During March and April 2016 a series of meetings took place between ‘The Uses of Art Lab‘, LJMU, mima (Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art), The Association of Arte Útil www.arte-util.org and ‘The Florrie’ in Toxteth, Liverpool. The purpose of these meetings was to begin an on-going conversation about developing the work of the Uses of Art Lab in direct partnership with the Florrie. A strong link already exists between the Florrie and LJMU/L’internationale – in March 2016 delegates of the Glossary of Common Knowledge ‘Constituencies’ seminar visited the Florrie as part of their discussions. The relationship between ‘The Uses of Art Lab’ and the ‘Florrie’, and their broader relationships within the context of mima, The Association of Arte Útil and L’internationale, mark a significant platform for the development of local, national and international research into constituencies and the development of ground-up and open-access educational resources for the Uses of Art.

From December 12th to 14th 2016 the L’Internationale Project Team for ‘The Uses of Art: The Legacies of 1848 and 1989’ met at Macba (Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona) for their penultimate project meeting. Discussions included a set of themes for the final ‘L’Internationale Dialogues’ project, which will see a range of curators, artists, activists and thinkers discuss issues of ‘Use’. During our time at Macba the first of these dialogues ‘Art, Museums and Democracy’  – a discussion between Manuel Borja-Villel, Director of Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid), Bart De Baere, General and artistic Direoctor of M HKA (Antwerp) and Charles Esche, Director of the Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven) – took place on December 12th.

These dialogues will uploaded to the L’Internationale online platform at www.internationaleonle.org. There will be four ‘threads’ to the L’Internationale dialogues programme, these are:

• Who is speaking?
• What is true?
• What needs to change?
• Where is South?

The L’Internationale Dialogues can be found online at:

www.internationaleonline.org/dialogues/

On December 8^th 2016 Alessandra Saviotti and Gemma Medina, who run the ‘Broadcasting the Archive’ Project for The Association of Arte Útil, together with a group of constituents from mima http://www.visitmima.com/?home=true (Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art) visited the Granby 4 Streets area in Toxteth, Liverpool. After looking around the area, and also seeing the work being done by the Granby 4 Streets Community Land Trust and Turner Prize winning group Assemble, discussions took place in the Granby Office of Useful Art around archiving, knowledge exchange, future practice and the potential of the Association of Arte Útil as a ground-up and constituent platform for developing open-source forms of education and use-based collaboration. You can find a reflection of Alessandra and Gemma’s visit to Middlesbrough and Liverpool in ‘Broadcasting the Archive 9# – Reflections on Participation on the Association of Arte Útil website at http://www.arte-util.org/broadcasting-the-archive9-reflexions-on-participation/