European Cultural Foundation

Welcome to our weblog Inside - Insight!

In the framework of our Mediterranean Reflection Group, we invited the aMAZE cultural lab to document and reflect upon the development and day-to-day implications of their cooperation project Atlante Mediterraneo.

We have been intrigued by the broad geographical scope of the project, engaging in collaboration on both shores of the Mediterranean.

Discover the project, from Tel Aviv to Barcelona, from Nicosia to Beirut, from Istanbul to Alexandria, by reading the blog!

By Nadim Karam, Atelier Hapsitus, Beirut (www.hapsitus.com)

I always felt it important to go public.
Maybe as a need to reach the world around me and exteriorize myself. Also as a necessity to address the city culturally, especially the emerging post war cities like (Beirut & others) were the financial issues are first addressed while the city’s memory and historical layers fall into oblivion.
What is public art and how to project it in the city has been an issue of continuous research at Atelier Hapsitus. Cities need to dream and through the insertion of stories that act as links between the past and the future, we can help them do so. I have selected our office to be on the demarcation line. In a city recovering from a long civil war, I felt that the areas that used to be the barricade lines during a war, fought from street to street, becomes a rich combination of cultural, religious and social behavior in the post war period.
The two days seminar in Venice was a total change for me. It brought together different ideas developing along the Mediterranean Sea; I spent two days in one space seeing such diverse and interesting ideas that brings new and fresh input to the mind. An escape from the daily life of survival in which we are entangled and a way to rediscover my city with a fresh outlook.
In fact the Mediterranean Sea is a relief for Beirut. It links it to different thoughts and a variety of cultural aspects. It opens its boundaries on almost all sides and gives it a unique identity that balances it with the mountains and anti mountains of Lebanon and the extent of the Arab desert.
I live in Beirut, and I have decided to work from here. Being on the Mediterranean Sea it is natural to be in touch with the other Mediterranean countries.
These meetings between different cultures around one “bassin” shows that the common sea that we share is fully populated with stories told each one his \ her way. Between Sadness and happiness, war and beauty, the boundaries of the Mediterranean Sea are always fluctuating. It is for us to find out the issues that differentiate us and the others that bring us together.

As conclusion of the Atlante Mediterraneo project, the aMAZE cultural lab in Milan together with the department of Industrial Arts & Design of the IUAV in Venice, offer a moment of reflection in collaboration with Venice International Biennial.

An experimental and multi-disciplinary debate on seven “case study” cities (Istanbul, Beirut, Nicosia, Tel Aviv, Alexandria, Barcelona and Venice), on contemporary perceptions of the city, as well as on the theme of new territories. Migratory flows of people, cultures and economies. The writing on the walls of contemporary city-territories, open maps with multiple meanings between their emotional, geographical, historical and social layers.
International seminar; publishing and journalistic presentations; conferences and video projections, visual materials, on the subject Atlante Mediterraneo. New City-Territory.

In collaboration with international universities and institutions:
Platform Garanti, Istanbul; Artos Foundation, Nicosia; Gudran Association for Art and Development, Alexandria; Ashkal Alwan Association, Beirut; Can Xalant Cultural Center, Matarò/Barcelona; Transit Project, Barcelona; Goldsmiths University of London, Department of Visual Cultures; Barcelona University, Metropolis-Post Graduate Program in Architecture and Urban Culture; Alexandria University, Department of Visual Art and Architecture; Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem University; University of Cyprus, Department of Social and Political Sciences.
With the support: Anna Lindh Foundation, Alexandria; European Cultural Foundation, Amsterdam

PROGRAMME @ IUAV, ex Convento Terese, Venice:
[sessions held in English]

Tuesday 12th June
h.9.30/13.30: Atlante Mediterraneo. Art and Urban Practices. Artists on action.

Istanbul (xurban_collective), Beirut (Tony Chakar), Nicosia (Haris Epaminoda),
Alexandria (Gudran Collective), Tel Aviv (Ofri Cnaani) and Barcelona (Pep Dardanya)
Co-ordinators: Vasif Kortun (Director of Platform Garanti Cultural Centre and of Turkish Pavilion);
Marti Peran (Visual Arts professor, University of Barcelona).

h.14.30/18.30: Thought and public sphere. Publishing, publications, magazine.

> Going Public ’06. Atlante Mediterraneo
Urban interventions, workshops, films, debates, cultural exchanges in public space.
Edited by Claudia Zanfi
Published by Silvana Editoriale, Milano/Actar, Barcelona 2006

> Did Someone Say Participate? An Atlas of Spatial Practice
Edited by Markus Miessen and Shumon Basar
Published by The MIT Press/Revolver 2006

> Roulotte
A magazine, a mobile exhibition, a documentation, a dialogue
Editors : Xavier Arenos, Domenec, Martí Peran
Published by ACM (Mataró, Barcelona) 2006

> YS. Ystenografo
weekly cultural supplement to Phileleftheros daily paper of Cyprus.
Investigate the art, graphic and cultural world.
Publishing direction: Eleni Xenou; Elena Parpa
Published by: Phileleftheros Ltd, Nicosia

> Arcipelaghi e enclave. Architettura dell’ordinamento spaziale contemporaneo
by Alessandro Petti, edited by Maria Nadotti, Bruno Mondadori Editore, Milano 2007
Publishing and visual project, to understand transformation of public space, under effect of control and safety devices.

> Port-City. On mobility and exchange
An exhibition and editorial project + an international platform of research, that investigate the theme of City-Port
edited by Tom Trevor, director Arnolfini Contemporary Art Center, Bristol

Co-ordinate: Claudia Zanfi (artistic director of MAST- Museo di Arte Sociale e Territoriale, Milan)
Umberto Pastore (University of Trento, School of Management + editor Silvana Editoriale, Milano)

Wednesday 13th June
h.9.30/13.30: New city-territories. The visible city, the invisible city, lectures and seminars.

Paolo Fabbri (Professor of Semiotic Studies at the IUAV, Venice), Yannis Papadakis (Social Anthropologist, Associate Professor, University of Cyprus), Sigal Barnir & Yael Moria (Professors Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem), Nadim Karam (Professor, Architect founder of Atelier Hapsitus, Beirut), Peter Lang (Professor at Texas A&M University, Department of Architecture); Heba Habuelfadl, (Associated Professor, Faculty of Fine Art, Department of Architecture, Alexandria University).
Co-ordinate PierLuigi Sacco (Head of DADI, IUAV Venice).

h.14.30/18.30: Communities and territory. Brainstorming and proposals.

The second day closes with an open debate and a presentation of students and Italian artists researches: Isolario, by Francesca Cogni + Donatello de Mattia; 100% Pubblica, by Giulia Gabrielli, Lorenza Cossutta, Isabella Sannipoli; CairoCities by Anna Ferraro and Giulia Giapponesi.
Co-ordinated by Achilleas Kentonis (Director of Artos Foundation, Nicosia), Pelin Tan (art critic, Berlin/Istanbul).

DISPLAY OF VISUAL MATERIALS AROUND THE CITY AND AT THE UNIVERSITY COURTYARD

by Claudia Zanfi, artistic director aMAZElab (www.amaze.it)

Atlante Mediterraneo is a collective project, designed to create a network of theoretical and artistic research among the countries that look onto the Mediterranean. An international and multi-disciplinary exchange space, a crossroads of different ideas, theoretical reflections and contemporary artistic practices. Atlante Mediterraneo has prepared a series of activities, theoretical debates, and “exhibitions as expeditions”. Starting out from a reflection structured and shared among the various partners on the concept of mobility, society and politics within the Mediterranean area, aMAZElab and its partners held a series of territorial workshops in various cities.

The project started off with the round table “Cyprus Day. Art rebuild society”, a study day dedicated to the realities of Cyprus, the relationship between creativity and society, in one of the last divided city of Europe.

The starting and finishing points of this round tour – Barcelona and Istanbul, developed studies on the transformation of the two cities: migration; flows of people; gentrification; tourism.

A garden for all (Alexandria, Egypt), is a sharing workshop - an experience with “Gudran Association for Art and Development”- on the implementation of a rural area near Alexandria: El Max, a semi-abandoned fishing village.

Transcrossing Memories (Nicosia, Cyprus), is a territorial lab involving both local communities (turkish-cypriot and greek-cypriot), through a mobile device: The Memory Box a public space open to everybody, which is a sort of library that gathers together people’s memories, arts projects, readings, video projections, music and performances.

Floating Symmetry (Tel Aviv, Israel). A multiple video projection, documenting the journey undertaken by the artists Ofri Cnaani and Jenny Vogel, covering the land-sea distance that divides the island of Cyprus from the waterfront city of Tel Aviv: a path through geopolitical and human symmetries bridging Nicosia and Jerusalem.

Going Public Atlas (Modena, Italy). Bringing this first Mediterranean voyage to a close, the experience and the research carried out in the six cities were collected first in Modena (Italy), at an international meeting for young artists, which aims to facilitate a genuine exchange between different cultures through artistic production.

New City-Territory (Venice, Italy) is the conclusion of this first long journey around the Mediterranean. The workshop, of an open and experimental nature, uses the towns as enormous “project room”. All projects presented were carried out dealing with the territory and its inhabitants.
Partners, artists, theoreticians, students form different universities and background, are invited all together to share their experiences on the subject. Art and theory as cultural practice: exhibition, workshop, debate at International Venice Biennial/ IUAV, Art and Architecture University.

Beirut, Istanbul, Nicosia, Cairo

Report by Ofri Cnaani (Israel/NYC) and Jenny Vogel (Germany/NCY), artists

What are the daily issues one is confronted with?
What are the misunderstandings, frustrations, challenges one is confronted with?
Due to several circumstances like the instability of the political situation in the Middle East, the lack of budget available to us, we had to stay flexible to continuously adjust our original idea and work around obstacles to make “Floating Symmetry” happen.
For a very long time the format of the final presentation was up in the air although we were in a dialog with the curators. By the time the details of the presentation were final we found ourselves to have very little time to produce the project.

What is the mutual gain from the cooperation process?
As artists we have intended to work on a collaboration for a long time, and this was a nice project to bring both of our interests together. We are both very pleased about the fact that Atlante Mediterraneo gave us this opportunity.
Since Going Public 06 was focused on geopolitical and cultural exchanges around the Mediterranean, we hope our project, which presents sections and comparisons between locations, reflects many of the issues that other artists touched on and so serves as an opening platform for conversation.

What are the effects of the cooperation on a personal experience level?
Through the participation with Atlante Mediterraneo we had a chance to learn about other artists with similar interests and projects as ours, and will get to meet them in Venice. From past experience (Ofri in Going Public 04) we know that the face time with other artists is a crucial part of the cooperative part in such a visionary project like this. Living and working in New York the art world seems sometimes to be too concerned with the market. Being in such a great project as Atlante Mediterraneo is a chance to participate in a more political and conceptual discourse.

What can we learn from this?
We can learn from this that planning in advance and agreeing on the objectives of a project are crucial for the collaborative process. Especially if working under such challenging conditions of time and space which has so many variables we must define the working format in order to save enough time and energy for the actual creative process.

Report by Barcelona group, from Can Xalant, Matarò
(www.canxalant.es)
coordinated by Martí Peran - Barcelona University, answering to some questions on cultural collaborations and artistic workshops:

What are the daily issues one is confronted with?
To confirm that is possible to develop projects in group
To insert the art questions into the real world
To create different dynamics to the accomplice with the public
To know better what kind of questions can be interesting for a general research
To attract people from a little town community

This type of workshops help to develop many of the raised questions. Perhaps, the most important ones were two of them. First of all, it was useful to create different dynamics to accomplice with the public, and to work in the public space. And also, to work in a group formed by people from different cultures.

What are the misunderstandings, frustrations, challenges one is confronted with?
Perhaps the workshop with students from different countries needs to be better decided with some general criteria as experience level.
For example, it’s not necessary to prepare an exhibition after the workshop. It’s enough to try to explain each experience and the researches in an open presentation to the public for the city. Moreover, it makes more sense with the idea of making public art.
Misunderstanding: Each group understood the project their own way.
Each group came with their researches, developed at a different stage.
Challenges: To work with people from other countries.

What is the mutual gain from the cooperation process?
Of course, to learn by direct experience to deal with real situations, in a foreigner country. After this meeting everybody knows new people, has new contacts and can develop new projects.

What are the effects of the cooperation on a personal experience level?
To learn working in team, especially for the students.
To learn working with others being in a foreign context in all senses.

What can we learn from this?
To discuss together the role of the art in a real context.

Report by Nermin Saybasili, curator
Project coordinator for Platfom Garanti, Istanbul (www.platform.garanti.com.tr)

For the project Atlante Mediterraneo, a group of young artists from Istanbul is conducting their research individually. Here I want to make a special emphasis on mobility, a mobile artistic practice and analysis, on a Deleuzian ‘nomadic becoming’, which allows for otherwise unlikely encounters and unsuspected sources of interaction of experience and of knowledge. Before we started to work on the project, I had this idea in my mind: as a city like Istanbul we should not try to define it, but reveal the complexities and the net of interconnectedness it carries in itself. The artists took “their own journeys” on the topography of Istanbul. Through their “mappings”, the city remains “soft” accommodating fragmented and heterogeneous, yet inter-connected constituent parts through which the tensions disappear and the interactions occur.

The research of each artist is turning to be a series of works: an audio-visual installation which focus on the life of an Ukranian woman living in Istanbul (Pinar Asan), an installation-work which deal with the ghostly presence of the minority groups (mainly the Armenians and the Greeks) in the city (Hera Buyuktasciyan), a group of photographs displayed in public settings (Deniz Gul), and a set of posters which mimic the missing posters by operating as a “virus” in the public domain (Adnan Yildiz).
Me and the artists do not only want to present the work in spaces allocated for the exhibitions, but also use the public space, hoping that the works can make possible to contact the inhabitants of the towns more easily and directly. I think that the result is satisfactory.

What can we learn from this? I believe that this should urge us to think both the production of public space, its control and regulation by the authorities, and the role the artists and curators can actively play, the models that can be developed.
For my part, it was important to meet the Lebanese journalist Bilal Khbeiz during the first workshop and cultural exchange in Italy, and listen to his experience as being one of the members of the Atlas Group in the past and as being a journalist in the city of Beirut. The workshops I am taking part in and their results are very interesting, as we intend in our project to make the inhabitants of the town to look at their city differently, as we aim at making them to participate to the artistic process. We are learning to cope with the situations and making use of them at the most possible and productive ways.

Report by Achilleas Kentonis, artist
Director of Artos Foundation, Nicosia Cyprus (www.artosfoundation.org)

What are the daily issues one is confronted with?
I would focus on two key words on this question: daily and confronted. Human nature deals with these two “codes” in an opposite way. “Western” people as part of a social group always try to keep on living and face the monster of every day life. Career, financials, love affairs, family, self esteem, health, fears are just a few of the little big things that are on the chess board and expect our next move. As a reaction to this stress full reality people look for a secure (usually semi virtual environment) pathway while searching for optimistic mechanisms like entertainment, religion, philosophical platforms etc. There is always a hidden territory at close range to each member of our societies. It is real and each one of us gives the size and volume to this according to his needs and personality. The confrontation is always included in each territory one way or another. The “daily” element minimizes it as long as it does not put the person at a high risk. These procedures are the most important elements that should one investigate nowadays. Geopolitical confrontations are there creating new metaphors for disorientation. Is much more visible and always is in the hands of people that are not directly influenced by that. What links though both worlds is the idea of home. Home is a symbol of daily life and possible security of confrontation of any kind. It is a territory itself. Whatever happens inside you keep it inside and whatever what happens outside you keep it outside.

What are the misunderstandings, frustrations, challenges one is confronted with?
Misunderstandings in Cyprus: different interpolation of basic terms due to absence of serious cooperation with the occupied areas in Cyprus. Of course the good will and good human relations were strong and all problems were overcame in a natural way. Misunderstandings in Italy: different interpolation of time. Frustration: none. Challenges: confrontation with yourself and with the other. This project smoothed a little the edges between yourself and the other.

What is the mutual gain from the cooperation process?
Of course we are not naive to believe that cooperation on artistic projects can really solve political problems. Artists care for art and politicians for power. Artists go into an adventure for additional experience and usually there to point out questions in society, aesthetics and hidden emotions. In that sense the cooperation process was mutually beneficial with all partners. On the other hand the borders (physical and mental) are still there. Injustice and the power of the strong did not change through the history of mankind. But if not the artists and the intellectuals do not live the utopia who will. After all, hope dies last.

What are the effects of the cooperation on a personal experience level?
The strongest effect that someone could feel out of this is the fact that in this project there is a Mediterranean common denominator. It is a fantastic opportunity to see the sea around us, as a bridge from where good and bad things could happen. We first feel Mediterranean and then Europeans. It is not the understanding between us that matters but the natural code that is fluxing in between. That breeze creates another positive “separation” territory between northern Europeans and southern Mediterraneans. Even though art is not there to clear out things like that effect influenced I believe all of us and that is the success side of the project.

What can we learn from this?
I will have to reply to this question as an artist. It is not about learning but about living. Communication is there, new experience is developing, new ideas for further cooperation are being generated and of course there is now the desire to expand this issue even further and open up to a broader network.

Eleftheria and Saray Square (South and North Ciprus), Nicosia 2006

Report by Abdalla Daif, artist and writer
Co-founder of Gudran Association for Art and Development (www.gudran.com)

The first question that came on my mind is what I would do, as an artist going to that community, with all those artists gathered in that meeting. A question that takes many forms, beginning with how to say “goodmorning“, including watching the other members of the group working in front of their computers, ending with the observation of the people from Formigine (small city in Italy, the first place of our meeting).

About me, I liked my position as an observer of other artists moving towards the audience, comparing our methodology in Gudran Association to that of the other groups, dealing with considerably different community from the one in Egypt.
A part the discussions with my friend Bilal Khbeiz about the Israeli-Lebanese and the Lebanese-Lebanese conflicts, my daily joy was refreshed by Susana’s persistence, Rachel’s vividity and Pinar’s understanding, finding other ways of being in contact with the community, asking the community about their ability to allow the children - who worked with my colleague Sameh El Halawani and me - to draw on walls of their houses. We chose a big part of temporary wooden fence so that a group of children could express themselves by drawing and painting.
For me it is quite an attempt to explore that iron frame of uniqueness of that small town. So, the biggest challenge is how to create an intimacy between the artist and the community through an artistic process.

While Sameh is monitoring the workshop, I am trying to get people walking in the street, listening to everyone’s opinion and, after discussing with the other artists the nature of our work as a group, trying to involve the community in the artistic process.

That had a tangible effect on us as a group. Actually through the project Atlante Mediterraneo, we are able to know closely other groups active around the Mediterranean, with different experiences and practices of working in communities. The discussions and sharing of small ideas and tasks contribute a lot to exchange experiences as a group of artists with different cultural backgrounds.

I can say that this kind of projects have a very important approach for the dialogue between these participating communities and group of artists and students. Thanks to our meetings and to the activities around the six mediterranean cities where Atlante Mediterraneo works in.

Worshops in Formigine (Italy) and El Max/Alexandria (Egypt)

Report by Giulia Giapponesi, video artists
University of Visual Arts, Bologna (part of Italian group)

As an Italian artist who participate in the international project Atlante Mediterraneo, I am part of the group of the exchange in which thirty young artists from five different Mediterranean countries have been invited to work together with the same task: having an open discussion about what’s going on in the public space and in the contemporary society.

At our first meeting last autumn in Italy, we basically have been sitting together around a table, trying to know each other. Our daily issues were about how to make a common point on different topics such as:
- What public art is, according to the personal experiences that each one developed in his own country?
- What kind of consideration about the territory is possible to make today?
- Which kinds of artistic actions can we make in the city as results of our considerations?

That was a hard discussion for different reasons. On one hand we had some practical problems: since not everyone could handle the English language at the same level, sometimes different translations were needed and, as a consequence, some subtle concepts used to get lost inside the process of making everybody understand. This problem has not really been a real obstacle because the main considerations has been always worked out clearly; but when we tried to point out some particular aspects of our personal experience I think that few people have really understood all. On the other hand, in my opinion, even when the language is properly understood by everybody, the cultural differences between our countries (especially between the countries on the opposite sides of the Mediterrean Sea), make some concepts not easy to be understood for all the interlocutors.

As one Turkish artist said during our meeting, Atlante Mediterraneo (part of the Going Public Project) is a challange of making global what is local. In his word, to bring thirty artists from all over the Mediterranean countries and make them having such a strong impact on a provincial town this is a “glocalization”. Trying to set a global view on what cannot be global by nature would end in turning what is global into local. I think he meant that it is easier to change the mind of an international artist towards the one of an old citizen of the city than to turn the mind of a local citizen towards the one of an international artist.

Anyway the exchange has many positive aspects. The most visible one is, of course, the cultural aspect of an experience which involve people of both eastern and western culture. This kind of exchange, like the one organized by Gudran Association (Alexandria) at the fishermen’s village in El-Max, where we participated for the Atlante Mediterraneo, really helps all the people involved (which does not mean only the artists but also all the organizers and the citizens touched by the event) to face their own cultural stereotypes and reconsider them. It is a mutual gain in terms of different ways of knowledge, not only of living but also of considering art and making it. That’s why these kind of workshops are such an inspiration for artists, because when one’s mind is open it’s easier to produce something that finds a way to communicate oneself to the others.

As a final consideration I would say that Atlante Mediterraneo is an important experiment. It is definitely an ambitious project and it startes with a great expectation. Probably the high number of participants could not be considered an obstacle from an artistic point of view, but it could be in consideration of an action planned on the territory. Anyway, in my opinion, most of the participants are giving a positive response in particular those that are supposed to have more adaptation difficulties like the Egyptian group. Moreover, some of the artistic productions are really interesting works and they really hit the city.

15th February 2007

Atlante Mediterraneo international workshop, Modena (Italy)

We are pleased to announce the release of the book

GOING PUBLIC ‘06. ATLANTE MEDITERRANEO

The book gathers the results of 18 mounth of public art and territorial project, the site specific artistic interventions, and the researches of partners and contributors from six mediterranean cities: Istanbul, Beirut, Nicosia, Tel Aviv, Alexandria, Barcelona.

250 pages, 2 languages (it+engl), 160 images full colors.

Texts by: Claudia Zanfi (curator); Tony Chakar (Beirut architect); Abdalla Daif (Alexandria art critic); Manuel Delgado (Barcelona anthropologist); Sameh El Halawany (Alexandria artist); Achilleas Kentonis (Artos Foundation director, Nicosia); Bilal Khbeiz (Beirut journalist); Elias Khury (Beirut writer); Vasif Kortun (Platfom Garanti director, Istanbul); Stefano Maffei (Politecnico, Milan); Yannis Papadakis (Nicosia sociologist); Marti Peran (Barcelona University); Sharon Rotbard (Tel Aviv urbanist); Nermin Saybasili (Goldsmiths University, London).

Special projects by: Atlas Group (Beirut); Ofri Cnaani and Jenny Vogel (NYC); Francesca Cogni and Donatello De Mattia (Milano); Gianmaria Conti (Milano); Oda Projesi (Istanbul/NYC); xurban_collective (Istanbul/NYC); Akram Zaatari (Beirut) and others.

Published by: Silvana Editoriale, Milano.
International distribution by: Actar, Barcelona.