[Nettime-nl] FW: Village Convention: Contextual Art in Rural Environments

["Wapke Feenstra" <Wapke@euronet.nl>]

Please forward to anyone interested.

We invite you to the

Village Convention Public Event

Sunday 22nd May, 3-6 pm, 
Ditchling Museum, Church Lane, Ditchling BN6 8TB, UK 
(map:  <http://www.streetmap.co.uk/streetmap.dll?postcode2map?bn6+8tb>
<http://www.streetmap.co.uk/streetmap.dll?postcode2map?bn6+8tb> )

The event follows a two day 
Village Convention 
which brought together 40 practitioners from Europe to discuss 
Contextual Art in Rural Environments.

Initiated and organized by myvillages.org and General Public Agency with
Ditchling Museum.


 
Forty artists, curators and theorists from Europe meet in Ditchling to
discuss the particular conditions of working in a rural environment.
Contextual and socially engaged art practice has been widely discussed
during recent years, but mainly within an urban context. Village Convention
focuses on approaches and examples of contextual practice in the rural
environment and the village.
 
The Village Convention aims to discuss the rural as a site for cultural
production that isn’t nostalgic or reactionary. It aims to recognise the
particularities of contemporary rural life in order to develop a cultural
production and representation that comes from within, rather than being
projected upon it.
 
Village Convention intends to be the starting point for an artist-led,
bottom-up network of producers concerned with how contemporary art can
contribute to life in a rural environment and vice versa.
 
The following issues will be at the core of this practitioner event: the
rural as a production site for art, the representation of the village and
villager in art, and the particularities of rural social networks and
informal economies.
 
The presented art projects and the results of the workshops will be on show
during the Sunday Public Event, which also includes artist's walks around
Ditchling, live music, and a visit to the Museum. Village snacks from other
European regions will be on offer.
 
A series of principles will be gathered from the discussions - these will be
published on the website myvillages.org. A publication to be widely
disseminated will include international case studies and a toolkit providing
principles for successful project development, to support policy and
practice development
 
myvillages.org is an artist initiative founded by Kathrin Böhm (UK/Ger),
Wapke Feenstra (NL) and Antje Schiffers (Ger) with a particular interest in
the village as a place for contemporary practice. myvillages.org is an
informal platform for artists to discuss ideas for village projects and to
initiate new work. (www.myvillages.org) Doris Koch is a Berlin-based artist
who has joined myvillages.org for the contextualisation and organisation of
the Village Convention. (www.doriskoch.de)
 
General Public Agency is a creative consultancy providing services which
include strategic brief-setting, public realm strategies, cultural policies
and programmes, and design studies. General Public Agency curates its own
programme of action research projects as well as responding to client
briefs. (www.generalpublicagency.com)
 
Ditchling Museum shows a collection of arts and crafts work, including a
significant Eric Gill collection, Shoji Hamada, and Hilary Pepler. It
informs on former village life and has recently started to commission
contemporary artists for site-specific projects in relation to the history
and location to the village. (www.ditchling-museum.com)
 
For detailed information on the Village Convention and the Public Event
visit
http://www.generalpublicagency.com/villageevent
You can contact General Public Agency on +44 (0)20 7378 8365, email
christian@generalpublicagency.com 
or contact http://www.myvillages.org  on +44 (0)7941 696 515.
 

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