Creative Practice Showcases
Jagiellonian University
Skyway - a Creative Collaboration: Artistic Practices beyond the Museum
Creative Practice Showcase Ola Wlusek
Skyway 20/21 exhibition, now in its second iteration, was a celebration of artistic practices in the Tampa Bay region, as it was a unique collaboration between Florida, USA's four institutions: the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg; The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota; the Tampa Museum of Art; and the University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa. Working together, curators from each institution offered context for the diversity of art being made in five counties. Many of the artists represented in Skyway 20/21 work in familiar fine art media, such as painting, sculpture, or photography, but their practices incorporate interdisciplinary approaches to art-making. Through site-specific investigations and community engagements, their work expands the artist’s studio and gallery space into the community at large. Each artist's work had a significant impact in the Tampa Bay area, but also resonated far beyond the local. Their artistic practices inhabited the intersections of the personal and the political. The artists mined their unique experiences, the experiences of their communities, and the collective consciousness in order to explore the politics of visibility and agency in the 21st century on a global scale. For example, through her collaborative projects, such as NOMAD Art Bus, Justice Studio, and SPACEcraft, artist Carrie Boucher works to highlight and address disparities by facilitating creative engagements and organizing networks of artistic support in places where individuals typically lack access to the means of artistic production. How can curators champion social practice in their collaborative approaches to exhibition-making?
"When the Wind Whips the Fire” and “Maestra’s Children": New Songs from an Ancient Tale View Digital Media
Creative Practice Showcase Lisa Parkins
This lecture performance focuses on continued development of a song cycle exploring the climate change crisis. How does the creative artist evoke the enormity of the disaster and reimagine a way forward? Inspired by “Erysichthon” from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, this song cycle tells the story of a man whose greed leads him to cut down the great tree in Demeter’s sacred grove. Enraged, the goddess of grain and sacred law curses him with infinite hunger. To satisfy his insatiable need, Erysichthon sells his daughter, Maestra, over and over again. In the end, he literally devours himself. In the imagined reality of this performance, Maestra’s children are the inheritors of Erysichthon’s’ hubristic legacy; Demeter’s fertile earth has been deeply harmed. But this is no myth–our future is in peril. The presentation will feature two new original songs that deconstruct Ovid’s story. “When the Wind Whips the Fire” depicts climate change as spectacle; Demeter’s ancient rage manifests as today’s choking droughts, extreme firestorms, and megafloods. “Maestra’s Children” departs from the mythic tale. The song tells the story of multi-generational arrogance and neglect, and the consequences we face as a result. It speaks to the human capacity to face the unthinkable and is a call for collective action. Drawing on the field of Performance Studies, the artist/scholar will discuss this project in relation to: Timothy Morton’s theory of hyperobjects; Shawn Wilson’s indigenous interpretation of capitalism and concept of relationality; David Graeber’s and David Wengrow’s critique of accepted historical narratives and rationale for reconstructing society.
The Time that Remains. Barrio El Aguilucho, an Interactive Documentary - Creating an Experience of Time, Place and Local Participation within an Elderly Community: Communicating from Proximity, Memory, Imagination and the Uncertainties of a Possible Life View Digital Media
Creative Practice Showcase Susana Foxley
The Time that Remains. Barrio El Aguilucho (www.eltiempoquequeda.cl) is a documentary project that explores the power of digital interactive technology, mix media (photo collage, photo portraits, video, navigation tools) and local participation, to propose an experience of proximity with a neighborhood in Santiago, Chile. In El Aguilucho street, multiple journeys of neighbors converge, between walks, meetings, and conversations. Ways of living and feeling time and place in an elderly community in which remembering, thinking collectively or imagining, modulate the future and the uncertainties of a possible life. The documentary invites the user to interact during a day -morning, afternoon and night- with the place, its residents and the natural environment, through narrative and sensory content. Over five years, the project explores modes of collaborative research and production with more than 90 participants of El Aguilucho neighborhood and its social organizations, from which emerge perspectives, aims and dilemmas of its residents. A community of working class origin, established in the 1930´s in the district of Providencia, which did not undergo economic growth as its surroundings. Resident´s monthly pensions are approximately US $170, about forty percent of the minimum Chilean wage. We present the findings of the research and creative process of The Time that Remains. Barrio el Aguilucho, in order to discuss on the potentials of documentary representation, interactivity and multimedia as means of community expression and participation from proximity, raising questions about engagement, social experience, and the arts.
