with the current protection legislation and the provisions of EU Reg. 679/2016 relating to the “protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data” (GDPR). The personal data acquired by BJCEM are processed exclusively for the purposes related to the call procedure, or to execute obligations established by law. The owners of personal data have the right to request updating, rectification, or, if interested, updating the data.
CONTACT DETAILS
BJCEM Executive Office Giulia Colletti
digitalcurator@bjcem.org
+39 011 19504733