22-23-24 March 2012
Bilbao/ Vitoria-Gasteiz (Spain)
Organized by ENPAP (European Network of Public Art Producers)
Registration is now open. More info: www.e-n-p-a-p.net
Going Public – Telling it as it is? is a three-day symposium aimed at exploring storytelling as a mode of production and reception of public art. It features a series of lecture performances and artist commissions spread throughout the city of Bilbao, and is accompanied by a closed network meeting in Vitoria-Gasteiz that draws together selected professionals in the field.
Situated in a public space, an artwork and its encounters with the audience are not easy to control and thoroughly supervise. In continuous dialogue with a changing context and local history, public artworks are kept alive by first or second hand testimonies. Storytelling is a mode of production as well as a mode of reception.
Through a series of performative lectures, Going Public – Telling it as it is? explores stories and storytelling as a methodological approach in relation to art in the public domain. The speakers recount or stage a story about an encounter with a public artwork. Meanwhile, artists are invited to locate their story in the city of Bilbao. A city conceived not only through its spatial and social meaning but from a more symbolic perspective, situating Bilbao as brand, model, image, ideal, effect, etc. With the aim of complexifying the notion of public space and unlocking the operations that construct that public sphere, the city appears as a physical, social, mediatic space. The artists build the narratives taking into account the complexity of the concept, revealing ways of creating stories, the limits of the fictional, means of reproduction and their scenarios transformed into territories of transit and buying and selling.
Submission fee: 40 EUR (Students, under 18s and unemployed: 20 EUR)
ENPAP – The European Network of Public Art Producers was formed in 2009 and unites six art organizations that share an affinity for expanding the notion of public art. Its main aim is to raise criticality in public art commissioning practice through promoting knowledge exchange, development of new working methods and establishing common vocabulary for new forms of production and public engagement in contemporary art.
ENPAP has been supported by: The EU Culture Programme, 2012 Euskadi, Diputación Foral de Bizkaia, The City Hall of Bilbao, Donostia 2016, The Foundation for the Culture of the Future, The Swedish Arts Council, Stockholm Arts Council, IASPIS, SKOR | Foundation for Art and Public Domain and The Romanian Cultural Institute.
The programme in Bilbao and Vitoria-Gasteiz is made possible through the collaboration with BizBAK UPV/EHU, ARTIUM museum and Basque Television (EITB).
Programme
22–24 March: Locating the Story in the City
Throughout the city of Bilbao and in local mass media
Participating artists: Alex Reynolds (UK/ES), Itziar Barrio (ES/USA), María Ruido (ES), Martha Rosler (USA) and Phil Collins (UK)
23 March: Performance lectures
BizBAK UPV/EHU, Bilbao
Participating artists: Olof Olsson (SE), Falke Pisano (NL) & Francesco Pedraglio (IT), Asier Mendizabal (ES), Asli Cavusoglu (TR), Goldin + Senneby (SE), Patricia Esquivias (ES/VE)
23 March: Expanded stories
Pavilion6/ ZAWP, Bilbao
Jeleton (ES), OJO (USA), Institut Fatima (DE/ES), Begoña+La Jawara Djs (ES)
24 March: ENPAP Caucus
ARTIUM museum, Vitoria-Gasteiz
Closed session by invitation only
ENPAP partners
BAC-Baltic Art Center, Visby/ Sweden
consonni, Bilbao/ Spain
Mossutställningar, Stockholm/ Sweden
Situations, University of the West of England, Bristol/ United Kingdom
SKOR | Foundation for Art and Public Domain, Amsterdam/ The Netherlands
Vector Association, Iasi/ Romania
BAC is a production office and work place for artists, curators and contemporary art writers. It is a flexible organization that runs a variety of different production- and residency programmes placing the artistic process at the centre of its activities. Instead of BAC formulating a fixed temporal, economical or spatial framework for artistic production, each artist is invited to formulate the conditions for their working process in dialogue with the organization. Lately BAC has realised productions with Victor Alimpiev and Ana Torf, and most recently with Fiona Tan. (www.balticartcenter.com)
consonni is a producer of art projects based in Bilbao. Since 1997, it has been inviting artists to develop projects that do not take the form of an art object displayed in an exhibition space. Matthieu Laurette, Hinrich Sachs, Andrea Fraser, Sergio Prego, Ibon Aranberri, Itziar Okariz, Saioa Olmo, Iratxe Jaio and Klaas van Gorkum and more are developing projects with consonni which borrow tools from the contemporary world to produce art projects in a wide variety of formats to subvert, criticise or simply analyse the society that surrounds them. (www.consonni.org)
Mossutställningar widens the possibilities for artistic productions outside the traditional institutional framework to create unexpected meetings between art, audience and place. In 2009 Mossutställningar started two networks: the Initiative to Create a European Network of Public Art Producers (ENPAP) and a Nordic Network of Public Art Producers with their own independent programmes. (www.mossutstallningar.com)
Situations is a visual arts commissioning programme based at the University of the West of England, Bristol, UK with an international reputation for world class commissioning and research. The programme combines commissioning of ground-breaking and remarkable artworks outside conventional art contexts such as One Day Sculpture, Heather and Ivan Morison’s The Black Cloud and permanent artworks such as Ruth Claxton’s And My Eyes Danced part of Wonders of Weston. From the start, the programme’s guiding principles were to combine the ambition of a commissioning agency model with the critical rigour of an academic research centre. Over the last three-years we have published pioneering research and publications such as Locating the Producers: Durational Approaches to Public Art (Valiz), Situation (MIT Press/Whitechapel Art Gallery) part of the documents of contemporary art series, produced curatorial strategies such as Slow Space for Bjorvika Oslo Harbour and delivered professional development seminars on the production of public artworks with ixia the UK national think tank for public art.
In 2012 Situations will deliver Alex Hartley’s Nowhereisland a large-scale island originating from the Arctic that will journey around the south west region of England, stopping at ports and harbours as a visiting ‘island nation’. To find out more and to become a citizen of this new nation visit www.nowhereisland.org.
SKOR | Foundation for Art and Public Domain is an internationally operating art institution based in Amsterdam, which advises, develops and creates art projects in relation to the public domain. SKOR mediates between artists, commissioners and the general public by forming alliances and partnerships with art institutions, public and private institutions such as municipalities, central and provincial governments, healthcare and educational institutions, project developers and architectural offices. Through its projects, SKOR reacts to socio-political changes in society and new developments in contemporary art, urban design and landscape architecture. Its public programme provides a context for its projects and seeks to connect current debates about art and the public domain. (www.skor.nl).
Vector is a non-for-profit association of artists, art critics and curators, based in Iasi, Romania. Since 1997 Vector has been producing the Periferic Biennial, publishing Vector Magazine, commissioning public projects, and hosting residencies. Importantly, Vector Association engages the city of Iasi itself as a participant in this process—as visiting artists are encouraged to use the city as a resource of production of their work. Starting with the last year, Vector has initiated an offsite working methodology that has already included the exhibition project Critical Point and the publication Vector-critical research in context at Frieze Projects, in the frame of Frieze Art Fair 2010 (London, UK), as well as a second chapter of the project at the Western Front (Vancouver BC). (www.periferic.org)
