Blog

The best we can. Re-establishing priorities for arts professionals in times of crisis

Arts professionals think that their work is important for society. Nevertheless, when it comes to defining or formulating this value in concrete terms, most of them fail to do so. Far from being able to establish the relevance of what they do for the people they aim to serve, they often seem to be totally unaware of what is going on around them and little informed on contemporary issues that affect their communities. Cuts in budgets for Culture, shrinking teams and an absurd demand for “doing more with less” have further intensified the disconnect between cultural organisations and society. The uncritical execution of repetitive tasks, therefore, has become a comfortable norm, where there seems to be little place for critical thinking, imagination, creativity and, ultimately, happiness. Can there be a way out from this swamp?

Audio

Podcast form Lublin Forum // Introduction into RESHAPE: Imagining alternatives

If you missed the RESHAPE Forum in Lublin at the beginning of April 2019, here's a chance to hear what we talked about.

Audio

Audio Podcast form Lublin Forum // What Is To Be Reshaped, panel discussion

Toni Cots, Igor Stokfiszewski and Amahl Khouri in conversation with Barbara Van Lindt about perspectives of artist, art workers and policy makers in Europe and South Mediterranean.

Audio

Podcast form Lublin Forum // Maja Kuzmanović: The Art of Futuring. Unknown, unknowable & uncertain

The complex uncertainties of our times make engaging with futures increasingly challenging. What could encourage proactive engagement with these challenges? The various approaches to uncertainty found in futures studies offer some starting points; where futures are iteratively imagined, tested, adapted and integrated into everyday experiences, as a continuous refinement of living in the long now.

Blog

Are we ready to RESHAPE ourselves?

Einstein allegedly said that 95% of every problem’s solution lies in forming the right question. The weeks prior to the Reshape meeting in Prague, this thought was constantly running in the background of my mind. What is the right question for our work?

Video

Amina Mourid — On civil society and culture in Tangier

Amina Mourid from Think Tangier speaks about the work of her organization, urban changes that are happening in Tangier and the response of the civil society to it.

Video

Laura Roth: Feminisation of Politics and Activism

Feminism seems to be gaining momentum in many countries, but most organisations and groups are still working based on patriarchal standards. The “feminisation of politics” includes different elements, which all aim to change the way activism and politics (in a broad sense) are done.

News

Workshop in Beirut: How can solidarity funding encourage the vitality of contemporary arts in these uncertain times?

The workshop 24-28 September will be held in Hammana and Beirut and organised by ACT association in collaboration with Hammana Artist House.

Blog

Art and Citizenship: What's Inspiring Us

The discussion of Edinburgh workshop started with sharing practices that are inspiring for the topic of Art and Citizenship. These are just a few of projects, organizations and people that fueled our talks.

Blog

The Center of the Periphery (Zagreb / Žitnjak, Croatia) ...and its values within the art world as a part of social fabric

Žitnjak (Serbo-Croatian) ― a place to grow wheat, a meadow, a field

Video

Đorđe Balmazović: Pits and Falls of Group Work // Marcell Mars: Memory of the World / Public Library

A joint lecture by Đorđe Balmazović and Marcel Mars held on 14/11/2019 during the Reshape Intensive in Cluj.

Video

Oxana Timofeeva: Solidarity On The Planetary Scale

A critical engagement of theory and the arts in a dialogue with natural and technical sciences is characteristic for the materialist turn in contemporary culture. It rethinks historical processes from the perspective of the posthuman turn: the history of humans has to be inscribed into the history of things and the history of the World – into the history of the Earth.

Blog

What kind of art should we develop so it could match social needs?

We are asked how the ‘value of art’ could be promoted in the ‘social fabric’? But, based on the practices we are developing in the Minipogon, we would feel more comfortable reversing this question in the following way: What kind of art practices should be developed so they could match real social needs, while making art finally purposeful for the society as a whole?

Blog

We Wanna Sleep With Common People

These days are really important days for me. I am selling my home. 30 square meters of size and over 10 year of life in these walls. It hosted my life and my work; what is now called homemade culture. In this little box I called home, I created my own festival, more than one actually. Three. They’ve all left by now, they live across Romania and abroad.

Blog

Art as a Tool for Social Transformation

From its capacity of generating changes in the collective imaginary, producing forms of critical thinking, inventing new ways of doing or proposing new formulas of social organization, art can be a practical tool for contributing to processes of social transformation. In this sense, when we talk about practices that are at the junction of art and social fabric, some of the most nutritious areas can be those of collaborative art, public art, practices close to activism, cultural mediation, art and education, or community culture. —— by Marina Urruticoechea (Sarean + Wikitoki + Karraskan)

Blog

Transnational/Postnational Artistic Pravtices Workshop in Istanbul: A Graphic Novel

Last week of January. It's time for our second session with the group. This time the destination is Istanbul. What a joy and excitement to visit Istanbul after 9 years. A lot has changed since my last visit to this megalopolis...

Video

Igor Štiks: Activist aesthetics

Igor Štiks presented cases of activist aesthetics in the artistic acts, practices and works related to contemporary political and social activism of progressive and left-wing movements and groups in the post-Yugoslav region.

Blog

The Department for Civil Imagination: An institution for reshaping realities in poetic, practical and political ways

Shaping, reshaping and changing the culture and arts sector often requires mapping and understanding of what is possible, not only to make, but to imagine as well.

Zeitgeist

Hope Through the Fog

McGonagle argues that a similar solution like that to the Covid-19 virus, to the other virus – the virus of the small state agenda which has infected societal provision and expectations – lies in a cultural turn towards reciprocal social relations, which can be articulated in a total art process that is not limited to rhetorical modes of production and consumption. The stakes could not be higher for individuals and communities right now in this immediate crisis but questions about what principles will inform the future are also necessary and important, to see hope through the fog.

Method

RESHAPE: An Experiment in Collaborative Change-making

RESHAPE is an attempt to kick-start our collective imagination. It is an experimental, collaborative, bottom-up process that creates instruments for transition towards a new, fairer arts ecosystem.

Method

Changing the Game: The RESHAPE Transition

This text is a first attempt to join the dots between the proposals, to draft the initial contours of a framework for understanding them. To understand the proposals, it can be useful to first have a brief look at the origins and the promise of RESHAPE, and how the project itself was redesigned and reshaped during an intensive process within the RESHAPE community. Secondly, we begin a reflection on how these proposals might contribute to responding to the current needs within the arts field. In very different ways, these proposals respond to increasing pressures concerning how the arts are organized, governed, and supported (or not).

Audio

Metod Fund: Reshape the institutions!

Based in Kiev, Method Fund was founded in 2015 by a diverse group of artists, curators, critics, architects and educators. Their founders — Lada Nakonechna, Olga Kubli, Tetiana Endshpil, Ivan Melnichuk, Denis Pankratov and Kateryna Badianova — describe it as an experimental self-educational project, focused on searching the form of an art institution that would meet the requirements of the present as well as the peculiarities of the local context. We’ve met via zoom with Lada on one screen and Olga, Ivan and Tetiana on the other, to talk about their views on institutional experimenting and reshaping.

News

CONFERENCE Reshaping the Art World: An Experiment in Collaborative Change-making

The results of the RESHAPE research are here – at the final conference, the RESHAPE community will come together and welcome artists, art workers, researchers and policy makers to discuss their ideas, test their proposals and join in on the conversation on the future evolution of the arts sector.

Audio

Contesting the Neutrality

The topics of decolonization and degrowth are certainly not new, but with the recent global movements, they are receiving increased attention and a sense of urgency. The same sense exists within the art world, where the necessity for decolonizing cultural institutions is followed by the requisition to go beyond the performative level and to rethink the role of institutions and implement change at the structural level.

Audio

Alenka Zupančič: The End of Fantasy Versus the Fantasy of the End

For a long time, we were living in a configuration best described as being caught between two ends, expecting the change that never comes. This “end that couldn’t end” on the one hand caused a sense of hopelessness, almost ontological fatigue, and on the other hand, it fueled the fantasies of the end that imagines it through some sort of catastrophic scenario - thus actually maintaining the status quo.

Audio

Disobedience means change

If culture is a set of invisible customs, rules and regulations pertaining to our society, can we view art as a way to question, break and reinvent them? Should artists be a force of disobedience, calling out for changes in the existing order of things? Can an artwork invite its audience to a space of shared concern, and function as an act of disobedience?

Lecture

Cancelled // Vincent Liegey: To Reshape Well, Let's Degrowth

"Degrowth" has emerged over the last 15 years. This "bomb word" has been used to open in-depth debates on whether infinite growth in a finite world is desirable or even possible. Degrowth first deconstructs the myth that growth is the central solution for the impasse our capitalist, productivist and consumerist societies have led us to.

Lecture

Cancelled // Renata Salecl: Big Data, Art and the Reshaping of Subjectivity

In the world of big data, we must not only deal with potential computer failures, but also a high level of opacity related to how this data is collected, how it is interpreted, who has access to it, and how it can be manipulated.

Workshop

Workshop 2: Value of art in social fabric

The workshop in Ghent will continue with the discussion about the value of art in social fabric: How is society shaped (and reshaped) with art and how is wider community benefiting from it.