Etcetera wins the International Award for Participatory Art
The Argentine collective is the winner of the second edition
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C.R.I.S.I. is a new participatory art project for Bologna by the Etcetera collective adjudicated by the Jury of the International Award for Participatory Art, composed of Julia Draganović, curator of the Award, artist Alfredo Jaar, curator Rudolf Frieling, artist Bert Theis, and Luigi Benedetti, Director General of the Legislative Assembly of the Emilia-Romagna.
Crisi, meaning “crisis” in English, is a word that no doubt has entered the daily life of Italian citizens. For Etcetera, though, the acronym C.R.I.S.I. means a “COMMUNE OF RESEARCH FOR INCLUSIVE SOCIAL IMAGINATION,” a “social ready-made” based on participatory laboratories. The goal is to discover and develop a new prospective, cultural responses and alternative economies through the use of different media and the funds allocated by the budget of the Award through the course of 2013.
The award jury stated: “The proposal of Etcetera was deemed worthy of winning because it gives a high potential for impact and ensures a large involvement with a vast public. The project presents a certain degree of articulation and involvement of different media and participant groups. The Jury wishes the best of luck to the project to have great support and involvement with the public.”
Composed of visual artists, poets and actors, the collective Etcetera began in 1997 in Buenos Aires. They bring art to where social conflict is born, in the streets, and then carry this conflict into the arenas of cultural production, including the media and art institutions. They enter the urban scene as a statement of protest or denunciation, and as a consequence they refer to a time and a specific place. Their practice is characterized by humor, poetic research and deconstruction that shapes a new kind of committed art: free from banal rhetoric and often very sarcastic and “incorrect.” In 2005 they took part in the founding of the International Errorist Movement, an international organization that claims the error as a philosophy of life. In 2009 they took part in the Istanbul Biennial with the project Errorist Kabaret, for which they were nominated for the International Award for Participatory Art by curator Galit Eilat, member of the International Selection Committee. C.R.I.S.I. will be coordinated by Etcetera’s founding members Loreto Garin Guzman and Federico Zukerfeld.
Accompanied and supported by the award’s curators Julia Draganović and Claudia Löffelholz and by the award’s partner organization La Pillola, Guzman and Zukerfeld will spend late spring and early summer in Bologna to implement C.R.I.S.I. within a network of local collaborations.
The International Award for Participatory Art is aimed at artists who have distinguished themselves on the international scene for their participatory practices. Curated by Julia Draganović and Claudia Löffelholz, promoted by the Legislative Assembly of Emilia-Romagna and in collaboration with LaRete Art Projects and La Pillola, the award experiments with audience participation through art projects that create new spaces of confrontation, negotiation and decision making with an open public.
Occurring every two years, the jury of each edition selects three finalists from a long list presented by an international Selection Committee. In their first year the finalists fulfill a residency in Bologna with the aim of designing a new, audience specific project. After adjudicating these proposals, the winning project is selected and implemented the next year.
Pablo Helguera won the first edition with the Ælia Media project, an alternative radio station that discussed art and the city. The project involved a group of cultural operators based in Bologna that trained at a school of journalism and then created a mobile radio station. Ælia Media continues today despite the end of the project in Bologna.
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