Tag Archives: Politics of Change

ready to Change?

sostenuto conference in Ljubljana, Slovenia – 1/5 december 2010
presentation of the OpenGreens project in the section: New Collectives – 2 december 18:40


Ljubljana community garden project by obrat.org

Numerous artistic and cultural actors in the Mediterranean area, in Europe, and throughout the world have noticed the important changes in our societies and the difficulties resulting from these changes. As experimenters and explorers, they are putting their efforts into proposing new ways of operating in the cultural sector and beyond.
In this moment of multiple and confusing crises, the European Union is also searching for new perspectives through its EU 2020 strategy. Within this context, it seems important to highlight how cultural actors are coping with social transformations, with transformations of public policies, or with transformations of cultural and artistic practices (new collaborative practices, the integration of communication technologies, etc.).
During the Ready to Change Forum, we are hazarding the following questions: is it possible to combine our knowledge, our experiences, and our desires in order to take a collective position? Is it possible to demonstrate the determinant role that we are assuming in this moment of our history, one which is illuminating the meanings and reconstructing models of solidarity, and proposing new ways of thinking and new forms of organization and relationships?
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SoftBorders – festival & exhibition in Sao Paulo

go to the ehibition website
download the exhibition catalogue: click here

A border, by definition, is simply a line separating two political or geographical fields. The word itself connotes political, economical, cultural, and psychological zones, along with conflicts and their conflicting positions. The same word also inhabits the act and the possibility of trespassing. Diverging thoroughly from this idea, this exhibition focuses on such projects and works that question the circumstances and limits of their territories of research, as well as the capacities and possibilities of the medium they choose to work with.

One of the main intentions of the “Soft Borders” exhibition is to duplicate the operation logic of the Upgrade Network in a gallery space, and to function as an “interface” to aggregate all possible means of perceiving and interpreting the word “border” by the Network. Yet, interface is a protocol that manages a border.
Although the exhibition displays different methodologies, technologies, motivations, and approaches, each and every work shapes, covers, and fills the volume of the gallery space in like attitude. It is the common language of the Network, which values equal distribution, sharing of information and production in tune with a similar mental and productive frequency. Parallel to this basis, the title “Soft Borders” also contains a strong indication of the word “software”, which operates on common languages (follows a code) shared and known by those who are correlated with it. In this respect, the expectation of this exhibition is to build new links and to explore new possibilities through and with the audience by sharing the common language of the Network.
(Basak Senova, curatorial statement)