From 22nd July until 24th July I’ll be attending and participating in the Association of Arte Útil Summit which will be held at mima.

Full details of this Summit can be found on the mima website here – mima Arte Útil Summit or here on the Associaiton of Arte Útil website.

Here’s a link to is a recent interview, in ArtReview, with curator (and Association of Arte Útil collaborator) Charles Esche – Charles Esche on how art might respond to the European crisis.

In the interview Esche mentions a possible ‘Office of Useful Art’ in Granby, Liverpool,) and the need to develop a usable theory/aesthetic discourse capable of accounting for and articulating the new and emergent ‘transdisciplinary’ work that might no longer look or sound like art as we currently know it.

From Monday 28th June to Wednesday 29th of June the Editorial Team for the Constituencies research Strand of the L’Internationale project ‘The Uses of Art: The Legacies of 1848 and 1989’ met up in Moderna Galleria, Ljubljana. After a very intense, very productive and critically reflective two days the team has developed an outline for the forthcoming publication ‘The Constituent Museum’ and correspond symposium (to be held in mima in early September’) that we hope will act as a framework for developing further debate in the sector around the development of (and necessity for) constituent practices of production, display and distribution.

From March 27 to 29 2016 I was invited to attend and participate in the ¿Creative Villages? Seminar which was organized as a collaboration between the Ecole cantonale d’art du Valais (ECAV) and LAPS, Research Institute for Art and Public Space, Amsterdam

The premise of the seminar was to take the territory of Leytron/Ovronnaz in Switzerland as a topographical metaphor to address contemporary dynamics of art in public sphere. The seminar itself provided an opportunity to begin radically re-thinking the relationship of 1:1 art practice to the instrumentalization, and commercialization, of the public sphere through contemporary art projects. In the light of this, the seminar also provided an opportunity to also discuss the kind of work, or labour, that the work of art is now becoming under the present conditions of neo-liberal capital.

I’m very grateful for both the invite to this Seminar and for the opportunity to discuss some of these issues with my peers and colleagues. It is not often that we get the time to do this and, through collaboration, encourage ourselves to think a little differently. As a result I’ve agreed to write and extended essay for the project which, when it is finished, I’ll also hope to post on this site. I also hope to develop a working relationship with and to the project as a means to continue thinking through some of these key issues.

From 2 – 4 March 2016 The ‘Constituencies’ Glossary of Common Knowledge took place at Liverpool John Moores University’s ‘School of Art and Design’. Over the two day period of the Glossary (co-curated in this instance by Zdenka Badovnic, Bojana Piskur and myself) a Keynote talk by Raul Sanchez Cedillo was followed by seminar presentations and discussion from guest including Nick Aickens (Van Abbemuseum, NL); Marwa Arsanios (LB); Zdenka Badovinac, Bojana Piškur, Adela Železnik (MG+MSUM, SI); John Byrne (Liverpool John Moores University, UK); Lia Colombino (Red conceptualismo del sur, PY); Khwezi Gule (SA);  Anders Krueger (M HKA, BE); Alexey Penzin (Chto Delat, RU); Ahmet Öğüt (TR);  Meriç Öner (SALT Research, TR); Raúl Sánchez Cedillo; Aida Sánchez de Serdio (Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, MNCARS, SP), pantxo ramas (MACBA, SP). Guests were also invited for a tour and talk of the Granby 4 Streets Project in Toxteth, Liverpool and were also invited for tours and dinners at ‘The Florrie’ and ‘Static Gallery’ (http://www.statictrading.com/).