Arts Collaboratory is a translocal network of art organizations focused on art practices and processes of social change. Consisting of 23 diverse organizations in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East, it provides a gathering point where they can share knowledge, collaborate on projects, and find emotional and financial support. Furthermore, it operates as a kind of school for learning to work in common across territories in order to form a community of solidarity that prefigures a post-capitalistic society. Arts Collaboratory thereby endeavors to extend participating organizations’ impact within society.
Current participating organizations are: 32º East | Ugandan Arts Trust (Kampala), Al-Ma’mal Foundation for Contemporary Art (Jerusalem), Art Group 705 (Bishkek), Ashkal Alwan (Beirut), Casa Tres Patios (Medellín), Centre Soleil d’Afrique (Bamako), Cooperativa Cráter Invertido (Mexico City), Darb 1718 Contemporary Art and Culture Center (Cairo), Doual’art (Douala), Kër Thiossane (Dakar), Kiosko Galería (Santa Cruz de la Sierra), KUNCI Cultural Studies Center (Yogyakarta), lugar a dudas (Cali), Más Arte Más Acción (Choco), Nubuke Foundation (Accra), Platohedro (Medellín), Picha Art Center (Lubumbashi), Raw Material Company (Dakar), Riwaq (Ramallah), ruangrupa (Jakarta), TEOR/éTica (San José), Theertha (Colombo), Visual Arts Network of South Africa (VANSA) (Johannesburg), and founding partners DOEN Foundation (Amsterdam) and Hivos (The Hague) with facilitating partner Casco – Office for Art, Design and Theory (Utrecht).
The new website marks a moment of transition for Arts Collaboratory. For the past year its members have been intensively engaging with one another to form a horizontal, inclusive, and self-organized community of art organizations invested in social transformation. In this spirit the website features news from all participant organizations and introduces their collaborative projects: Arts Schoolaboratory*, addressing alternative pedagogy; Territories Working Group: Lobby Research Project, redefining approaches to the notion of lobby; Minga, Exploring Utopia, enacting different forms of utopia; and Here and Now: A Collaborative Video Art Vision, a program of moving images from members’ respective regions. The website also functions as a library to share the organizations’ practices amongst each other and with the broader community to provide a toolkit for building a more common future.
Arts Collaboratory has been providing grants for socially engaged art projects. With funding for the 2013–15 period just concluded, a new direction will be announced in the beginning of 2016.
For further inquiries, please e-mail us at info [at] artscollaboratory.org.
*Arts Schoolaboratory contributes to Creative Time Summit: “The Curriculum” (11–13 August 2015, Venice) in the framework of the 56th Venice Biennale.
