In
his 1977 lectures "How to live together," Roland Barthes
addressed the philosophical problem of the coexistence of individuals
through the lens of the everyday: food, things, places… Achieving
the utopia of a collective, "idiorhythmic" subject,
requires us to overcome arbitrary division as much as to open spaces
of shared interests. How can relations of commons be translated into
cultural methods to build a convivial society? Can the sense of
emplacement give new meaning to our engagement with the global issues
of the world? In times of acceleration and separation, intuitive
practices of the local and slow life constitute a precious knowledge.
A growing number of citizens are becoming involved in a horizontal
process of ecological and social "transition" that takes
its roots in simple gestures of everyday life: growing food,
preserving seeds, bartering knowledge, and building tools of
resilience to prepare for the multiple crises that lie at the horizon
of our complex, yet fragile systems of organization: debt, peak-oil,
anthropogenic climate change, crop yields and a general decline of
efficiency rates.
From
June 20 to 24, Nature Addicts! Fund will host its fourth mobile
academy in the city of Basel, where the fund has a 3-year partnership
with Institut Kunst
to bring international artists to the new exhibition space Der Tank
located within the School of Fine Arts, FHNW Academy of Art and
Design .
Curated
by Stéphane Verlet-Bottéro, the academy "We need places where
we can fall in love" invites 12 emerging European artists to
debate on the cultural implications of the shift to relationships of
places and commons, interact with local "transitioners" who
are developing practical alternatives from urban agriculture to local
currencies, and look at how issues of rhythm, space, living and
working together, are addressed by a number of artistic initiatives
in and around the city.
Participants:
Inge Ceustermans, Etienne Chambaud, Sjim Hendrix, Valentina Karga,
Sophie Krier, Tiphanie Mall, Katarzyna Przezwańska, Simon
Ripoll-Hurier, Paul Smyth, Julia Stern, Hanes Sturzenegger, Yesenia
Thibault-Picazo
Contributors:
Ugo Bardi, Béla Bartha, Bastiaan Fricht, Chus Martínez, Mathilde
Rosier, Pierre Tandille, Isidor Wallimann, Marilola Wili
Nature
Addicts! Fund was founded in 2011 by Bertrand Jacoberger with the
objective of supporting artists and arts organizations concerned with
environmental and sustainability issues. The mobile academies hosted
by NA Fund aim to bring together emerging artists and researchers
from all forms of expression to debate, learn from each other and
allow new creative impetus to emerge. The traveling format serves as
a source of inspiration as each country, each artistic community has
its own unique outlook on the world, influenced by its geographic,
political, economic and social situation. In 2012, NA Fund was
partner of the commission and conference program "On Seeds and
Multi-species Intra-Action" at dOCUMENTA (13). In 2013 and 2014,
Le Centquatre Paris was funded in a partnership that saw five artists
benefit from residencies, productions and exhibitions. In 2015, NA
Fund gathered ten critics, curators and scholars in Venice to discuss
perspectives and needs of artistic research in the anthropocene.
June
20–24, 2016
Basel
Switzerland
