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- Convenors:
-
Ioannis Tsioulakis
(Queen's University, Belfast)
Fiona Murphy (Dublin City University)
Evi Chatzipanagiotidou (Queen's University Belfast)
- Formats:
- Panels
- Stream:
- Creativity
- Location:
- Examination Schools Room 8
- Start time:
- 20 September, 2018 at
Time zone: Europe/London
- Session slots:
- 2
Short Abstract:
The panel invites proposals that examine creative practice within conditions of economic and social crisis. We welcome papers addressing one of the following themes: languages of coping and articulation of crisis vocabularies, strategies of survival among artists, the emergence of crisis aesthetics.
Long Abstract:
We invite proposals for papers which analyse the ways in which creative artists cope with circumstances of 'crisis', particularly in its economic and social forms. The panel seeks to explore three interrelated themes:
1. Languages of coping: how do creative artists articulate their responses to the crisis? We welcome ethnographic work that analyses the vocabulary of crisis-narratives, interrogating concepts such as: resilience, survival, sustainability, adaptability, resistance, opportunity, and struggle. We invite papers that reflect on the following: How does language relates to individual versus collective conceptualisations of 'crisis'? To what extent are creative artists unique in those attitudes? Is the concept of 'creativity' one possible discourse to cope with crisis?
2. Creative strategies: what kinds of methods do artists employ in order to survive financially and safeguard the conditions of their creative work? Engaging with discourses on precarity and resistance, the panel seeks to understand the strategies that allow expressive artists to retain access to audiences, careers, employment, and visibility, within conditions of economic recession and austerity. We welcome presentations that assess how collective forms of resistance emerge within domains of creative labour, such as grassroots artistic collaboration, transnational networking, and intermediality.
3. Crisis aesthetics: are there particular aesthetic forms (for example audio/visual styles, performance habitus, or production ethics) that emerge as a result of, and commentary on, the crisis-scape? Under this theme, the panel will particularly focus on ways in which 'crisis' shapes novel genres of expressivity, as well as hinders and excludes dominant aesthetic tropes.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
In this paper, I show how immigrant artists in Dubai navigate their art practice after the financial crisis that has hit Dubai in 2008. The city might have recovered, but how did it affect immigrant artists?
Paper long abstract:
The Arab Gulf is usually not associated with austerity or economic hardship, due to a public narrative of the success of rentier states in the oil-rich countries of the Arab Gulf. The financial crisis, however, did not spare cities such as Dubai and affected Dubai's burgeoning art scene as well as its artists. Many artists in Dubai are 2nd generation immigrants, and their right to stay depends on the state's unpredictable visa and residency system. Unlike more privileged Emirati artists that receive state-funding for their art practice, these artists have to fend for themselves economically. While the city of Dubai might have recovered after the latest financial crisis, I argue that these artists haven't. If they don't find jobs, they won't just have economic problems but also lose their residency permits and thereby their homes. In this paper, I trace the way in which these artists in Dubai deal with crisis in both their art practice as well as their everyday lives. Which artistic and life strategies do these artists develop vis-à-vis economic hardship, unfair visa regulations, state censorship, and phases of precarity? This paper answers this question based on six months of ethnographic field research in Dubai from 2015-2017. It thereby will provide a perspective on economic hardship that differs from monolithic ideas of entire state austerities and instead shows how recession lives on for immigrant artists in states that have already recovered economically.
Paper short abstract:
Since 2010, austerity-led cuts to the Arts Council budget in Northern Ireland have devastated the region's arts scene. This paper examines the local art world's responses, focusing on the language used to argue for the value of increased funding and on the protest strategies employed.
Paper long abstract:
Since 2010, cuts to the Arts Council budget in Northern Ireland have devastated the region's arts scene, so much that public funding for the arts in Northern Ireland is projected to soon be only half that of the 2010/11 fiscal year. The series of Culture Ministers who have overseen these cuts have consistently positioned them as products of Westminster-led austerity. Concern and frustration at these choices have motivated Northern Ireland's art world to respond with a series of protests. Studying these protests can grant important insight into localized responses to austerity in small economies and in regions that are relatively marginal within the global art scene.
This paper interrogates the protest strategies employed by Northern Ireland's artists over the past five years, examining the various conceptions of 'crisis', 'creativity', and even 'austerity' itself that have been mobilized in an effort to draw attention to the art world's plight and bring an end to the yearly whittling away of the public arts budget. It is particularly interested in the value language at play in the discourses of artists and protesters, civil servants and government officials, and the general public. Examining these value arguments - which variously position arts and creativity as public good, human rights, instruments of policy, inherently beautiful, elitist, and so forth - can provide deeper understanding of the ways in which the meaning of art and creativity shifts and changes during times of austerity.
Paper short abstract:
The proposed paper will examine how professional musicians in Athens calibrate their employment strategies, creative outputs, and conceptualise their personhood within the context of the Greek financial and socio-political crisis.
Paper long abstract:
The proposed paper will focus on the ways in which the post-2010 economic 'crisis' in Greece affects local professional musicians. The chronicle of Greece's radical economic and political change in the past seven years has been covered extensively by domestic and international media. Following the global financial crisis that began in the United States in 2008, Greece faced a sovereign-debt crisis in 2009, which resulted in a succession of so-called 'bailouts', with each of them deepening the imposed austerity, the recession and the political alienation of Greek citizens. This paper will address how increased precariousness and unemployment due to the 'crisis' reshapes the strategies of working musicians, but also their self-conceptions and sense of personhood.
Since 'The Crisis', musicians have found steady work scarce and payment often not forthcoming. This paper will elaborate on the ways that professional musicians in recessional Athens practically adjust their work to the new crisis-scape, but also how they embody subjectivities of the precarious labourer. I will suggest that freelance musicians in Athens engage in two simultaneous processes: (1) they incarnate a new type of artistic labourer, what I call the 'Music Precariat': mobile and alienated from industry structures, but also an agent of grassroots solidarities at home and abroad. (2) They operate as 'aesthetic prophets' of a new kind of cultural production, based on ideas of small-scale performance, domesticity, independence, and free, unmediated circulation.
Paper short abstract:
This paper focuses on the creative trajectory, practices and epistemology forged by a group of three collaborators who sought to resist the current creative and sociocultural crisis in Brazil by forging a multifaceted and growing music education project.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines the creative strategies, novel concepts, epistemology and inventions that emerged from an international collaboration involving an anthropologist, a video producer, and a multi-instrumentalist musician forged to cope with and resist the socioeconomic and creative crisis in Brazil through actions in the realm of music education, including the design and release of a musical card set and various associated games.
For many, Brazil as a whole has been in a state of perpetual crisis, including socioeconomic, political, cultural-educational, and economic. With the rise of neoliberalism, the Internet and the growing accessibility of video production to online audiences with the potential for 'going viral' via social media, a new struggle in terms of creative practice, tradition, and education started taking shape among networks of professional and amateur musicians in Brazil. For many, the trendy musics being heavily promoted to young people is lacking in terms of lyrical, rhythmic, harmonic and melodic content, standing in contrast with the music traditions that once brought Brazil to the world stage, in particular genres like Chorinho, Samba, Bossa Nova, MPB, and the jazz and classical music infused instrumental musics of the 1970s.
Focusing on the trajectory of a music education project that I have joined in October 2016, this paper analyzes the combined crucial roles of collaboration, spirituality, intuition, epistemological and linguistic resonance, work as play, audiovisual production, and networking, in resisting the crisis spawned by mainstream musics during the current creative and socioeconomic crisis.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores how artists conceive of their role in relation to the political struggles that characterise the social space in Palestine. How do they relate to attempts to either instrumentalise contemporary art as a nationalist endeavour, or to excoriate it for not contributing to the same?
Paper long abstract:
The stagnation of the Oslo process, and the thwarted independence it promised, have left Palestinians frustrated by their political representatives; meanwhile the divisions between Fatah and Hamas in the West Bank and Gaza have largely silenced calls for a unified Palestinian state. The weakening of Palestinian political factions, and the absence of a credible route to resist Israeli occupation or negotiate the establishment of a viable independent state, have led to a sense of arrested crisis in the national movement.
This paper, grounded in ethnographic fieldwork at the International Academy of Art Palestine in Ramallah, offers an analysis of art education and the politics of Palestinian cultural activity, as mediated by its aid funding context. It relates the discourse of the artist as an oppositional figure to the notion of 'resistance' and emancipatory politics in Palestine. It analyses how artists strategically engage with constraints on their creative practice (including the liberal values agenda embodied by the art school, demands for a certain aesthetic from the international art circuit, and discourses of the nation in Palestine) in order to achieve intertwined personal and political aims.
I explore the ways in which artists identify the particular pressures under which they work: significantly the donor economy, the Israeli occupation, the Palestinian national movement and moments of contact with the global art circuit. How do these artists respond to the material conditions of occupation and oppression, and how do they enact resistance, in the many forms in which they come to understand it?