Paper short abstract:

This paper proposes a look on practices in contemporary art which approach the Place in urban contexts by electing direct experience, seeking models of action and located sociability, taking the dialog as the principle of a process that leads to the construction of ‘images’ based on the development of experiences.

Paper long abstract:

This paper proposes a look on practices in contemporary art which approach the Place in urban contexts by electing direct experience, seeking models of action and located sociability, taking the dialog as the principle of a process that leads to the construction of 'images' based on the development of experiences. Practices that are examples of resistance to social formatation under the influence of the media and which give rise to a set of actions and relationships that occur in a given space-time raising awareness for the sense of inhabit a world in common.

The group Oda Projesi and Jeanne van Heeswijk will be the cases in focus as examples that propose a view of the public space of cities crossed by different communities of language, history, culture and religion (the clash of identities with need of translation), formulating frameworks for experiencies to create something together. Approachs that do not stay by the observation and interpretation of the Other, acting with him in his many forms. In public space heterogeneous and fragmented , these proposals will develop a work focused on micro-situations that give priority to the person.

Enhanced in public spaces outside the circle of institutional art system, and in close relation with the daily lives of its inhabitants, art thus becomes a state of encounter which creates new modes of identification and collaboration.

Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses artist Yvonne Buchheim's work on her Song Archive project - an interdisciplinary artwork that interacts with musicology, anthropology and psychology. The project aims to playfully investigate the value of art as a catalyst for social interaction.

Paper long abstract:

This joint paper by the editors of a monograph on Buchheim's Song Archive Project will discuss the ways in which practice-led research that uses art strategies to situate artwork within the public realm, through publicly funded exhibitions and installations, live art events and academic symposia, interacts with it's initial participants - singers located in a particular context - through a playful dialogue with ethnographic concerns. The artist Yvonne Buchheim set up the Song Archive Project in 2003 in response to a song collection from 1773 by Johann G, Herder. His collection and theory suggests that the cultural identity of a people is reflected through their song tradition. The aim of the Song Archive Project is to develop a body of works that re-examines this assumption in the context of contemporary song culture through the lens of a visual arts practice.

In contrast to conventional ethnographic song collections, the research is not restricted to a particular song type or locality, exposing both tacit musical knowledge and various singing abilities across a wide range of contemporary locations. The paper will discuss the way in which the Song Archive Project does not aim to preserve traditional song, but instead explores participatory art strategies in gathering, examining and exhibiting contemporary song culture. It also asks how this ongoing interdisciplinary inquiry addresses issues of memory, location and context at the intersection of a multiplicity of disciplines and practices.

Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on the role filmmakers have played and continue to play in perpetuating a mythic portrayal of the so-called “Kalahari-Bushmen” which has locked them in space and time and continues to have major negative impacts upon their lives. The paper explores the Western fantasies of a pristine Eden which keeps the myth alive and the devastating effects upon real people (the Ju/’hoansi) as well as one filmmakers attempt to dispel the myth.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores how documentary and feature filmmakers have used the "Bushmen of the Kalahari" as a screen to project fantasies of a 'window on the Pleistocene.' From the documentaries dating back to the 1950s when groups of "Bushmen" were still living relatively independently by hunting and gathering, the paper will show how an urge to portray people and landscape as part of some pristine wilderness - which resonates with an Eden or Golden Age has led filmmakers to deny reality and perpetuate a myth of "illud tempus," or timeless beginnings. With reference to archetypal psychology, the paper will explore mythic fantasies at work in the Western Psyche, and show the negative effects of these shadow projections upon the Ju/'hoansi whose name means The Real or True People. The paper then shows how one filmmaker, John Marshall, woke up to the mythic projections in which he had himself indulged in his formative years and spent the rest of his life returning repeatedly to the Kalahari to counter the damage he felt the mythmaking of filmmakers and others had done. Finally the paper suggests a more conscious mode of filming in remote indigenous communities and 'exotic' places which is reflexive and takes cognizance of the tendency to project myths and fantasies, while respecting local traditions and culture.

Paper short abstract:

This joint paper will look at the different strategies that artists use to employ ritual to engage communities with place. Four artworks by Joseph Beuys, Marcus Coates, Alastair MacLennan and Shimon Attie, that have engaged communities in times of transition, will be discussed and the effects assessed via the responses of audience-participants.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will draw from debates in visual culture and social anthropology to explore the ways that artists employ ritual to engage communities with places in the UK in processes of transition on large and small scales. Beginning with a discussion of Joseph Beuys' "Celtic Kinloch Rannoch" (Scottish Symphony) 1970, the paper will go to discuss three contemporary works. In "Journey to the Lower World" 2003 Marcus Coates employs humour and ritual to help residents of a tower block earmarked for demolition to come to terms with the changes that they will face. In "Lure in Rule" 2008 Alastair MacLennan created a work along a footbridge in the market town of Cardigan undergoing regeneration that gently emphasized the celebration of life in times of change. Shimon Attie was commissioned in 2006 by the village community of Aberfan, Wales to create a new work that responded to the 1966 disaster in which 130 people were killed by a falling coal slagheap. In "The Attraction of Onlookers: Aberfan - an Anatomy of a Welsh Village", Attie employs great sensitivity to the villagers' need to both remember the tragedy of the past and to move beyond it.

The paper will emphasis the response of audience-participants to address the questions: How do peoples' experiences of rituals in places that are familiar to them alter their perception of those places? To what degree are such actions a form of re-making of place, a call to address the question of how places could or might become?

Paper short abstract:

Country houses, awakened to their post-museum status, are seeking new ways to engage with their audiences. Using the Bronte Parsonage in Haworth as a case study this paper questions the role of contemporary art programmes and their contribution to visitor understanding of the site and its history.

Paper long abstract:

Seeing contemporary artwork in heritage spaces is a growing aspect of the visitor experience. This curatorial conflation of the practical and ideological frameworks of heritage preservation with the languages of contemporary art generate a 'hybrid' experience; neither of an 'authentic' interior, nor in a white-cube space. As part of the Brontë Parsonage's Contemporary Art Programme, Cornelia Parker's Brontëan Abstracts exhibition in 2006 is a particularly useful case study to allow examination of the visitor encounter with this hybrid strategy of display. Visitor comments suggest that meaning making is framed very much by prior knowledge and experience; it is as a result of this 'expectation' that visitors appear to either accept this hybrid display as a meaningful experience or not.

Public arts initiatives such as this one at the Parsonage are a critical strategies in the (re)connection of people to places. This hybrid strategy of display can be located within a context of public art; further research and development is needed to ensure it can generate more meaningful heritage spaces and visitor experiences, especially for local and returning audiences.