Wednesday, June 22, 2016

NA Fund Academy 2016: "We need places where we can fall in love"




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