Pandora's Box explores the form of conversation as a method of aesthetic solidarity and empowerment. As an online platform it collects and archives talks, stories, discourses and struggles to re-value and constantly reboot practices of solidarity. The conversations and texts published in this first Volume are starting and connecting points creating a web of support, exchange and dispersion being a catalyser for planetary solidarity and imaginary and real material nanocommunities.
Silver Rights focuses on the ancestral bond between the communities and the land (mapu), a bond eroded and denied by colonising forces that have mutated over the centuries to gradually establish themselves in recent decades through neo-extractivist practices; a settlement process resulting from the convergence of investment policies and commercial agreements between South American governments and foreign multinationals, including the Italian Benetton.
Mediterranea 19—School of Waters imagines a Biennale as a temporary school inspired by radical and experimental pedago- gies and the way they challenge artistic, curatorial, and research formats. From this standpoint, School of Waters acts as a collective tool to defamiliarise stereotypes that manipulate our geographical imaginaries, especially those linked to the eurocen- tric interpretation of the Mediterranean area.Â
Dialogue forms the basis of everything in my artistic practice. I never work in a vacuum, never just in my head or shut away in a studio. I always view myself as being in a dialogue with the world, with others. I travel a lot for my work and I’m dependent on people to talk with locally, on hospitality and collaboration. For some time, I’ve also been interested in the way we can understand plants as actors in history, in other words, not just as passive extras. Of course, plants don’t talk in words, but they are still communicating through smells, colours, or toxins. So conversations always take place on various levels.
From the middle of January to the end of March 2014, the class Design for the Living World lived and worked in Soweto. They developed two projects in two neighbourhoods in Soweto: Ubuntu Park in Orlando East and the Primary School Vegetable Gardens in Noordgesig.
The Soweto Project began a year earlier, when Stefan Horn of the Berlin-based art association urban dialogues invited our class at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg to join the Nine Urban Biotopes project. The basic idea was for us to stay in Soweto for three months and work closely with the local community.