6th – 7th NOVEMBER 2024
Arts (on) shifting terrain
Critical studies on the erosion of creatives’ rights & well-being
Alchemy of Commons (Aiwen Yin), Tsveta Andreeva, Francisco Godoy Vega, Nabil Ennassouh, Li Yuchen, Latte Creative, Suhaiymah Manzoor – Khan, Simona Murialdo Sànchez, Valentina Vetturi, Marianna Takou, Biljana Tanurovska Kjulavkovski
curated by
Denise Araouzou, Alessandro Castiglioni, Simone Frangi, Svetlana Racanović
at
Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts – Ecole supérieure des Arts de la Ville de Bruxelles
Rue du Midi 144, Bruxelles
organised by
BJCEM – Biennale des jeunes créateurs de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée
co-funded
by the European Union
Arts (on) Shifting Terrain: Critical studies on the erosion of creatives’ rights & well-being is the two-day closing act of the project DE.a.RE – DEconstruct and REbuild, a three year-long project including a series of translocal and interdisciplinary online courses and gatherings for artists and workers in arts organisations, focusing on eco-centric, equitable and sustainable processes and practices.
The first day combines discussive and participatory formats including workshops and small assemblies and a plenary, led by artists, designers, poets, curators and organisers that propose spaces of discussion, experimentation and play, where, together with art students and members of the public, we will engage in a series of critical studies on cultural workers’ rights and well-being. The intention is to address certain aspects that define and reinforce the precarity of creative work from an intersectional lens and collaboratively experiment with ideas that offer ways of thinking and working through these issues. This event is curated by Denise Araouzou, Alessandro Castiglioni, Simone Frangi, and Svetlana Racanovic.
The second day is dedicated to the DE.a.RE Advocacy Campaign, which responds to the working conditions, needs, and concerns raised by artists across the EuroMed region. Launched by BJCEM and designed by the agency Latte Creativa, this campaign aims to raise awareness and influence policy reforms, calling for fair remuneration practices and sustainable funding structures within the cultural sector. The advocacy effort seeks to ensure that artists can thrive and contribute meaningfully to diverse, peaceful, and ecologically-conscious societies. The campaign will be discussed during an open session.
[6th NOVEMBER 2024]
9 AM – 10 AM
Registration and Welcome
10 AM – 1PM
Morning studies: three parallel workshops
[WORKSHOP 1]
“An arts economy rooted in community? But, what is a community?”
led by Alchemy of Commons (Aiwen Yin)
hosted by Denise Araouzou
Guiding questions: How are systemic and personal crises interdependent, and how is the art economy implicated and affected by them?
How could art economies rely instead on forms of kinship, equitable networks and relational values to thrive?
Workshop: The board game Alchemy of Commons invites anyone working in the arts who are curious about or have experience in collaborative and collective practice configurations to imagine a care-based art economy. The purpose of the Alchemy of Commons is to guide imagination and experimentation towards new kinds of art economies that support socially-engaged arts and activism while addressing their needs and embodying their values.
Responding to: The symptoms of being governed by the GDP metric – a legacy of the colonialist imperialist British Empire, further entrenched during WWII – which ignores individual, collective, planetary limits and interdependencies are evident in the escalating and coinciding instabilities across socio-economic, ecological, and political layers. Misleading definitions of progress have also defined the conditions under which creative workers live, form relationships, and work. Artists and creative workers are often forced to navigate precarity, artificial scarcity and market-oriented demands while struggling to remain creative in a socio-political climate which increasingly reduces funding for the arts, devalues artists’ contribution to democratic, pluriversal and equity-centred societies. Artists and collectives proposing other ways of being to the dominant extractivist model through activism, or socially response-able projects rely increasingly on alternative and solidarity economies to work.
Maximum capacity: 10 people
[WORKSHOP 2]
“Virtualization technology and labour: digital production, intellectual property after AI”
led by Valentina Vetturi and Simona Murialdo Sànchez
hosted by Alessandro Castiglioni
Guiding questions: What is the destiny of many creative professionals in front of artificial intelligences and learning machine possibilities? How does it change the way of spreading knowledge, of being artists? What creative freedom is possible outside contemporary information regimes? Should we oppose it, rebel or is the best strategy to adapt?
Workshop: Topics include intellectual property rights in AI-generated art, ethical considerations in machine learning algorithms, and the impact of AI on the artistic process. Participants will engage in discussions, examples of exercises with the invited experts to foster a better understanding of how AI is reshaping the relationship between technology and art and finding ways for exploring the possibilities of protecting – or reconsidering – authorship in the EU context.
Responding to: Creativity, practices, education, social transformations: how are they influenced by a digital paradigm that is changing design methodologies, the way in which we know and, at the same time, replicates and amplifies the injustices, systemic violence and biases of our communities?
Maximum capacity: 10 people
[WORKSHOP 3]
“Artists’ rights in a diasporic perspective: citizenship and migrations in the Fortress Europe”
led by Francisco Godoy Vega and Li Yuchen
hosted by Simone Frangi
Guiding questions: Who has the right to have rights as an artist in Europe? What does it mean to operate as a migrant artist in Europe? Are artists’ rights a fundamental part of the struggle for accessing social justice when constantly made precarious by visa procedures and threats of expulsion from Fortress Europe? Which relationship can we trace between creative labour as a platform of the border control system and extreme practices of sanitation of the European territory?
Workshop: This workshop aims at complexifying the understanding of the question of artists’ rights in Europe from a diasporic perspective which takes into account the burden of migration/exile laws and the glass ceiling of European legality.
Responding to: The discussion on artists’ remuneration rights and artist’ social protection policies is often romanticised and de-historicised when tackled exclusively from an unquestioned white Eurocentric perspective which gives citizenship – and all the satellite rights that come with it (from the right to health to the access to housing and education) – for granted.
Maximum capacity: 10 people
1 PM – 3 PM
Lunch Break
3 PM – 6.30 PM
Afternoon studies: Threading the shifts
The afternoon threads together the discussions, ideas and topics explored during the workshops in the format of an assembly that aims to synthesise, together with the public, ways of thinking and doing that could be useful for cultural workers in traversing certain socio-political and economic systems and realities that contribute to ever shifting and precarious ‘terrains’.
- Opening with poetry by Suhaiymah Manzoor – Khan
- Introductions and reports by Denise Araouzou, Alessandro Castiglioni, Simone Frangi and Svetlana Racanović
- Assembly with facilitation by Marianna Takou, Director at Casco
- Closing with poetry by Suhaiymah Manzoor – Khan
Registration form for the workshops and the afternoon studies
6.30 PM – 7.15 PM
Evening studies:
A performance by Nabil Ennassouh
7.15 PM – 8 PM
Drinks
______________________________
[7th NOVEMBER 2024]
9 AM – 9.30 AM
Registration
9.30 – 9.50 AM
Welcome speech Christine Bluard, Director of Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts – Ecole supérieure des Arts de la Ville de Bruxelles
Mercedes Giovinazzo, BJCEM President
10.00 AM – 12.30 PM
Morning Studies: Advocacy campaign Presentation
The second day will begin with the launch of the DE.a.RE Advocacy campaign, presented by Salvatore Barbera – Latte Creative. This campaign, shared across the EuroMed region, has the two-fold purpose of awareness-raising and advocacy. It aims to communicate to the general public and those who hold influence in the administration and promotion of creative and artistic sectors three main points:
- What creative and artistic work is today and how it is interconnected to and contributes to the societies and the communities they are embedded in
- How the material realities and needs of most artists are not met because of a detached art market, the politics of art institutions and the reduction of public funding in the arts
- How the inequities present within the arts economy reflect and are worsened, by forms of discrimination and social prejudices present within our societies
A key reference of the session will be the survey BJCEM launched on the working conditions, needs and concerns of artists across the EuroMed region. This session will contribute to ongoing discussions and strategic action of ensuring fair practices in the creative sector and by outlining a strategy to mobilise support throughout layers of governance and civil society.
The DE.a.RE campaign advocates for policy reforms that are urgently needed to implement sustainable, equitable, and inclusive funding structures and remuneration practices. These changes are crucial to enable artists to create truly meaningful work in a time where imagining peaceful, just, diverse and ecocentric societies is more important than ever. Experts in the fields of creative production, policy, arts, activism and advocacy will be invited to respond and enrich this gathering and the direction of the campaign.
Respondants: Biljana Tanurovska Kjulavkovski and Tsveta Andreeva moderated by Svetlana Racanović
This session will be available also as a Facebook live event.
ABOUT PARTICIPANTS
Yin Aiwen is an artist, designer, researcher, educator and occasional institutional strategist based in London and Rotterdam. Her work evolves around the idea “the technological is institutional and the institutional is technological” and advocates relationship-centre design as the antidote of an atomised society. Yiren Zhao is an educator, researcher and community organiser with a MA degree on psychology and a practice of playback theatre. Working together since 2021, they created Live Action Role-Playing game Liquid Dependencies (with Mengyang Zhao) that explore the future of mutual-aid society, and gamification-as-research project Alchemy of Commons which develops future ecosystem for socially engaged art and communal practices. Their collaboration seeks individual healings through systematic change, bringing system design, game design, ethnographic research, liberation psychology and community development together and form actionable proposals. (Photo credits Anna Liv Bolther)
Biljana Tanurovska-Kjulavkovski is a cultural worker, researcher and curator at the intersection of dance, theatre and visual arts performance, art history, cultural policy, independent cultural scene, feminist and environmental (curatorial) practices. She is working as a freelancer and as a program director of Lokomotiva, Skopje. Currently, she is a co-researcher for the NADA Digital Archive of Dance and Performance ((Non)Aligned Movements); co-curator of the exhibition Dancing, Resisting, (Un)working, curator of International School “Curating in Context”, co-mentor of the Critical Practice (Made in Yu) program and Re-Imagine project, and co-curator of the Performance Platform Festival in Skopje. She teaches and writes, is an art historian and holds a PhD from the Faculty of Drama Arts in Belgrade for which she won the ENCATC International Research Award. In 2021 she received the AICA Macedonia “Ladislav Barishic” Award for the research “Political Performance as Extended Field in Macedonia in 90s”.
Francisco Godoy Vega – QBIPOC writer, artist and curator. PhD in History of Art and Visual Culture (UAM, 2015) and member of the Ayllu collective. His publications include “Uses and Customs of Whites” (2023), “Exhibition as Recolonization” (2018) and “There Is No Sex Without Racialization)” (ed., 2017). He has also published the poetry books “The Revolution of the Rats” (2013) and “The Sudaca’s Disease” (2018) and has also been a speaker at more than twenty seminars and conferences, including Ámà: 4 Days on Caring, Repairing and Healing (Gropius Bau, 2021), Aabaakwad (MCA Sydney, 2020) and Decolonizing the Museum (MACBA, 2014). He has curated exhibitions such as The Theft of Pain (MNBA Chile, 2023), All Shades of Anger (MUSAC, 2018) and Critique of Migrant Reason (La Casa Encendida, 2014). As a member of the Ayllu collective, he has exhibited at Matadero Madrid, the Sydney Biennial, the Santa Mònica Arts Center, the Kochi Biennial, the CAC in Quito and the São Paulo Biennial.
Latte Creative is a forward-thinking digital agency that specializes in creating visually striking and purpose-driven campaigns, with a strong focus on social impact and advocacy. Founded on the principle of using creativity for positive change, the agency collaborates with NGOs, non-profits, and socially conscious organizations to help them amplify their messages and engage with their target audiences in meaningful ways. Latte Creative offers a wide range of services, including digital strategy, web development, branding, graphic design, and content creation. Their expertise lies in combining storytelling with innovative design to craft powerful narratives that resonate with people on a deeper emotional level. Whether it’s through interactive websites, bold visual identities, or multimedia campaigns, Latte Creative excels in translating complex social issues into accessible and compelling content. What sets the agency apart is its dedication to sustainability and social good. Latte Creative carefully selects clients and projects that align with its mission of promoting positive societal change, covering topics like environmental protection, human rights, and global development. By leveraging creativity and digital tools, the agency aims to inspire action, mobilize communities, and ultimately contribute to a more just and sustainable world.
LI Yuchen is a visual and performance artist from Nanchang, China, currently living and working in Amsterdam. In 2013, she graduated from Life Sciences in Xiamen University in China. In 2021, she graduated from ArtEZ University of Arts in Arnhem, Netherlands. The work of LI Yuchen revolves around migration stories and diasporic experiences, of both humans and our food. She investigates the historical-cultural-political contexts which gear the movements, by listening to the personal narratives, thus questions the notion of identity beyond nation-state construct and expands the sense of rootedness and belonging while reconnecting to ancestral memories. In her work, the stories of food are intertwined with the stories of people, for food holds a strong connection to cultural identities, traditions, ancestral memories, and plays a key role in ecological, economic, political transitions throughout history. Through her visual and oral storytelling in forms of installations, videos and performances, LI aims to understand the dynamics when we encounter “the other ”, and to explore different ways of relating to the world in order to re-indigenize ourselves. Her work is not intended as a statement but rather to raise questions into collective conversations. LI is a member of Weaving Realities collective since 2019, who organizes performances and workshops by thinking-feeling with living Earth. She is also the co-founder of Asian Movie Night since 2017, a roaming film project to introduce diverse Asian cultures with film and after-movie discussions. Her work has been shown in various art and academic institutions in the Netherlands and abroad.
Marianna Takou is a researcher and organizer from Athens, Greece. She is currently based in Utrecht, the Netherlands, where she works as the Executive Director at Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons. She first became part of Casco’s ecosystem as a volunteer in 2013. Since 2019, as part of the team, she has been working on different aspects of Casco’s operations and is a member of the Arts Collaboratory network. With a background in Sociology and training in International Development, she holds an MSc in Sustainable Development from Utrecht University. Her research interests and organizing focus on feminist and queer practices in mobility, migration, the commons and the degrowth movement.
Nabil Ennassouh, student in Master 1 in ISAC (Institut Supérieur des Arts et des Chorégraphies) at Academy of Fine Arts of Brussels. Devoted practitioner, seeking exaltation through the movement. Nabil Ennassouh is a self-taught dancer nurtured by hip hop, voguing, reggae, dancehall and with their rhythmical roots coming from their north African background. That’s where they learned their first movements of body expression from. In a previous life, Nabil used to be a flight attendant navigating through different lands and contexts; those experiences re-embodied the notion of circularity, fluidity and movement. Their works focus on empathy, affinity and deep collaborations that look at all the possible positions of bodies, their emancipations, their legitimacy and their vulnerabilities. This question on positioning is at the core of their practices, notably around the privileges gazes and power dynamics.
Simona Murialdo Sanchez is a professional illustrator, art director and an NFT artist. She studied Fashion Illustration at Central Saint Martin College followed by a BA in Graphic and Multimedia Design from London Westminster University. After a long experience in the UK in 2002, she became a lecturer at Istituto Marangoni Milan, while consulting as Art Director for different fashion companies and magazines. In 2022 she took the role of Programme Leader in Istituto Marangoni Milan in the Fashion Styling area. Simona is currently sharing her work between Italy and South America where she has a few exhibitions as a digital artist. She is also the founder and curator of Paraguay Ilustrado a Portfolio of illustrations inspired by the Culture and the Nature of Paraguay and the subtropical regions of South America. Simona is currently a contributor for Welldone Agency Milano and a FIDA member. Among her clients are Oxford Press, Elle UK, CIA Illustration, Agency Roger La Borde, FashionWeekly, Evening Standard, Bulgari, Harvey Nichols, Escada, Curatoria Design, and more. As an NFT artist, it is possible to find a selection of her works in OpenSea and Foundation.
Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan is a writer, poet and educator disrupting understandings of history, race, knowledge and violence. She writes across genres and regularly speaks and facilitates workshops to equip herself and others with the tools and faith to resist the unliveable conditions we find ourselves in, and work towards another reality. She is the author of Seeing for Ourselves, and even stranger possibilities (Hajar Press, 2023), Tangled in Terror: Uprooting Islamophobia (Pluto Press, 2022) and the poetry collection Postcolonial Banter (2019); a co-author of A FLY Girl’s Guide to University; and a contributor to the anthologies Cut from the Same Cloth? and I Refuse to Condemn. She is a co-founder of the Nejma Collective, a group of Muslims working in solidarity with people in prison. Suhaiymah’s debut play Peanut Butter and Blueberries recently sold out at Kiln Theatre in London.
Tsveta Andreeva is a Public Policy Manager at the European Cultural Foundation, in charge of EU public policy monitoring, advocacy, research and development, European partnerships and projects. Since 2020 working on A Cultural Deal for Europe campaign (in partnership with Culture Action Europe and Europa Nostra). Tsveta’s professional background is in cultural policy, management and economics. She holds a PhD in Cultural Economics from University of National and World Economy (Sofia). She accomplished her MA in Sofia, followed by post-graduate studies in Dijon Business School (France) and the University of Birmingham (UK). Before joining ECF in 2009, she worked in the International cultural cooperation and European affairs at the Ministry of Culture of Bulgaria. Her research activities and publications are in the areas of cultural and creative economy and policies.
Valentina Vetturi is a visual artist working at the intersection of performance, writing, and transdisciplinary research. Currently based in Bari, Italy, her work explores themes such as memory, digital ecologies, and collaborative processes. She holds a Law degree, a Master’s in Landscape, Art, and Architecture from the Polytechnic University of Milan (2007), and a Master’s in Digital Currencies from the University of Nicosia (2019). Her practice is influenced by open-source methodologies, fostering decentralized knowledge networks that merge art with scientific inquiry. Vetturi won the Italian Council research grant in 2024 and she collaborates with institutions like Lagos Biennial (2024), Museo MA*GA Gallarate (2023), Museo MAXXI Roma (2021,2014), Strauhof Zurich (2016).