I curated the visual identity of the Performing Public Space Symposium 2022 at ClubSoda, Tilburg, NL.
The /per/Form symposium is the coming together of three curatiorial perspectives that moves through the mesh of nine different researches in the frame of public space. Everyone is invited to partecipare and walk with us on paths of multicolored threads.
Reshaping conflictual boundaries of belonging in stories and bodies
In this channel, the entanglement of our research projects tries to create a dialogue on how to better understand the integration of co-existence in a public space setting through the stories of people, togetherness, and bodies and how or where they belong. The focus shifts from the use of political texts as tactics to talk about concepts of home and belonging, the creation of “agonistic spaces” through participatory designs, the position of the non-binary body and identity as a public space, concluding with a discussion on how the pandemic worked like a magnifying glass to highlight difficulties in sharing space.
Chiara, Hiba, Laura, Yannis
Temporal islands of performative interventions
The main aspect of Ioannis' project is public transport and Jitka's project is about the solution of transformation areas. The curatorial concept of the projects came together in addressing the fundamental question of the temporality of public transport spaces and brownfields. Both projects evaluate the current use of these places by people and their activity and speculate on how places can be transformed through artistic interventions. The projects are united by their spatial ephemerality and the exploration of 'non-places' (Augé, 1995) and 'dead zones' (Doron, 2015) in the Metropolitan cities, Prague, Athens and Amsterdam. Public mobilities are liminal acts of humans and brownfields-transformative areas are transit spaces. The projects address how human activity transforms these transit public places and how, in turn, these places shape the urban commons.
Jitka, Ioannis
More-Than-Human Perspectives within Public Space: Thinking, Learning, and Creating with Plants, Artefacts, and Material Agents
This panel tackles human and non-human relationships, and how these shape our spaces. In our day-to-day lives, within city planning, policy, and politics we, humans, rarely consider non-human agents as fellow producers of space. Each speaker invites us to look closely, and through a different gaze at the beings and materials that we share our public spaces with. Valentina looks for collaboration with plants in her juggling practice, Florinda turns to all material bodies to discover non-anthropocentric site-based dance practices and Kamila traces relations of artifacts in desire paths as phenomena of urban counter-narratives, and explores them in the matter of words and clay.