Brave New Alps
An interview with Bianca Elzenbaumer and Fabio Franz
Visual Arts Network
is a blog hosted by CSI about collectives, community based organizations and networks working at the intersections of art, politics and social change.
Curated and written by Yulia Tikhonova – founder of Brooklyn House of Kulture - a grass-roots non-profit organization
Q. What was your starting point, how did the idea to form your project come about?
A. We began to work together in 2005 while doing our BA degree. The wish to work together came from our many discussions questioning the role of designers in society. At that time we felt like we had studied the wrong thing, but then we realised that we actually had learned quite a few useful skills to engage with the environmental and social issues that concerned us and to reach people with a message. So we both did a thesis project on environmental issues connected to mass tourism in the Alps and it was really the discussion we had that pushed us in our creative work.
After graduation we realized that the world was not quite ready to embrace two designers who did not want to submit their creativity to the market, but who wanted to engage in an activist practice. In this rather difficult initial phase it was important for us to stick together, to keep up the discussion and to support each other financially. Since then, every project we have done we have worked on environmental, political and social issues that we felt strongly about, always with the aim in mind to get others involved as well and to prove that designers can have more free space practice than what is often assumed.
Q. Who is involved in the project/organization?
A. The two of us are the core of Brave New Alps, but in every project we get others involved. These people can be experts sharing their knowledge, friends engaged in similar issues, family members supporting us with logistics, building as well as cooking skills, students who are interested in trying out a different approach or simply people who care about the issues we work on. We don't like the idea of being an island and many of our projects have strong discursive elements to them — also because much of what we do is based on a humble approach in which we try to avoid hierarchies and where we almost never come in as the "experts," but always learn from and with others.
Who outside this core group have you been collaborating with? (ie other sectors, other organizations, etc) Where do you position yourself, i.e. as: artists / social workers / activists etc,. relative to other groups?
Each of our projects develops through some form of collaboration. The projects in the Alps see mostly local residents and environmental organisations involved; the projects in Palestine mostly involved local creatives when we worked with Decolonizing Architecture (now DAAR) and human-rights organisations for the development of the alternative travel guide Decode Jerusalem; while the project Laboratorio Campano, which looks at illegal toxic waste dumping in Southern Italy saw local activists involved.
Whenever we set up experimental educational environments like the student-led Department 21 at the Royal College of Art in London, the people involved are mostly our peers with whom we love to explore issues in an interdisciplinary, open-ended way. We are designers and we are activists.
Q. What is your relationship to the art market? Do you have a relationship to commercial art and the gallery system?
A. We don't relate to the commercial art and gallery system and never had to bother about this, because most of the things we do seem not to be collectable/sellable anyway. We strongly relate to what could be called the "public art market" as we often get funding from public and non-profit institutions. We would in fact not be able to do most of our projects without this kind of support.
Q. How do you engage with the political system?
A. We engage with the political system in an indirect way, by structuring the content of our projects in a critical way, by employing a non-hierarchical approach, by being inspired by and applying direct action. The direct action approach is something that often comes up in the way we respond to situations that we find difficult or unacceptable. It mostly happens quite naturally that we start to build a project around something we would like to see changed and we then employ the means available to us to interfere with that situation. Here an obvious example is Hotel Oush Grab in Palestine, where we started a "battle of signs" with a group of illegal Zionist settlers. Another example is surely again Department 21 where we simply wanted to get more out of college than what the official structures could offer. But also our current research project Designing Economic Cultures has a strong direct action component, as it looks for ways in which critically engaged designers can set up systems of support in order to be less subjected to the pressures of the market. The theoretical research and our engagement with practices within and outside the field of design that we find inspiring go hand in hand with projects on the ground in which we try to put our thoughts in practice.
Q. What is your position regarding your institutional status? Do you have decentralizing institutions as a goal?
A. As Brave New Alps we don't have an institutional status — which in a way is great because it gives us a lot of freedom, but it is also tricky at times as without this status funding is way more difficult to obtain. This is something we will need to carefully consider for the future as it would be wonderful to find ways to be less precarious.
Q. What would you do if you finally received all that you wished for?
A. If we finally got what we wish for — a more democratic, just, heterogenous and unalienated society — we would certainly find it exciting to figure out where to go from there!
I will also be asking you to submit images, website(s), and other links that you think are relevant.
http://www.brave-new-alps.com/department-21/
http://www.department21.net/
http://www.brave-new-alps.com/decode-jerusalem/
http://www.brave-new-alps.com/laboratorio-campano/
http://www.brave-new-alps.com/hotel-oush-grab/
http://www.designingeconomiccultures.net/
Visual Arts Network
Is a blog hosted by CSI about collectives, community based organizations and networks working at the intersections of art, politics and social change.
Curated by written by Yulia Tikhonova - founder of Brooklyn House of Kulture - a grass-roots non-profit organization
CONFLICT KITCHEN
Conflict Kitchen is a take-out restaurant that only serves cuisine from countries with which the United States is in conflict. The food is served from a take-out style storefront, which will change identity and design every four months to highlight another country. Conflict Kitchen is located at 124 S. Highland Ave, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Q. What is your mission?
A Through food, wrappers, programming, and daily interaction with customers, Conflict Kitchen creates an ongoing platform for prime discussion of international conflict, culture, and politics. In addition, the project introduces a rotating venue for culinary and cultural diversity in Pittsburgh. Future interactions will focus on North Korea, Libya, and more.
Q. What was your starting point, how did the idea to form your project come about?
A. Conflict Kitchen has been developed in response to the local situation of Pittsburg, in the context of a post-industrial city which has very few art institutions. This remote location causes disengagement with national discourse, which we try to overcome through the sharing of food. The food comes wrapped in the interviews which we have conducted with the people from the country we are working on. We spend four month just developing the content and presenting a plurality of conversations. We are constantly thinking about other interactive ways of involving people.
Q. Who is involved in the project/organization?
A. Conflict Kitchen is a project by two multidisciplinary artists: Jon Rubin, and Dawn Weleski . Jon Rubin’s work explores the social dynamics of public places and the idiosyncrasies of individual and group behavior. Dawn Weleski's artwork relies on the innate drive of people to play and test connections between seemingly disparate people and places in a state of transition. Some 85% of the Conflict Kitchen operation’s budget comes from the sale of food. In addition the project uses funds from the Sprout Fund, The Waffle Shop and the Center for the Arts in Society.
Q. Who outside this core group have you been collaborating with? (ie other sectors, other organizations, etc)
A. We have a local employee, who does everything from cultural research to cooking. Carnegie University, where I teach helps to support the project, using the University as an economic vehicle. We collaborate with individuals in the specific countries we engage with, but also local ethnic groups such as local Persian organizations, Afghans in Pittsburg . Conflict Kitchen and a Waffle shop, These and our other project are sharing the same kitchen ( live talk show with the customers) http://www.waffleshop.org/
Q. Where do you position yourself, i.e. as: artists / social workers / activists/etc. relative to other groups?
A. Artists and educators
Q.What is your relationship to the art market?
A We don’t have any connection with the art market. I am very aware of an explosion of food related projects in recent years, and how food engagement allows for story-telling. Being a food operation takes us from the art circuit and places us in a stream of daily consciousness.
Q. How do you engage with the political system?
A. We don’t engage with the dominant political system directly. We are more interested in creating a larger conversation about what lays behind this conflict. How they feel about us, about their government, all of that might have an effect in political decisions but we don’t take direct action. Instead we welcome contradiction, the world which doesn’t sit on a right or left in terms of a political system.
Q. Where do you see visual art practice fitting in your activity?
A. It was important for us to dislocate ourselves from the art market.
Q. What is your mega goal?
A. North Korea will be our next ‘cuisine destination” With this project we want to make people think about: who we are; what our country is in relation to other countries; what we know about other countries, as opposed to a very narrow discourse about the countries with which we are in conflict. For us this project presents a chance to have a nuanced conversation with people who are coming to the window and buying food.
CONFLICT KITCHEN is open for winter on Saturdays and Sundays from 11:30am to 2:30pm, we will reopen 7 days a week on April 1st, 2012: Saturdas and Sundays from 11am to 2:30pm, and Monday through Friday from 11:30am to 2:30pm. conflictkitchen.org
Image courtesy of freeDimensional
Yulia Tikhonova: Interview with Todd Lester, August 22, 2011
What is fD’s mission?
To support art spaces hosting activism, and strengthening community engagement. fD is tactically a 501c3, nonprofit organization; it is a ten-year initiative that seeks to build a movement whereby art spaces perceive the legitimacy of being a first responder and critical hoster when concerned citizens (often artists doing the work of activists) are in trouble … and artists understanding and knowing about resources that professional activists already have access to when those artists use creativity to fight injustice.
Who is involved in the project/organization?
Sidd Joag, Program Coordinator
Ângela Destro, Sao Paulo Correspondent
Adham Bakry, Cairo Correspondent & Graphic Designer
Anne Dunning, Organizational & Professional Development Consultant
What is your institutional status?
fD is a US 501c3 non-profit, this was created to help with raising money. In our actions we don’t fit into a concept of institution. When we have an artist or an activist in a particular region in distress we use the urgency of the situation to activate our network, and to instigate action by a member-sensitive set of contacts. Networks are not non-profits and non-profits are not networks. Basically non-profits and civil society systems in the West can’t accommodate the radical potentiality of a network. You have to be a bit schizophrenic.
We act as if we are US non-profit but we are in fact a bigger organization which does not fit into a common institutional structure.
How do you measure risk-factors for artists and activists?
Artist residency programs are exclusive – often there is a jury, which makes a decision. We start with a basic idea that artists in distress will never be selected into a residency in a timely fashion. Our position is that we need to be reputable, global and international and non-nationalistic because what we want to do with our residents is to move ahead without the jury panels—as their activist work is very time-sensitive. We see each case as being outside of the art word; as a case of the life and a death. On the other hand, there is a latent activism in the art world that you can activate; there is a hunger by art spaces for doing something less abstract and more engaged with communities.
There is a demand for what we do by the art spaces. When we receive a case we typically ask several art spaces simultaneously, so we can receive their answers more quickly.
We have an Advocacy committee, and a Services committee. If there is a cartoonist from Iran in a situation of danger, we are going to ask someone we know from Iran, but we are also going to ask someone from a field of cartooning. We bring each case to the art spaces really quickly; we are trying to act really fast.
Who do you collaborate with? (ie other sectors, other organizations, etc)
freeDimensional collaborates with grass-roots constituencies including Atelier Moustapha Dime, Senegal; Artkhana, Egypt; Caravansarai, Turkey;
Casa Puan (Proyecto Victoria Ocampo), Argentina; Cura Bodrum Residency…
Where do you position yourself, i.e. as: artists / social workers / activists etc?
I am a knowledge worker and a systems thinker. I created a system of Safe Haven that addressed a need within the human rights sector and used a surplus value/resource (apartments / hosting) within the arts sector.
What is your relationship to the art market? Do you have a relationship to commercial art and the gallery system?
Well, many of the artist-stakeholders, who face danger due to their use of creativity to fight injustice, do engage/participate in the art market, but usually not at the same time as their distress.
How do you engage with the political system?
Artists are smart, innovative; actually they reflect society and when they do it well they capture the heart of the community. Usually the artists don’t move people to action by their conscious decisions. Usually they create an art work so strong that it moves people for actions. To quote Art and Upheaval by William Cleveland, I would say that the totalitarian regimes always make it their first business to eliminate the intellectuals and free-thinkers. We don’t need to question that there is a fear by politicians of the artists who can bring precision and clarity into politics. The artists are different from the professional activists; artists don’t know how to be political, but they reflect life so well—and this is political art on its own. When we learn about an artist in danger we only consider danger from the political side, we don’t take up this political issue, and we do everything to tone down his or her specific political situation. We use an effective space to invite an activist but we don’t take sides. We want to take pressure away from the political side and to give time to heal. When artists do the work of activists, they face the same (political) dangers as professional activists challenging the same political systems/regimes.
How do your practices negotiate between self-reflectivity and serving the needs of the artists that you are engaged with?
We invite artists to every level of our decision making: steering committee, annual meetings, program design. For the first five years we were a direct service, intermediary provider, reactive when artist-activists were in danger. Now, in our next phase, we are using what we learned then in order to be proactive: to inform, co-learn and reduce the number of assaults on artist-activists by strengthening the field (art spaces, community arts practitioners) and working with regional networks who can help us to tailor our model(s) to specific regional conditions and cultural specificity.
There is a legalistic approach that complicates free expression and continues to wedge artists and professional activists further and further apart. So, basically, artists will find it increasingly harder to locate distress resources and to ‘locate’ their work in the definition of a ‘human rights defender’ than in the broader frame of ‘activist’.
What are your relationships with grass-roots organizations?
FD is a horizontal network, and will last 10 years: we will disband. In justifying this 10 year span we attempted to create an intersection of arts and human rights movements; whilst artists are granted a studio space, the human-rights defenders have places to stay. There are older examples such as SFAI which has a history of making large investments in the situations at risks, and goes back to hurricane Katrina, 9/11, the housing market crash, etc. The reason why I am saying this is that this practice existed before, that the avant-garde intellectuals were hosted in exile, but what I would argue is that the new emerging grass-roots institutions will be more adaptive to an idea of hosting. Because, the new art spaces will see themselves as doing emergency programs like this on their own, and our mission will not be needed any longer. I would point to spaces such as Caravansarai in Turkey, and the Center for International Art in Community (CIAC) in Guapamacataro, Mexico.
How do you measure your success?
We have helped to provide safety to over 200 artists, citizens, journalists, cultural workers. Half of them were placed through providing a housing solution, and others were helped by finding solutions such as lawyers or social workers who were able to help the artists to deal with the trauma. If we don’t have money we can nominate them to the rapid response agencies, simply make a helpful introduction. The nature of the horizontal network is that we measure this success by practical and concrete examples.
What is your mega goal?
My mega goal is that the art spaces will receive their legitimacy to be active members of their communities; that they can unleash their innovative energy and allow their legitimacy to be experienced. Art spaces can do what we have been doing. If our first 5 years of our work were to build the program and teach the art spaces about rescuing measures of the artists and activists in danger, the next 5 years will be stepping back and supporting the spaces which are doing this already. We see the critical hosting as a something positive, as encouraging the art spaces to take up an important role in community, and cease their two- dimensional existence.
All pictures in this post can be found here:
The Ghana ThinkTank was founded in 2006 by Christopher Robbins, John Ewing and Matey Odonkor to address the inequities we experienced on either side of the Global Development equation. Maria Del Carmen Montoya joined the project in 2009, bringing her experience in public health and public art to the mix. Images available here.
The Ghana ThinkTank developed because we had all experienced the bizarre and often problematic effects of external solutions imposed across cultures. We'd seen ideas that sounded great to US ears, but which were irrelevant or even damaging in the culture in which they were imposed, especially when one considers the inevitable assumptions and stereotypes operating. So, we sought to reverse that power dynamic, to impose external solutions from the "Developing" world onto the "First" World. And that became our motto, "The Ghana ThinkTank is Developing the First World."
Over the five years this project has existed (we are halfway through a ten-year plan), our goals have changed somewhat, as we have come to terms with the surprising solutions that come from unexpected places. Rather than creating a sort of punitive experience in which one group’s idea is crudely imposed on another, it has become a way to transpose different cultures from one context into a completely different one, and experience first-hand how the gaps between cultures operate in day-to-day experience.
Who is involved in the project/organization?
We worked in Summer 2011 with a number of US-based associates at the Queen's Museum of Art, and, through the Artistic Noise Program in Bronx and Boston correctional facilities, we work with a continually expanding network of think tanks in Ghana, Cuba, El Salvador, Mexico, Serbia, Iran, Afghanistan, and groups of incarcerated youth.
These groups are incredibly diverse in age and demographics. Our main guideline in creating them is to avoid Artists and Development Organizations. We want our conversation to come from some place other than the worlds in which we are already operating. We are also trying to establish think tanks in the more naïve sense of the word–as groups of people brainstorming ideas, rather than as marketing/lobbying firms with a specific agenda, as the word 'think tank' has unfortunately come to represent in the US these days.
Where do you position yourself, i.e. as: artists / social workers / activists etc?
Although we operate on the cusp of public art and community action, we definitely position ourselves as artists. A large part of what makes this project so alive is that it functions in the grey areas between industries that art allows. We can ask questions others cannot, get into situations unacceptable in other industries, and create partnerships that are otherwise not possible.
That said, part of our ten-year plan involves reaching into other fields and industries in a more straightforward and sustainable way. This summer we developed our first project involving working with NGOs (Non Governmental Organizations), by bringing Serbs and Albanians in North and South Mitrovica across the Ibar river to solve each other's problems. And we have hopes to pilot the Ghana ThinkTank process in commercial sectors, to see how these cross-cultural problem-solving techniques can operate in a money-focused system.
What is your relationship to the art market? Do you have a relationship to the commercial art and the gallery system?
We are generally invited by art institutions (such as: Creative Time, Queens Museum of Art, National Museum of Wales, ZKM Germany, etc.) to implement our projects in the geographic communities around their institutions. The Ghana ThinkTank process unfolds over the duration of the show, and our installations and actions grow out of a response to the people, problems, solutions and experiences that unfold. It is purely a commission-based system; nothing is sold. However, we have produced some saleable objects with this work, and are not philosophically opposed to the commercial art system. In fact, we are quite curious how we can operate in commercial systems. A major point of the project is to examine the systems that surround us, accepting that we are implicated and not external to these systems. Clearly the commercial art market helps make our projects possible, even if we have not sold anything.
How do you engage with the political system?
The problems and solutions submitted are not ideas of our own – they come from our think tanks, and our problem-communities. So, we are not expounding a specific political agenda with the Ghana ThinkTank beyond giving voice to alternative perspectives and realities.
That said, much of our work becomes political, as many of the problems and solutions given are political.
So far, we have not engaged directly with the existing political system. Instead, we have created alternates, opportunities for direct action by citizens, methods for creating change directly.
How do your practices negotiate between self-reflectivity and serving the needs of the participants that you are engaged with?
Although we try to implement the solutions we are given as objectively as possible, we have learned that understanding another culture's perspective involves a translation. So, we must bring ourselves into the action, because it is us that translate an external solution into the context in which it is meant to operate. It's an awkward dance that often involves assuming an alter-ego so that we can fully assume the goals of the think tanks and the problem-givers, even though both perspectives are outside our own experience.
As Mel Chin said in response to the project, "each solution is an opportunity for another art piece in its own right." We want these projects to hold up in and of themselves, not just as examples of an applied concept.
What would you do if you finally received all what you wished for?
"Solutions" would not be judged solely by their efficiency or utility, but there would be more variety and participation in decision-making processes. There might be more uncertainty in day-to-day life but this would make more room for unconventional approaches. In much of the world, daily life is more of a negotiation, rather than an application of fixed rules, and that vibrancy is essential. It makes life more exciting; it helps us continue to learn and opens the door to new possibilities.
If we got all that we wished for in this project, the U.S. would operate on more of a dynamic D.I.Y. ethic, in which people felt they had the right and authority to participate directly in the details of daily living we often take for granted. And it feels like we have to reach outside our own culture to figure out how to do this…
Ghana ThinkTank in Queens
Some thoughts about subsidy for the arts/entrepreneurial arts management, compromise and the deterioration of the arts in New York.
I recently spent some time in Europe in some fairly intense discussions with artists, arts administrators, arts entrepreneurs and government officials involved in the arts. That last category doesn't just mean people who work in the Culture Ministries. One of the first public speakers at the Arts and Audiences Conference in Bergen, Norway was Minister of Health and Human Services Ågot Valle, who spoke about the importance of culture to the mental and physical health of individual Norwegians and to the social health of the populace as a whole.
I'm still digesting this very pleasant shock, but it has been counterbalanced by a less pleasant realization that the European art vernacular has been thoroughly infected by American-style market evangelical nonsense, even in those countries like Norway and France, that have a sane policy of subsidy for the fine arts proportional to their economic and societal impact.
I was sorry to see that the American belief that "the market will fix everything and anything can succeed through marketing" had become so ingrained in the language here that it was almost impossible to talk about art or audience without sounding like a corporate salesperson. The “free market” delusion is spreading and we need to wake up.
Several predominant trends in American not-for-profit arts production all but guarantee failure for not-for-profit artists and groups: 1) pressure from government and philanthropic organizations that insist on corporate evaluation criteria, methods and administrative structures and market-focused behavior in an innately and historically subsidized industry; 2) a roadhouse/festival distribution model based on the fiction of break-even box office revenue; 3) counter-productive competition for a declining philanthropic resource pool; 4) A hardening consensus that, in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, art is a trivial activity that has negligible impact on economic and community development.
New York’s clear decline as a center for cutting edge art can be traced directly to these trends. The city just cut support for small and mid-sized non-profits in half even though these groups have been proven to provide as much direct and tax revenue for the city as the television and film industry combined. America’s anemic support for the arts is probably as evident in its gigantic trade deficit as anywhere else and in the death of Cultural Diplomacy as a method of “winning hearts and minds.”
In Margeret C. Ayers’ study, Trends in U.S. Cultural Exchange and International Programming, the problem of a severe trade deficit in the performing arts can be seen clearly in the budgets of Lincoln Center, Kennedy Center and BAM whose budgets over the last five years demonstrate the problem:
Spending on international imported work: $127,000,000
Spending on export of American Work (BAM only) $1,200,000
In Europe there is still hope because most people recognize the necessity to subsidize art. There is a community ethic that understands government as the expression of our desire to care for ourselves and one another. Health care is broadly understood as a fundamental human right. Culture is understood as the carrier of continental, national, regional, local and individual identity. And despite the trend deeper into Nationalist criteria for most European arts agencies, and the trend toward isolationism in the EU, there is an understanding of cultural exchange as a powerful grassroots tool for diplomacy, and cultural collaboration across national boundaries as the inevitable reality of our technological age and the natural impulse of institutions and governments across Europe. By contrast, I was the only American at the conference and my way was not paid by any American entity.
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