Practice and Power Media Resources

In June 2018, Dublin was host to a four-day, major transnational event exploring questions of negotiation, exchange and representation in contemporary collaborative arts practice.

Artists across the world are engaging with diverse constituencies to develop projects that seek to influence and expand the possibilities for greater participation and agency across artistic, cultural and socio-political spheres. Practice and Power considered this paradigm shift towards collaborative processes and methodologies within the arts.

An international community of artists, participants, community activists thinkers, policy makers and programmers gathered in Dublin for this major event, which was the culmination of a series of public Staging Posts held at key points across the Collaborative Arts Partnership Project (CAPP) partner network over 2017/2018. Practice and Power marked the final and most significant dissemination moment for CAPP. Attendees were immersed in the field through workshops, discussion events, networking opportunities, launches, and keynote talks.

For those of you who weren’t able to join us, and for all of those who were there and would like to re immerse themselves, in the coming weeks and months, we will share media – audio recordings, videos, and images, from Practice and Power, on this page.

Keynote talk: Pier Luigi Sacco

Pier Luigi Sacco is the Professor of Cultural Economics, IULM University Milan; Director of the IRVAPP centre of Bruno Kessler Foundation, Trento; Senior Researcher, metaLAB (at) Harvard, and visiting scholar at Harvard University. He is the Special Adviser of the European Commissioner for Education and Culture, member of the Europeana Research Advisory Board, of the Economics of Culture Committee of the Italian Ministry of Culture, of the Advisory Council for Research & Innovation of the Czech Republic, and of the Advisory Council of Creative Georgia. He is the Senior Editor of the Leisure and Tourism Section of Cogent Social Sciences. He has published about 200 papers on international peer-reviewed journal and edited books with major international publishers. He works and consults internationally in the fields of culture-led local development and is often invited as keynote speaker in major cultural policy conferences worldwide. Pier Luigi led the second day of Practice and Power with this keynote presentation.

Traveller Collection Roundtable at Pavée Point

Seamus Nolan’s work, Traveller Collection, a CAPP commission, investigates the idea of archive, deconstructs ideas on ‘heritage’ and engages with communities of place and of interest, involving Traveller activists and archivists. Artist Seamus Nolan, working with Paveé Point, representatives from the Travelling community and researcher Dr Eve Olney, is engaging in an ongoing collaborative process with cultural practitioners, Traveller activists and collectors in an exploration of what a Traveller collection or a Traveller specific museum might be and how it would be managed and maintained by Travellers. An online platform dedicated to Traveller culture, www.travellercollection.ie, is open to submission, moderation and curation by the public. Here, visitors to the site can view featured collections and recently loaded items.

On the 21st June 2018, a roundtable discussion was held in Paveé Point on Representation and the archive, with Seamus Nolan, artist; Rosaleen McDonagh, Paveé Point; Dr. Eve Olney, Artist and Ethnographer; Jessica O’ Donnell, Head of Education and Community Outreach, Dublin City Gallery, and chaired by Oein de Bhairduin. This wide-ranging discussion explored questions of ownership, agency, and representation of Traveller culture and heritage. Points of discussion included the challenges of collecting Traveller culture, and the related necessity to have a Traveller collection maintained by Travellers themselves.

This audio record of the Roundtable discussion opens with a song from Mary Collins.

Keynote talk: Jeanne Van Heeswijk

Jeanne van Heeswijk is an artist who facilitates the creation of dynamic and diversified public spaces in order to “radicalize the local.” Her long-term community-embedded projects question art’s autonomy by combining performative actions, discussions, and other forms of organising and pedagogy in order to assist communities to take control of their own futures. Drawing on two major projects Freehouse: Radicalising the Local in Rotterdam (2008 – ongoing), and the more recent Philadelphia Assembled (2015-2017 and ongoing), Jeanne explores key questions relating to power and practice from the artist’s perspective. This keynote was the opening talk of Practice and Power.

Practice and Power: Experience the Event

It is hard to condense four intensive days of discussion, debate, inspiration, creation into just a few minutes, but the following video captures the essence of Practice and Power – a diverse, varied programme featuring the best of contemporary European collaborative arts practice.

Video: Arcade Films

The Realm of Possibility – an Acoustic Footprint

Sound by Susanne Bosch & Seán Mac Erlaine

Over the last four years, Susanne Bosch, CAPP Artist Researcher, gathered about 200 hours of audio recordings from the CAPP network meetings, events, dialogues, conversations and exchanges. She captured countless moments attempting to verbally de-construct and newly construct this field of interconnectedness through collaborative arts. A sound piece has been developed in collaboration with composer, musician and producer Seán Mac Erlaine that captures the polyphonic, multi-layered complex web of conversations.

The sound piece is 20 min long, contains 20 different voices and was developed for both stereo listening as well as Dolby 5.1 surround environments.

CAPP Practice and Power, Create, Dublin (2018). Photo: Joseph Carr.