WORLD

Yota Ioannidou (DAI, 2009) invites us to the Waste/d Pavilion, episode 1 by Temporary Academy of Arts @ State of Concept Athens (till May 21, 2022) What are the new wastes of the ongoing "crisis," with the current war bringing to the fore how expendable and exhaustible human lives are and reminding us once again of the urgency of the energy-related crisis. Can we attempt to write a new social contract? And what can be the role of art and culture in that?

| tag: Athens

Fred Lonidier, L.A. Public Workers Point to Some Problems…, 1980, 11 panels with photographs

With the exhibition Waste/d Pavilion, episode 1, the Temporary Academy of Arts (Elpida Karaba, Yota Ioannidou, Vangelis Vlahos, Despina Zefkili) inaugurates its collaboration with State of Concept Athens, by taking over its artistic directorship for a year and presenting Waste/d Pavilion, a project which comprises exhibitions, public events, performances, educational activities, screenings, lectures, workshops, discussions and readings around the thematic axes of waste, surplus and abject

Participants: Nikos Arvanitis, Ege Berensel, Chiara Bottici and Benoît Challand, Peggy Zali and Xenia Kalpaktsoglou, Jumana Manna, Dimitra Kondylatou (DAI, 2017), Fred Lonidier, Armando Lulaj, Tatiana Mavromati and Laura Maragoudaki, Tina Pandi and Marina Markellou.
 

Waste/d Pavilion unfolds through a series of "episodes," focusing on different thematics: labor, body, ecology, and language. Artists, researchers, and scientists from Greece and abroad have been invited to present different conceptualisations of the notion of Waste/d, through various ways of viewing, circulating, and developing methodologies for an anti-Waste/d front.
 

"For Work, about Work, by Work." These words, used by American artist Fred Lonidier - a core member of the San Diego group that adopted the methods of conceptual art for the purpose of social documentation in the 1970s - to describe the essence of his work, could serve as a leitmotif for the first episode of the Waste/d Pavilion. Although Waste/d does not focus on a strictly delimited theme, episode 1 revolves around different waste/d bodies and places and their claims. Looking at labor in the cultural sector itself, such as the violent occupation of the National Theater in Tirana, where art became a front for the controversial real estate projects of former artist and current Prime Minister Edi Rama. 

What are the new wastes of the ongoing "crisis," with the current war bringing to the fore how expendable and exhaustible human lives are and reminding us once again of the urgency of the energy-related crisis. Can we attempt to write a new social contract? And what can be the role of art and culture in that?

The opening text "Europe after Eurocentrism?" by Chiara Bottici and Benoît Challand, included in the publication accompanying episode 1, invites us to rethink the European project in a global context, characterized by mass migration, the challenges of establishing new forms of citizenship, and the new forms of oppression produced by war and climate change.

Waste/d Pavilion is part of State of Concept Athens’ new research chapter ‘Coalition of the Care-full’, a project of the European Pavilion, an international programme of the European Cultural Foundation in collaboration with Camargo Foundation, Fondazione CRT, and Cultura Nova Foundation, in which six cultural organizations from Europe participate: Studio Rizoma Palermo, Arna Vombsjösänkan, Iniva London, L’Internationale, Brunnenpassage Vienna and State of Concept Athens.

Τhe European Pavilion enables cultural spaces to experiment and reflect on Europe. To question, discuss and define what Europe is and what it could become in the future. To tell stories, to imagine, to question. Is there a more appropriate venue for such an undertaking than the European Pavilion?

The Coalition of the Care-full research chapter is funded by the European Cultural Foundation.
 

 

Ege Berensel, Strike and Wedding, 2019, 80 found slides, 35 mm, color, 16 min.

Waste/d Pavilion is an ongoing art and pedagogy research project on social and artistic potential in times of extended crisis, by the Temporary Academy of Arts, PAT (Elpida Karaba, Despina Zefkili, Yota Ioannidou, Vangelis Vlahos). Waste/d involves research and production of new theory and artistic projects, creating alliances among practitioners from different localities, as well as art and scientific fields and taking various forms (books, lectures, interviews, seminars, performances, live events).

The Temporary Academy of Arts was initiated by Elpida Karaba in 2014. PAT (the abbreviation of Temporary Academy of Arts / Προσωρινή Ακαδημία Τεχνών) is a mobile academy of arts and at the same time an art project of experimental education that adopts mechanisms from various systems of knowledge and art practices for the production and transmission of artistic programs and the construction of their historicity. PAT is a para-institution engaged with a range of activities involved in different levels of institution affiliations. It depends on an ‘expanded’ curating, incorporating exhibitions, events and publishing projects persistently addressing the relationship of art and its institutions, the labour involved and the public.

The Academy is working upon different educational, artistic and social models and adopts a research based and multidisciplinary approach to knowledge production, in order to investigate the boundaries, permeabilities and repressed contradictions that underlie public spaces. Rather than being merely an educational platform or an art school, PAT functions as an analytical tool, concentrating on spatial and institutional criticism. PAT’s projects, combine the symbolic with the mediated and the tactical in order to examine art and its production, inquire on the status and potential of art to address the urban condition and to question the mechanisms of producing and framing knowledge.In each project of the Academy, different artists and theorists are invited as educators, visitors or as consultants to organize and carry out the outcome of the project while different modes of art and educational practice are used, such as workshops, discussions, interviews, performances, (re)enactments etc.