Revisiting Miaaw 28 (from October 25, 2019)

Based in Bucharest, Raluca Voinea works as a curator and art critic, based in Bucharest and, since 2012 as co-director of tranzit.ro Association. In 2013 she acted as the curator of the Romanian Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale and in 2015 she co-authored, with Alexandra Pirici, The Manifesto for the Gynecene: Sketch of a New Geological Era. The Manifesto subsequently became translated into several languages and included in different publications and exhibitions.
In this episode she talks with Sophie Hope about The Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life, described as “a bet and a promise, an experiment, and an investment into a future we can still shape”.
The station began as “a joint venture of a group of artists, curators, theorists, economists and others, who, together with tranzit.ro, co-own and co-manage a plot of land in the village Silistea Snagovului, 30 km north of Bucharest, in the proximity of a protected natural area (forest and lake)”. Raluca describes its genesis and its evolution.

Judith Marcuse has become one of Canada’s senior artist/producers, with an international career that spans over 50 years as dancer, choreographer, director, producer, teacher, writer and lecturer. In 2007 she founded the International Centre of Art for Social Change, initially as a partnership with Simon Fraser University, where she was appointed an adjunct professor.
Marcuse acted as the lead investigator of a six-year (2013- 19), Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council-funded national study on art for social change, the first of its kind in Canada, which involved some 50 Canadian artists and scholars.
On Culture of Possibility podcast #35, Arlene Goldbard talks with Judith Marcuse, based in British Columbia, Canada, and a powerhouse of imagination, production, and advocacy for more than 40 years. Among her projects have been large-scale multi-arts festivals; multi-year collaborative projects with youth; a major, Canada-wide study of community engaged art for social change; a national mentorship project; and a national network.
In January, JMP and ICASC will go into hibernation because of severe funding challenges plaguing the sector; of some 400 Canadian organizations doing community-engaged arts for social change work, 38% have closed over the last few years.
Arlene talks with Judith about her work, her long view of community-based cultural work in Canada, the sector’s financial precarity, the challenges and opportunities to come.

In his own words, Edwin Mingard works as “a socially-engaged visual artist. I work principally with moving image, making standalone artists' film and installations. My work often plays with mainstream and accessible forms – documentary, music video, magazine – so as to move beyond a traditional gallery audience.
“I am interested in who makes moving image work, how, why, and for whom. I often produce work within a discrete community or interest group, making work with a personal connection to my collaborators and broader social relevance. I want to celebrate and make visible the joy of the making process itself and explore its value for individual and collective growth and change. I develop processes to enable diverse groups of people to make work together. This focus is mirrored in the subject matter of my work, which deals with themes around our social environment and relationships with one another”.
In this episode, Edwin Mingard talks to Hannah Kemp-Welch about the need to turn off ‘broadcast mode’. Edwin brings diverse groups of people together to explore social change through moving image. He shares his learning from a long term project with young people in Stoke who were either homeless or recently experienced it, collaborating on a beautiful film called ‘An Intermission’ (2020).

Su Jones worked as the director of a-n The Artists Information Company from 1980 to 2014. Her doctoral thesis Artists livelihoods: the artists in arts policy conundrum, Manchester Metropolitan University 2015-2019, exposed baseline flaws in the interrelationship between arts policies and artists’ livelihoods over the last 30 years and articulated a unique new rationale for better support to artists that could enable many more to pursue livelihoods through art practices over a life cycle.
She now works as an independent arts researcher and writer who holds specialist knowledge and insight about the social and political environment for artists and contemporary visual arts.
Sophie Hope and Owen Kelly talk with Susan Jones about the relationships between the visual arts, arts policies, and the nature of artists’ livelihoods. They discuss these issues in relationship to the discussion about these and other related topics at the Aberdeen Summit held in June 2023.

The word falay means running water, accumulated underground through rainfall over millennia. Considered by locals of Ru-us al-Jibal as sacred, it acts as a driving force in the creation of landscapes and social practices.
In Helsinki, Zeynep Falay von Flittner has brought together a collective of transitions designers, systems thinkers, sustainability experts and researchers using system-aware creative practice to catalyse regenerative futures.
In this conversation she discusses what drives her, the work of Falay Design, her personal journey, and her roles as the founder of Design Activists for Regenerative Futures, and as a member of the board of Systems Change Finland.

On Culture of Possibility podcast #34, François Matarasso and Arlene Goldbard talk with Ralph Lister, executive director of Take Art in rural Somerset, England.
Take Art has been offering rural touring, projects in dance, theatre, and other arts practices, and working with artists and community groups, including schools, hospitals, day centres, youth clubs and early childhood education for going on four decades.
In this episode, they look at the ways perception, funding, and policy frameworks differ for rural and urban communities, how rural projects are networking and collaborating across Europe, and about the remarkable work Take Art has been able to carry forward, even in challenging times.

Albert Potrony’s website describes him as “an artist with a participatory practice examining ideas of identity, community and language. Potrony is interested in generating social spaces through his projects, and participation from diverse groups and individuals is a key element of his work.”
In this conversation with Hannah Kemp-Welch he introduces his participatory arts practice, describing a recent project with young fathers in Gateshead and former members of an anti-sexist men’s group. Albert and Hannah talk about collaborative practice in detail, and the role of listening within this.
‘Not knowing’ emerges as a key theme.

In this episode Owen Kelly continues a discussion begun last month. He begins by quoting a comment that ARlene Goldbard made after the last episode, and addressing the point she made.
He goes on to look at the relationship between copyright and branding, and at two recent events in which large corporations have attempted to extend the use of trademarks in predatory ways. He looks at Starbucks’ attempts to silence their union and at easyGroup, “Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou’s private investment company” and their successful attempt to shut down an indie band who have, for the last eight years, called themselves Easy Life.
Not easyLife (as in easyJet), you may note, but that traditional English expression “Easy Life”, as in “she’s opted for the easy life now”.