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The Triennale di Milano is currently promoting the initiative “Milano&Oltre. Una visione in movimento / A vision in motion“, curated by the association Connecting Cultures, and aimed at re-inventing the relationship between the city and the people who live, use and cross it, with a special focus on those places which seem irrelevant, alien or undesirable. This series of events, which represents the conclusive phase of the three-year project developed by Fondazione Cariplo, is intended as a workshop on the future metropolis open to all the citizens. Throughout May 2013, artists, architects, urbanists, photographers, scientists, policy makers and performers will offer various readings of the city, debating, analysing, depicting and interpreting such topics as the plural city, new citizens, interculturalism, participation, open-source design, etc. The workshops, roundtables, exhibitions and performances will highlight the role of art and culture as catalysers of energies and transformations in the contemporary urban contexts.
On 9 May 2013 Europe will celebrate the 63rd anniversary of the Schuman Declaration. Sixty-three years ago, on 9 May 1950, the then French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman made the first move towards the creation of what we now know as the European Union (EU).
This year’s celebrations will be especially poignant following the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize 2012 to the EU. In its citation, the Nobel Committee said that the EU had “for over six decades contributed to the advancement of peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights in Europe”.
The European External Action Service (EEAS) will be joining the other European Institutions throughout the month of May to celebrate Europe Day worldwide. EU Delegations will be leading a range of different events in their host countries on the theme of Europe in the World. Lectures, competitions, film festivals and other events organised by the EU Delegations in cooperation with Member States’ embassies will demonstrate the best the EU has to offer.
A recently published Austrian essay collection about museum and migration – Wonisch, Regina, and Thomas Hübel, eds. 2012. Museum und Migration. Konzepte, Kontexte, Kontroversen. Vienna: transcript Verlag. – aims at comparing different approaches of visualizing migration in museums. Authors analyze and compare projects developed in German-speaking countries (such as the 2004 Gastarbajteri exhibition in Wien Museum, which is online as a virtual exhibition) or the work of DOMiD (Documentation Centre and Museum of Migration in Germany) to French and Anglo-Saxon concepts. Though questioning whether the visualization of migration history in museums or exhibitions could lead to new exclusion, the essays argue that the aspect of diversity and a steady history of migration should rather be a fundamental principle in depicting general history in museums. The book can be purchased online; the first pages are available through this link: http://www.transcript-verlag.de/ts1801/ts1801_1.pdf.
On Apr 23, Professor Ian Goldin held a Seminar to discuss about “How Migration Shaped our World and Will Define our Future”. Goldin is Professor of Globalisation and Development and director of the Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford; together with Geoffrey Cameron and Meera Balarajan, he is the author of the book Exceptional People: How Migration Shaped our World and Will define our Future (published by Princeton University Press in September 2011).
The recent Seminar was meant as an opportunity to debate about the role of migrants throughout history, as the engine which fueled human progress. The talk highlighted how their movement has sparked innovation, spread ideas, relieved poverty, and laid the foundations for a global economy. In the contemporary more interconnected world, characterized by increased migration flows, Goldin looks at the profound advantages that such dynamics have for countries and migrants the world over, and proposes new approaches for governance that will embrace this international mobility.
The podcast of this special talk can be downloaded and listened through this page.
The Narodni muzej Slovenije/National Museum of Slovenia is currently hosting the travelling exhibition “Imagining the Balkans. Identities and Memory in the Long 19th Century”, investigating the formation and development of modern nations in this area during the “long 19th century” (as Hobsbawm described it). The event is part of UNESCO’s global initiative “Culture: A Bridge to Development”, that seeks to enhance cooperation and dialogue among national history museums.
The exhibition focuses on the constitution and evolution of modern nations in South-East Europe during the 19th century, and is structured around eight thematic paths: “Living in the old world”, “Travelling, communicating”, “A new social order: the rise of the middle classes”, “Creating and diffusing knowledge” “Mapping”, “Using history, making heroes”, “Public celebrations” and “Images of the Nation”. In the foreword to the exhibit’s catalogue Irina Bokova writes that “This exhibition traces the history of a vibrant cultural mosaic, revealing the diversity of this region’s cultural heritage and the energy arising from the interweaving of influences between and within countries. Travelling from one museum to another, Imagining the Balkans will help strengthen cooperation among cultural institutions and professionals and raise public awareness as the basis for deepening dialogue”.
The exhibition, inaugurated on April 8th, will be on display until 25 August 2013. It is meant to travel to Serbia and Romania in September/December 2013, and to other countries from South-East Europe in 2014-2015.
#invasionidigitali is a grass roots movement, enhancing a network of institutions and events focused on the dissemination and valorization of the Italian artistic and cultural heritage through the use of internet and the social media. The instrument implemented by the movement are programmatic “digital invasions”, aimed at raising awareness about the crisis which is affecting the Italian cultural sector and promoting the Nation’s cultural and artistic heritage through social media. These invasions consist of a network of coordinated events, which take place at the same time in different museums and heritage places in Italy. Bloggers, tour guides, photographers and social media users will illustrate their experiences in the selected cultural sites through pictures and videos, which will all be posted on the social media, as well as on the project’s YouTube channel.
The next “digital invasion” will take place from April 20-28, 2013 (during the week which was meant to be the dedicated to the celebration of culture, and which was recently cancelled). #invasionidigitali invites everyone who may be interested to participate to visit a museum or cultural site with their camera or smartphone, to share these experiences on their personal accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest or Youtube, and to assign these docs a #invasionidigitali tag. All the tagged contents will automatically be aggregated of the #invasionidigitali portal, and available
The aim of the event is to transform the participants into #DigitalCulturalAmbassadors, and to spread a free and shared culture.
In October 2012, the European Commission promoted an international conference investigating “European Audiences: 2020 and beyond“. The event took place in Brussels, and brought together 800 culture professionals to discuss about how to engage more meaningfully with the audiences of today and tomorrow. The lively participation and debate at the conference highlighted the crucial role of audiences for the cultural sector, who are hungry for engagement, for shared experiences, for a sense of community. Audience development is in fact one of the priorities of the EU’s future funding programme for the cultural and creative sectors, ”Creative Europe”.
The EC has recently published the conclusive outcomes of the conference, which you can download through this link: http://ec.europa.eu/culture/news/documents/conclusions-conference.pdf.
These days, Ruth Noack, Leader of the MeLa Research Field 04 “Curatorial and Artistic Research”, is visiting China; on this occasion, she will give a lecture at the Department Fine Arts of the University of Hong Kong.
Is it possible to think of language and image, discourse and art works as equally valent? It stands to reason that curators and art historians would have a different answer to this question, as they have different disciplinary socialisations, different tools and methods, different experiences with art. Ruth Noack’s lecture will not clarify these differences, but instead experiment in conflating both approaches. The exploration of the topic will focus on the work by Indian artist Nasreen Mohamedi (1937-1990).
On April 11th, Ruth Noack, Leader of the MeLa Research Field 04 from the Royal College of Art, will participate in the Para/Site International Conference, that will take place at Para Site contemporary art space in Hong Kong. This three-day forum brings together a group of original thinkers, artists and curators from around the world to discuss and navigate on the spectral contemporary condition of art. The conference will present different contextual genealogies, realities of production and interpretative vocabularies and allow for their reading from the perspective of Hong Kong and its changing position in the globalized contemporary art field. » Read more
The MeLa Staff is pleased to launch the new issue of the MeLa Newsletter, providing updated news about the Project outcomes, events and publications.
Don’t miss in this issue:
→ Introducing the new MeLa Books, illustrating the outcomes of the activities promoted within the MeLa Research Fields 04 and 06.
→ Reporting the outcomes of the MeLa Conferences, which took place at the University of Glasgow and Università degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale”.
→ Illustrating the MeLa RF04 Exhibition, organised by the Royal College of Art in relation to the work by Austrian artist Ines Doujak, “Loomshuttles/Warpaths”.
→ Presenting the EUBORDERSCAPES Project, investigating the ongoing evolution of “Bordering, Political Landscapes and Social Arenas”.
→ Spreading the final outcomes of the EUNAMUS Project, after the conclusive conference in Copenhagen.
You can downloand the MeLa Newsletter #06 at this page: http://www.mela-project.eu/publications/1047.
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