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Workshop for curators and cultural workers

DOCVA-Viafarini Fabbrica del Vapore
via Procaccini 4, Milan (Italy)
5th of February 2013 : 4 pm-6 pm (group work)
6.30 pm-7.30 (open discussion and public presentation)

Lead by: Vessel curatorial team

We are engaging collaboratively in a discussion to activate an alternative critical practice responsive to our current time which resembles more often a market-driven economy... while more civic engagement is needed.
The past critique has been a binary logic the neo-liberal regime and the leftist ideologies have both revealed to be ineffective. So, we believe institutions have to move outside of this duality to keep up with the current merging paradoxes and further disclose a new imaginative dimension.

For this reason, we decided to activate a space for collaborative thinking which may allow for the possibility of creating responses to the contemporary way of producing culture.
In particular, we would like to challenge the notion of collaborative practices: How is it possible in our current milieu -a regime of all captive capitalism- to open up a critique through the means of collaborative cultural production towards the rhetoric of ‘consensus’ of neo-liberal democracies? And further how curatorial practices can be the space for experimenting with different strategies that can enhance a more progressive politics for collaboration? What does it mean the act of ‘doing together’?
In order to respond to such issues, we have challenged the format of a manifesto, whose platform can offer us a tool through which we would like to incorporate ‘multiple voices and perspectives’. Even though such a format, in its historical formation was meant to be a ‘fixed’ declaration that unifies singular instances under the name of a collective voice, we believe that in the current panorama where structures of power are ubiquitous and multi-layered, the idea of the manifesto as it was can not be effective to respond to the changed conditions. To contrast the rhetoric of consensus, where the collective voice hides singularities and free expressions, we decided to reshape the manifesto’s confrontational critique towards a ‘schizophrenic’ dimension, where every instance can be respected and incorporated within it.

Despite the fact that we are aware of the limits of this multi-centered discourse, what is important to us is to highlight the necessity to reformulate tools of critique and strategies that we might think at in order to advance a more effective practice within not only curatorial practice, still the focus of our investigation, but within contemporary cultural production at large.

A resulting thanks to the collaboration of the participants of the first International Curatorial Workshop, organised by Vessel in 2011, where, in the notion of a ‘Not (Yet) Manifesto’ the ‘(yet)’ sheds light on the changing idea of what a manifesto is in these times -where the ‘plurality of voices’ can all be counted, and ‘free speech’ needs to be exercised as an ongoing process. It needs to be flexible, mobile and adaptable to different contexts and perspectives.

Vessel already experimented this format in London through the event: “God Save Curators?” where, after inviting cultural operators, curators and researchers instigated a discussion using as a starting point some declarations present in the ‘manifesto’ and then asked the participants, virtual and physical to interact and respond to them. The subsequent step was to publish these comments in order to fix a set in stone in the ‘ongoing’ process, and to instigate further discussions.

In Madrid at Matadero, Vessel presented ‘Not (Yet) a Manifesto’ and surprisingly it immediately gave rise to an informal discussion between the participants. Although on this occasion there were no official comments recorded on it, the debate helped us to ‘re-think’ the manifesto as a tool and to consider what strategy we should adopt next.

So, the workshop in Viafarini, will be the next step of this process which will help the ‘Not (Yet) a Manifesto’ to go further and expand the already contained positions and create a dimension where ‘conflictual’ positions can again emerge to respond to the ‘normalized’ process of collective decision making through the strategy of ‘consensus’.

We invite you, as active thinkers living in the current scenario to generate ideas together in order to develop a new kind of positioning in response to the effects of post-industrial intangible production.