RESISTANCE: Participatory Arts Productions


In June 2022, 30 diverse and multidisciplinary arts and culture professionals from across Europe, traveled to Lesvos and participated in the ‘RESISTANCE Residency’, where they explored how arts and culture practices can support the decolonisation of digital spaces and resources, leading to an equitable European digital transformation. Seeking to continuously expand the discourse, research and innovation on practices that lead to an equitable European digital transformation, ARTSFORMATION followed up on the work of the ‘RESISTANCE Residency’, by producing the ‘RESISTANCE Participatory Arts Productions’ in Lesvos-Greece. Between the 11-21st of April 2023, 12 artists from across Europe participated in a facilitated program aimed at providing a dedicated space where artists can create new artworks which generate artistic thinking, processes, and solutions to the societal challenges caused by Europe’s digital transformation. How can different modes of resistance towards digital colonial forces be manifested through artworks? How can artworks serve as equalizers in the societal inequalities caused by the digital transformation? How can artworks help empower the equitable participation of otherwise marginalized communities in Europe’s digital transformation? The programme was aimed at spurring the production of individual artworks that respond to the themes set out by ARTSFORMAITON, the Resistance Residency, as well as the challenges posed by Europe’s digital transformation. During their presence in Lesvos, participants were engage in participatory actions and peer learning sessions that assist ed them in producing new and individual pieces of artwork that respond to the themes of ARTSFORMATION. The artworks proactively respond to the challenges posed by Europe’s digital transformation, and were displayed in Lesvos in a group exhibition that was open and free for the public to attend.

Artworks

Comença a clarejar
Alba Raventós

Visual Projection

Comença a clarejar is a recorded action made during 7 consecutive days on the island of Lesvos, in the city of Mytilene, facing Turkey coast and the Aegean sea during sunrise. Contrast and Contradictions in the land and in the body are similar. Earth and Soma are repressed, oppressed and violated for human civilisation. Humanity experiences the world through the body, through all its senses. These actions represent the importance of live experiences and live art to transcend and continue.

SOLILOQUIES 1, 2 (ART-A-WAY | CAST-A-WAY)
Angelica Marinescu

Video, canvas painted with acrylics, found objects

ART-A-WAY is a projection of a video recorded performance. The artwork was realized in the frame of a collaborative project, a multimedia project, bringing together an object installation (realized by a Romanian visual artist), videography (Romanian film director) and my performance (Indian classical dance, performance), questioning our relation to the information (technology), communication (real/virtual space) networks and digital environment. I seek the liminal moment/translation time/space when we are disruptively taken out of state of equilibrium/innocence/trust/belief inner/social/political spaces into a potentially dangerous/fallacious situation, that we were or not aware of, and often our struggle to reach to utopic dreamscapes that will reassure our worldly safety and human connectedness. CAST-A-WAY – (performative/interactive) installation of objects. In relation to the digital and larger transformations of the contemporary world, this part of my work situates the discursive level within the site of new possibilities that an island is, where the borders between the imaginary and the real might be blurred, as an island could provide an experience of virtual possibilities for transformation, a locus of imagination, desire, hope and fear, located both within and without, where subversion, fantastication and critical alternatives can be enacted. With a critical perspective related to the accessibility of the digital alternatives (internet unite/divide), the island is seen as situated at the margin(s), it includes the rhetoric of (post)colonial discourse, center and periphery; it can be mapped, explored, colonized, appropriated, included in the mainland through a cartographic discourse/action.

Planet Earth Reset Button
Claudio Beorchia

Workshop, 15 A4 paper sheets

The work presents the outcomes of the workshops I conducted in Lesvos, that involved the colleagues participating in the program. The workshop is a speculative and radical design exercise in which participants are invited to design a hypothetical button that can reset the whole world. The goal of the workshop is to push participants to use their imagination and to reflect on the processes of interacting with the technologies we use every day. The work, materially, consists of the A4 sheets on which the participants drew, represented, described, the button they designed.

Healing ⅔
Csilla Bartus

Textile print 100 x 150 cm, digital print 594 x 420 mm, prints of phone screenshots 12 x A5

Decolonizing AI: an archive of collective consciousness on Restrictions. The workshop based on participation and contribution is an intermedial re-sensibilisation of the interaction with digital devices. As a digital resistance, the acceleration of AI algorithmic image-making processes are deconstructed to a more human paced speed, inducing human emotional labor as the central element of the process. Radical imaginative practices are made using Snapseed image editing app, especially the Healing Tool, whose qualities are to distort, deconstruct and reconstruct images in a way that is similar to ‘deep dreaming’ – we made progress in identifying what causes for each of us a specific restriction, finding its associated image and then to deal with it with the tool we have, and by this means giving a glimpse of a control over what controls us.

a_mostra
Filipa Branco Jaques

Installation of various materials in glass flasks, fish line, staples, thumbtacks, light, curtain/s

a_mostra (a play on words from ‘amostra’, which means ‘sample’; ‘a mostra’ means ‘the show’) is a showcase - interactive and acoustic - of various materials contained in ampoules of different formats. In Portuguese, 'pôr no mapa' (meaning 'put on the map') is an expression for placing something or someone prominently. This is an attempt to give relevance not only to the vessels as a means of producing sound, but also to what is contained within them - the visual and isolated display of multiple elements of Mytilini. Materials that everyone can relate to or connect with are contained in the jars (kitchen utensils) and vials (laboratory items). The sense of community is embedded in the objects themselves. The sound is the installation itself.

Shipless Oceans (Against the Weaponisation of Geography)
Nine Fumiko Yamamoto-Masson

Multi-part mixed media installation. Acrylic, ink, markers on paper, synthetic textile, rocks, wire mesh, lego, words.

Shipless Oceans (Against the Weaponisation of Geography) is an artistic research (using drawing, painting collage, flexible sculpture) into the tension of coastal poetics an architecture, into the quantum flow of time in the sea-human relationship, exploring the conditions of visibility and effability in liminal zones such as the sea and its currents, also in relation to the weaponisation of geography to serve hegemonic regimes of power. It is the continuation of a series of works responding to Frank Kafka’s 1915 parable Vor dem Gesetz (Before the Law), exploring the manifestations of borders and gatekeeping as ideology-driven spatiotemporal violent assemblages of power, the first iteration of which, a theatre piece called Labyrinths & Ladders – Against the Weaponisation of Time, premiered in Berlin in February 2023.

Scraped Data, Hidden Faces
Jiří Gruber

INSTALLATIONS FROM PRINTED PHOTOGRAPHS

Installation scraped data, hidden faces explores the role of repetitive, manual human labor in the context of machine learning and the contexts of power associated with that. the work is inspired by the specific case from the end of 2021. At the time, open ai company hired dozens of workers from kenya, uganda and india through an outsourcing firm outside nairobi to detect violent, racist or otherwise inappropriate content in the machine learning datasets and manually remove it. These workers were paid less than two dollars an hour for this activity, and many of them developed psychological problems as a result of the dehumanizing work and repeated confrontation with drastic or otherwise unpleasant material. And at the same time, however, the resulting machine learning outputs lack sufficient representation of similar populations.

We Could Do Worse
Margerita Pulè

Multi-media installation, Single-channel colour film, recorded with iphone & edited with free-to-use software. Printed images constructed using mobile app, from images taken with iphone & drawn on tablet

We Could Do Worse lays out the retelling of the fictional attempt to build a new version of a democracy through the use of AI and digital technologies by three protagonists who led the experiment. The result of their work remains unknown; an ambiguity that suggests that perhaps the project is still continuing to this day. References to policy-making, citizenship and moral-driven software initially seem bland, but ultimately have a sinister resonance.

Hey AI’m
Paolo Lolicata

Installation multimedia. Sound, video, prints, glass and mirrors

Hey Ai’m is an installation that explores the relationship between humans and technology in the fragile equilibrium between machine and human learning, playing on the duality of giving and receiving. By using a conversation with an Ai gtp the journey of discovering Lesvos takes the form of a philosophical walk to generate, collect and re-organise data on topics such as heritage, islands, colonialism, decolonisation and spirituality.

The wasteland of your desire, The dreamland of your use
Patrycja Plich

video installation, mixed media, drawings, found objects

Video work presenting the body of water as a conflict ground between contradictory symbolic, imaginary and real orders. Relations between the tyranny of the maritime territory served by technological improvements and the origin of tectonics flow as a place for creation of natural boundaries. Artist invents the concept of geology of morality as an idea manifested by the occurrence of the island and its mnemonic power, surrounded by recovered memories of life without incapacitation. Formal deconstruction of the cartographic representation of maritime territories as an area determined by the relation of dependencies. Here, the horizontal loop geometry is turned into the delaminated, folded topographical system floating somewhere in the ocean of lost but recoverable capacities. The work is questioning the origin of structures of power and taking the approach to decolonize ourselves from re-invented machinic enslavement caused by multilayered bio-geo-politics. Accompanied by a series of drawing works – Beyond visual line of sight.

Proxy, This Is Not A Performance - Session Zero
Swaeny Nina Kersaan

Interactive collage on paper + sound recording

Proxy, This Is Not A Performance is a project that bridges physical and digital worlds of lived identity play and the economics of online self-representations by generating avatars through reading, dungeons, role-play, illustrations or identity tokens, and *speculative fiction. Session Zero is when the role-players come together before actually playing the game. The purpose of a Session Zero is to figure out characters, how they fit in the world, and expectations during play. Proxy, This Is Not A Performance - Session Zero is a documentation of this process. You are invited to add to these documents.

Old and New
Tomasz Mielnik

Paper Collages

A collection of collages that depict how old power structures based on control and shaping of societies, have shifted to the digital realm. In this context, the quote from Lampedusa, "everything must change so that everything can stay the same," is paraphrased to highlight the persistent nature of power dynamics, even in the ever-evolving digital age.

Participants

Swaeny Nina Kersaan

Swaeny Nina Kersaan is an avatar artist and visual writer who explores digital culture through illustration, digital media, role-play, and the commodification of digital self-representation. With a background in graphic design, conceptual art, and a Master's in Art and Visual Culture, Swaeny Nina's work is influenced by counter-theory and is neither limited by medium nor location. Currently, she travels Europe with her participatory multi-media project "Proxy, This Is Not A Performance” [swaenynina.com]

Angelica Marinescu

Ph.D. in Sociology & Communication Sciences (University of Bucharest, Romania, University of Burgundy, France). Currently, an associated researcher at the Institute of Sociology, Romanian Academy, Bucharest, and a lecturer at the Faculty of Journalism and Communication Sciences, University of Bucharest. Previously, a lecturer at the Faculty of Sociology and Social Work, and a researcher within the Villa-Noël CEREFREA (Centre Régional Francophone d'Études Avancées en Sciences Sociales), coordinator of CRU (Centre de Réussite Universitaire), a project of AUF-BECO (Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie), University of Bucharest. From 2017 to 2020, a scholar of the Indian Council for Cultural Relations, Government of India, training in Indian classical dance. Projects and publications on: media studies, online communities and networks, Romanian rural communities, art sociology, Indian studies (diaspora, indigenous communities, Buddhist studies, dance studies), Asian studies (heritage studies, South Korea), sociology and anthropology of food. Interested in the interference between visual and performative arts; working currently on projects exploring the intersection between (new) media (networks), art and body representation(s) [angelicamarinescu.wordpress.com].

Claudio Beorchia

Claudio Beorchia is an Italian interdisciplinary artist, increasingly working through relational and participatory practices. He studied Design and Visual Arts at Iuav University in Venice and at Brera Fine Arts Academy in Milan. He holds a Ph.D. in Design Sciences at Iuav University Doctorate School. Through commissions, awards and residency programs he developed and showed his projects on numerous occasions in Italy and abroad, usually working with museums and cultural organizations. He participated in about thirty residencies, many in Italy, as many in Europe, but also in the United States, China and Japan [www.claudiobeorchia.it]

Margerita Pulè

Margerita Pulè is a curator, researcher and artist, with a multidisciplinary and collaborative practice. In 2018 she founded Unfinished Art Space, an independent and nomadic space showing contemporary art in Malta, creating it out of a need for supportive and risk-taking spaces for artists in Malta. She is also a founder-member of the Magna Żmien Foundation, a community project which digitises 20th century analogue home archives, forming a community archive accessible to researchers and artists. Before this, she programmed much of the European Capital of Culture community programme for Valletta 2018, something that has inspired her work in genuine community-building and providing support for practicing artists [www.unfinishedartspace.org].

Tomasz Mielnik

Tomasz Mielnik studied art history at the University of Wrocław and film directing at FAMU in Prague, where ηε graduated with the feature film JOURNEY TO ROME (premiere at Karlovy Vary IFF). He is currently preparing for the film GREGORIUS, THE CHOSEN ONE, a dark comedy about a sinner who will become a pope. With this text, he was selected for the ScriptEast program and Sofia Meetings market. The project has already been supported by The Czech Film Found for production and is in the phase of international financing.

Csilla Bartus

Csilla Bartus is a multidisciplinary artist from Romania (b.1996), currently based in Budapest. She holds an MA degree in graphic art and a minor in psychopedagogy, and has refined her skills in design, digital art, and event organization through internships and work experiences in Berlin and Budapest. Her artistic approach is both poetic and analytical, exploring subjects such as posthumanism, post-internet culture, and the Anthropocene. Csilla examines environmental, human, and non-human conditions, with a focus on transformations, migration, survival, adaptability, and resilience. Using digital, physical, and illusionary experiences and techniques, she creates installations that honour and critique our relationship with the environment and technology, inviting viewers to engage in deeper reflection. Her work has been exhibited in various cultural events.

Patrycja Plich

Patrycja Plich is a transmedia artist, social designer and activist, working with the problematic of global landscapes of crisis. Using the drawing as a critical geography research where it's possible to connect digital trace and contextualized trajectories with movement – combining it with walking practice as a research tool. Confronted on the use of creative possibilities coming from crisis, where new collective topographies (also those virtual and formally intangible) can appear. Member of the trade union fighting for women rights in culture. Founder of Wanderland platform – long lasting cross-cultural project connecting Senegal, Poland and Marseille, educative initiative Kobalt migrating platform and eco-design project Wastebooks [https://patrycjaplich.tumblr.com]

Filipa Branco Jaques

Filipa Branco Jaques is a multidisciplinary artist from Évora whose career includes music, drawing, animation, performance, and sound sculpture installations [https://filipajaques.wixsite.com/ohmyohmy]. Graduated in Fine Arts-Multimedia at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto. She is the author of the album "âmago" and most recently “Gone Soul”, among others, of her music project fibrja [https://fibrja.bandcamp.com/]. Integrates the project um, dois, trio - creation of the Associação PédeXumbo -, and collaborates with Miguel Jaques' musical project. She works in the Educational Service of the Eugénio de Almeida Foundation. Filipa has collaborated with institutions such as Pointlist, Galeria Sismógrafo, ExQuorum, and more recently Materiais Diversos with the project "em espera" [https://dentesdeleao.pt/en/cycle-of-participatory-arts/].

Paolo Lolicata

Paolo Lolicata is a Sicilian artist and curator working with an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural philosophy aiming to unfold identity preconceptions. He studied Performing Arts and a BA in DAMS at Link University in Rome. In Melbourne he founded LOLICU, a project exploring the convergence between artisan work and artistic practice to explore social concerns such as migration, reuse, masculinity and gender identity through a single symbolic fashion accessory: bowties. The project was accepted by the Incubator of Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane and distributed in stores worldwide. The opportunity to exchange with several communities in Australia led Paolo to create The Fusion People Project exploring projects to empower cross-cultural communication with a strong focus on food as a medium and the younger generations as an audience. In collaboration with the IIC and the Italian Consulate in Osaka he developed Sicilia Fusion Japan, a year-long program of cultural exchange involving artists, chefs, students and professors in both Sicily and Japan. He returned to Europe for a Master in Curatorship in Turin and to study Graphic Design in Berlin. He collaborates as independent curator at Paratissima in Turin where he won Best Curatorial project in 2019 with Human Touch. In 2020 he curated ISOLATION, a residency project in Sicily, hosted by the Municipality of Milazzo and Salina Island's Lighthouse Museum. In 2022 he took part in Duplex AIR program in Lisbon, exploring curatorship as an artistic practice. In the same year, he curated in between we swim by Nathalie Mei during Lisbon Art Weekend at PADA studios. Paolo is currently developing Universal Harmonization, a nomadic project at the intersection between rituals, communities and art making focusing on the healing potential of art. The project was recently hosted at Moagem, Portugal. He is in the process of developing OBRIGAD+ISSIMO in Lisbon founded by Culture Moves Europe. Taking inspiration from the shared Italian and Portuguese celebration of Liberation Day on the 25th of April, the research aims to unfold the concept of Liberation as a collective, personal, emotional and ethical multi-layered sociocultural process entangling history to perspectives on contemporary society. On The Move recently selected Paolo to represent Sicily in the Cultural Mobility workshop in Tunisia focused on empowering cultural exchange in the South Mediterranean area.

Alba Raventós

Alba Raventós is a performer & somatic artist born in Tarragona. She graduated in Occupational Therapy from the Autonomous University of Barcelona, completes a Postgraduate Degree in Integrative Body Work at the National Institute of Physical Education of Catalonia in 2013, and, right after that, a training in Basal Stimulation. Subsequently, she graduates as a Somatic Educator in Body Mind Centering in Germany in 2016. She starts a non-formal dance education travelling along europe and starting a festivals with dance work in Barcelona; doing intensive work Improvisation and Contact Improvisation. From 2016 she co-direct with Uma Maraval Ara En Moviment association, where the first international festival for the arts of movement (Barcelona New Year Dance Festival) is organized. In 2017 the first edition of the summer festival (Barcelona Dance in Summer) is presented. Both events are held annually to date. Since the early stages of the association, together with Uma Maraval and Adrià Sonet, she facilitates the residential training program, co-financed by Erasmus+, focused in somatic practices, movement and dance for educators who work with groups of adults and youngsters. To date, it has been held in Catalonia and in various European countries.. Collaboration with Mercat de les Flors to make contemporary dance project called Mapa De Ball from well-known coreographers based on Barcelona, arrive in highschools creating a performance after 3 months of artwork. 2 years in a road with teenagers participating in this project. As a member of Colectivo Deria Rectificadora, she co-creates the piece Topless America, a performance with a poetic-feminist spirit, shown at L’Estruch, Antic Teatre, Soma, Contemporanis de la Barceloneta, Asturias Contact Festival and MoveFest. In 2021 she creates El Timo, a piece which integrates performance and thought, a hybrid reflection on culture, history and the body, where she combines song, philosophy and movement. El Timo was created from the postpandemic need and was showed in Catalonia, Nowadays, she continues to explore body and dance in laboratories and creation processes, as well as intensives on Contact Improvisation and contemporary dance, while working as a Body Mind Centering teacher, offering intensive courses and classes on a weekly basis [araenmoviment.org/en/we-are]

Nine Fumiko Yamamoto-Masson

Nine Fumiko Yamamoto-Masson is a Japanese-French interdisciplinary artist, researcher, translator, community organiser, activist. She focuses on regimes of knowledge and gendered necropolitics of Japanese, European, U.S. (neo-)imperialisms and their intersections. Her work, deeply rooted in anticolonial feminist abolitionism, highlights networked resistance, transformation, especially art as a method of counter-knowledge in internationalist-antiimperialist alliances against hegemonic historical revisionist narratives. Her artistic research and practices fluidly embrace many methods and forms (drawing, photography, installation, sculpture, social practice, performances, collage, writing, sound, video, curating...), always grounded in solid research, conceptual approaches informed by theory, animated by poetry, playfulness, holding space for the unspoken. [nineyamamotomasson.com]

Jiří Gruber Born

Jiří Gruber Born 1992. Works as an intermedia artist, curator and educator. He studied at the Faculty of Arts MU and FaVU BUT in Brno and AVU in Prague. He also completed internships at HfG in Karlsruhe, Tirana ArtLab in Albania and Kvaka 22 in Serbia. In his creative and theoretical practice, he deals primarily with critical reflection on the institutional nature of contemporary art, power levels of language but also on aspects and consequences of the penetration of digital technologies into our everyday lives. Currently active in Prague and Ostrava.