Announcing the 2012 finalists
The collective Etcetera, Emilio Fantin and Jon Rubin are finalists of the second edition of the International Award for Participatory Art curated by Julia Draganović and Claudia Löffelholz and launched by the Legislative Assembly of the Italian region Emilia-Romagna in collaboration with LaRete Art Projects and La Pillola.
The Argentinian collective, the Italian and the US-American artist have in common an artistic approach which, although taking the most diverse forms, is characterized by an involvement of the audience in the artistic process.
All three received the invite to spend a research period in Bologna in order to explore the city, get a feeling for and collect knowledge about the cultural, but also social, political and economic context. The scope of this two weeks residency is to get prepared for developing a project-proposal to be realized next year in Bologna. The stay in Bologna should enable all three finalists, who will be guests of the international residency program Nosadella.due, to deliberately unfold their research regarding audiences, places, practices and opportunities to choose in order to advance their interventions.
The award is dedicated to artists with a proven experience in social practices. Out of a long list of 20 artist nominated by an international committee of curators the finalists have been selected by a jury composed by Julia Draganovic, curator of the award, Rudolf Frieling, curator of the Media Arts department of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar, Bert Theis, artist and co-founder of OUT – Office for Urban Transformation and of Isola Art Center in Milan as well as Luigi Benedetti, Director General of the Legislative Assembly of the Region Emilia-Romagna.
American artist Jon Rubin, whose project Conflict Kitchen in Pittsburgh is one of his best known examples of social practice, was the first of the finalists to come and spend his research period in Bologna in May 2012. In the month of September and October, Emilio Fantin, Italian artist with a long record of participatory practices and the Argentinian collective Etcetera, founded to connect art and socio-political activism in an ironic and disruptive way, will be residents of the project.
To discover which kind of mutual stimulus their encounter with the city has created and to see which project will be realized, one has to wait until January 2013, when the jury will select the winner of the second edition of the International Award for Participatory Art.
International Award for Participatory Art
an initiative of the Legislative Assembly of the Emilia-Romagna Regional Government
in collaboration with LaRete Art Projects and La Pillola.
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