THE SITE IS HALF THE WORK - URBAN CURATING AFTER THE PLANETARY TURN
Lecture by Gilly Karjevsky
Wed 13 March, 6 p.m.
The planetary poses a particular challenge for urban curators; namely that of how to care for sites and curate on sites from a cosmo-local perspective? How to address questions of scale, geo-politics and regional environmental challenges, in particular in densely urbanized areas? Earthcare and the program of maintenance may offer some avenues for inhabiting, observing and curating on sites while cross-pollinating between sites and the humans who care for them. The lecture will be drawing on programs that emerged from their immediate contexts: Jardin Essentiel - a public garden in Brussels of over 30 varieties of medicinal and aromatic herbs that hosted two months of experimental design and artistic interventions in 2016, and climate care - a festival for theory and practice rooted at the Floating University Berlin (2019-2023). These projects ask us to review how we care for sites after the planetary turn, and which aesthetic sensibilities and imaginative political actions we can rehearse through such curatorial approaches.
Gilly Karjevsky is an urban curator based in Berlin. Her current research looks at Collective Autotheory and Urban Curating after the planetary turn. She is a guest professor for social design at HFBK in Hamburg 22-24, curator in residence at the MArch at CSM in London, and founding association member at Floating e.V since 2018, where she is curating the Climate Care festival - a festival for theory and practice on a nature-culture learning site, the residency program Urban Practice and a participatory lexicon process. Gilly is a graduate of the Spatial Practices program at Central Saint Martins in London and has an MFA in Narrative Environments. She has published on several platforms, most recently "Collective Auotheory" in New Alphabet School #21 - Practices of Knowledge Production in Art, Activism and Collective Research , "Care for Cities" in Expanding Academy Reader #3 and "Climate Care - A Curriculum for Urban Practice" in Radicalizing Care - Feminist and Queer Activism in Curating.
Gilly Karjevsky is currently a guest of the Temporary Gallery residency program.
It has become a declared, if often only half-heartedly pursued, goal of cultural institutions to question and renew their own structures with regard to diversity. However, diversity must not just be a temporary program or a hip agenda, but must go deeper. The question must not only be who gets access to cultural education and its institutions, but who is even able to consider cultural and/or creative work as a career perspective.
Although so-called "art brut" - art by people with a mental illness or a mental disability - is very well established and highly valued, "art brut" artists and their artworks are excluded from the usual art scene: "art brut" functions as a separate area of the art world with its own exhibitions in which only "art brut" artists participate. As a result, they very rarely meet with artists without disabilities. Although the intention behind "art brut" exhibitions is certainly positive and worthy of support, there is no real inclusion here - the artworks are "isolated" in separate exhibitions instead of being included in exhibitions of artists without illness or disability. In order to address this problem in the long term, the Temporary Gallery. Centre for contemporary art in Cologne, would like to implement an idea in 2024 that focuses on empowerment and inclusion at a deeper level: a residency program for cultural workers - in cooperation with several partners from Cologne - with the main goal: to counteract the exclusion of so-called "outsider art" in the long term to deal with this problem in the long term, the Temporary Gallery. Center for Contemporary Art in Cologne, initiated a project (or - has a project begun?) that focuses on empowerment and inclusion on a deeper level: a residency program for cultural workers with the main goal: to counteract the exclusion of so-called "Outsider Art" in the long term.
The aim of the program is to invite several international artists to Cologne. The guests visit partner institutions and meet artists in their studios. In addition, individual "feedback sessions" are offered, talks lasting around 1-2 hours, for which artists can register. The residents also present their work at an event in the Temporary Gallery.
We successfully tested the project in 2023 - thanks to the support of the Bezirksregierung Köln - with the Kunsthaus KAT18 as a partner institution. We hosted the collective Sour Grass from Barbados, Hubert Gromny from Berlin and Luiza Proença from Rio de Janeiro in Cologne. In 2024, the project will be continued thanks to the support of the City of Cologne (funding program: "Kultur - Diversity") and expanded to include new partner institutions.
We hope that the project will also contribute to strengthening the artistic scene in Cologne in the long term. After all, better networking with international artists expands the opportunities for artists based in the city to take part in exhibitions outside Cologne.
Images:
Climate Care Festival 2023 - Krittercratia. Foto: Mor Arkadir
