Create National Networking Day 2019, Cork

*Please note that this event is now FULLY BOOKED. However, we are operating a wait-list. 

Join Create and partners Crawford Art Gallery (Cork), Counterpoints Arts (London), Cork City Arts Office and Heart of Glass (St Helens) for Create’s 2019 Networking Day for Collaborative Arts. 

We invite you to a day of exchange and learning about artists’ practices, which operate in the spaces between socially engaged arts, pedagogy, and politics, in order to activate, stimulate, critique, and make change. The Networking Day promises to open up a space for us all to ask a shared and urgent question: how can collaborative forms of arts practice – engaging with the embodied experiences and knowledge of citizens – initiate and implement real civic agency and significant momentum for social change?

We will begin the day looking at the institution as commissioner, with a central focus on world-renowned socially engaged artist Tania Bruguera’s work on the Tate Modern Turbine Hall Hyundai Commission. Bruguera will be joined by Dr. Cara Courage, Head of Tate Exchange and Tate Neighbours Natalie Bell, Shamus Dark, Debra Reis and Charles Yassin. This session will be chaired by Áine O Brien, Co-Director Counterpoints Arts.

Working closely with the Crawford Art Gallery and Cork City Arts Office, we are delighted to offer a number of afternoon breakout sessions, which reflect current collaborative initiativesand artists’ practices in Cork and the wider region.

Eve Olney of Art, Architecture and Activism will host NonViolent Communication within Social Collaborative Projects with Spyros Tsiknas and Giorgos Tsitsirigkos. This workshop employs real-life situations through the medium of theatre. Artist, curator and educator Fiona Woods offers Knowledge Commons: Cognitively mapping tools and methods of Collaborative Practice; this workshop will involve participants in a cognitive mapping of relevant knowledge commons, including the Arte Útil archive, and asks them to exchange tools and methods that they have discovered or developed through their own experience. Mid-point: Creative Enquiry Artists-in-Residence in conversation features Mary Brady of Cork City Council and The Creative Enquiry Artists in Residence Susan McManamon, Marie Brett, Colette Lewis in a roundtable discussion of how best to facilitate meaningful opportunities of creative engagement and dialogue with older people. Sociologist, activist and AIC Scheme Cultural Diversity Researcher Evgeny Shtorn will present The Politics of Representation in Art and Activism with artist and activist Emily Waszak. This session will explore crucial and challenging questions around the ethics of representation and related tensions between art and activism. Miguel Amado, Director of Cork Printmakers will present Undercommoning Curating: Collaboration Towards Co-creation and Community Development. This workshop aims to explore co-creation as a tool for undercommoning curating, examining how it may facilitate an art practice that responds to the needs, expectations and aspirations of socially excluded groups. In the sixth breakout session A Space for Contemplation, Producer Emily Gee (Heart of Glass), will invite a reflective discussion about context specific work, and what we face as artists, producers and communities working in emotive and challenging territories.

Later in the afternoon, guest speakers will turn to the concept of citizens as commissioners. In the second panel of the day, chaired by Patrick Fox, Director of Heart of Glass, Sören Meschede, curator and coordinator of Concomitentes, Spain and artists Mark Storor and Linda Curtin of the per cent for art project I Can Colour Between the Lines But I Choose Not To in Knocknaheny Cork will explore community-based commissioning and the politics of place. They will be joined by Kath Gorman, Head of Participation and Engagement for Cork Midsummer Festival.

In the context of the Decade of Commemorations and how Ireland’s struggle for independence played out very vividly in Cork, it seems fitting that we close the day with a discussion about the notion of commemoration and the symbolic role of public art. To this end, we will be joined by Hammad Nasar, former Director of the Stuart Hall Foundation, current Paul Mellon Research Fellow and initiator of Let Our Statues Speak project, to reflect on questions of memory and whose history gets written in or out of the urban fabric in broader processes of commemoration.

The day will conclude with a reception to mark the launch of the new Create Strategy 2020-2025.

Following the Networking Day, on the 27th of September, Counterpoints Arts will facilitate a Learning Lab: Art, Cultural Democracy and the City. This will be an in-depth conversation with key stakeholders and strategic players in the arts and cultural landscape who are influencing the evolving urban fabric of Cork.

Further Information about Breakout Sessions

Booking for breakout sessions: After you book your place at Networking day, your ticket confirmation email will have a link directing you to reserve your place at your preferred session. Please note that you may only attend one breakout session. Those who have previously booked their place at Networking day will receive a follow up email with breakout session booking information.

NonViolent Communication within Social Collaborative Projects. Eve Olney of Art, Architecture and Activism introduces a unique collaborative practice by Athens-based social artist/actor Spyros Tsiknas, and artist/ Non-Violent Communication (NVC) expert Giorgos Tsitsirigkos. Spyros and Giorgos combine theatre practice and explorative processes in constructing a setting in which participants consciously embody and think/act through conflict resolution. Eve Olney will contextualise these techniques and methodologies in terms of their usefulness and impact within everyday social collaborative and participatory projects. The setting for this session is within the current exhibition of the social project The Living Commons.

Artist, Curator and Educator Fiona Woods will present Knowledge Commons: cognitively mapping tools and methods of Collaborative Practice. This workshop will involve participants in a cognitive mapping of relevant knowledge commons, including the Arte Útil archive, and ask them to exchange tools and methods that they have discovered or developed through their own experiences. In this time of global emergency, many collaborative art projects seek to move beyond the production of ‘rehearsals’ for social change. Arte Útil proposes working with the resources of art to bring about meaningful transformation of socio-political realities.

Mid-point: Creative Enquiry Artists-in-Residence in conversation features Mary Brady of Cork City Council and The Creative Enquiry Artists in Residence Susan McManamon, Marie Brett and Colette Lewis in a roundtable discussion of how best to facilitate meaningful opportunities of creative engagement and dialogue with older people. The artists will share their creative approach to engaging older people in the processes of art making; consider the residency model as an effective access point for older people to creatively encounter arts practice; evaluate how these parallel residencies advance the work; and consider the legacy of the project

The Politics of Representation in Art and Activism will be explored by activist and AIC Scheme Cultural Diversity Researcher Evgeny Shtorn and artist and activist Emily Waszak from MERJ. This session will explore crucial and challenging questions around the ethics of representation and related tensions between art and activism. Representation as a concept must include the intersectional perspectives in which an artist operates, in terms of their own class, race, gender and sexuality, alongside those of the community within which they are working. This session will address these interrelated topics, examining the overlapping contradictions between activism and art.

Miguel Amado, Director of Cork Printmakers will present Undercommoning Curating: Collaboration Towards Co-creation and Community Development. This workshop aims to explore co-creation as a tool for undercommoning curating, examining how it may facilitate an art practice that responds to the needs, expectations and aspirations of socially excluded groups. Miguel Amado suggests turning curating into a civic practice, one committed to the undercommons: networks of solidarity that interlace within, against, and beyond the hegemonic ideology. Through undercommoning, curating moves away from the aesthetic parameters that have been defining the mainstream narratives of art, both historical and contemporary.

Suicide can be a very public death, whilst simultaneously an intense private experience for those who grieve. The Suicide Chronicles is a long-term collaborative artistic project created in St Helens (UK), which currently has the highest suicide rates in England and Wales. The project is a collaboration between Artist Mark Storor, Heart of Glass and those who have been affected by suicide. In this session, Producer Emily Gee (Heart of Glass), will share work in progress and invite a reflective discussion about context specific work, and what we face as artists, producers and communities working in emotive and challenging territories. The Suicide Chronicles seeks to address the lack of an effective language through which we can publicly discuss this issue. In Chronicle One, which will be shared as part of the session, three women reclaim this experience and give an audience public access to a private world.