Despite and Because. On Politics & Poetics of Collaboration Across the Mediterraneans - Online public programme
UNIDEE Residency Programs is happy to announce the launch of the online public programme Despite and Because. On Politics & Poetics of Collaboration Across the Mediterraneans.
Inscribed in the framework of the Neither on Land nor at Sea biennium at UNIDEE, this programme of monthly online talks seeks to enquire into ways of instituting, organising, caring, and commoning in the arts, bringing to the forefront some of the experiences currently inhabiting and activating the Mediterranean spaces.
Despite & Because invites curators, practitioners and facilitators from art organisations and projects that operate or have originated in the broader Mediterranean region to get together, so to discuss ways of practising, researching, caring, and struggling together, within and through (para-)institutional and collective settings.
The programme aims to unsettle the understanding of the Mediterranean as a graspable locality, exploring shared or recurring conditions as well as stark contradictions. In doing so, it also brings to the public conversations on systems, infrastructures and means, which are oftentimes held in private.
The online public programme runs parallel to the UNIDEE residency modules, starting in May 2023, allowing for an additional form of engagement and participation in the themes and methodologies explored in this season of the UNIDEE programming, open to all.
More information about the calendar of events to follow soon.
• 1
School of Intrusions
with Noor Abed and Lara Khaldi
Sunday 14 May 2023, 11 am (CEST) online
Link for registration
School of Intrusions is a collective of sorts practicing informal ways of gathering in and around specific urban and rural sites. The members of the group change and fluctuate. It grew out of a conversation about education, art schools, collectivity, and the city as a common space in Palestine. Together the group developed a set of tools to navigate the city as a site of knowledge and how this knowledge is produced.
Speakers:
Noor Abed works at the intersection of performance, media and film. Her works create situations where social possibilities are both rehearsed and performed. Abed’s work has been screened and exhibited internationally at Anthology Film Archives, New York, Gabes Cinema Fen Film Festival, Tunisia, Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival, The New Wight Biennial, Los Angeles, Leonard & Bina Gallery, Montréal, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, Ujazdowski Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw, The Mosaic Rooms, London, and MAXXI - National Museum of 21st Century Art, Rome, among others. In 2020, she co-founded, with Lara Khaldi, the School of Intrusions, an independent educational collective in Ramallah, Palestine. Abed is currently a resident at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam 2022-24 and was recently awarded the Han Nefkens Foundation/Fundació Antoni Tàpies Video Art Production Grant 2022.
Lara Khaldi is an independent curator and critic from Jerusalem, Palestine, living temporarily in Amsterdam. She was part of the curatorial team of documenta 15. Until recently she was the head of the Media Studies Programme at Alquds Bard College, Jerusalem and a tutor in the Disarming Design MA program, at Sandberg Institute, 2020-2022. Khaldi is appointed as the new director of the contemporary art space de Appel in Amsterdam, starting from January 2023.
• 2
Mahal Art Space & Tajarrod
with Nouha Ben Yebdri and Sarri Elfaitouri
Tuesday 20 June 2023, 6 pm (CEST) online
Link for registration
Mahal Art Space is an independent and alternative space, a 35 m2 white cube in Tangier, dedicated to the promotion of contemporary practices, especially in the visual arts, through a transdisciplinary approach. Mahal Art Space's mission focuses on the invention of new (local) artistic ‘protocols', to the reflection on art spaces and their environment, and to the different constraints related to the artist's practice and audiences. The project is mainly aimed at artists and other practitioners who are at the beginning of their careers, as well as at the general public. Towards this direction, Mahal Art Space is committed to creating an ecology of practices that connects in particular the young/emerging art scene in Morocco, with different audiences and communities in the city of Tangier and beyond, as well as with established artists and agents in the field.
Tajarrod is a pedagogical design led research practice aiming to challenge the dominant socio-cultural and disciplinary ideologies in Libyan and beyond. Tajarrod's projects vary between the production of theoretical writings and investigations, exhibitions, workshops, as well as the organization of public dialogues and competitions.
Speakers:
Nouha Ben Yebdri is an independent curator, founder and director of MAHAL, a non-profit organisation whose mission is to respond to and accompany the needs of the emerging contemporary art scene in Morocco, from its headquarters in Tangier. Her curatorial practice focuses on the reflection and conception of projects around issues related to the development of art spaces, institutionalization procedures, mediation/outreach protocols, and the impact that these spaces have on their environment; as well as the study of contextual factors that influence the conception of the terms and dynamics that unfold through these processes and places. These efforts are conveyed and put into practice through the programming of the independent space Mahal (or also known as Mahal Art Space) and Silent Pedagogies - بيداغوجيات صامتة , a program that questions the curricula of artistic training in Morocco and analyzes the relationship of art spaces with the different audiences it hosts and works with.
Some of the projects she has curated through these two programs include: the Méta Skholé Libre workshops (with Jean-Paul Thibeau); the group exhibitions Iconographies de la rue (with Think Tanger), Tangier: Facets of a Mediterranean Intersection (with Robin Vermeulen), and What Dies Last, an online and in-person show; Maared/ Aarada - معرض/عراضة, an exhibition and public program (with Mouhawalat collective); undercurrents, an independent training and learning platform, together with LE18, Derb El Ferran and Fondation Dar Bellarj, both based in Marrakech.
Sarri Elfairouri is an interdisciplinary architect, artist, curator, cultural manager, and writer based in Benghazi, Libya, and the founder and director of Tajarrod, a pedagogical design led research practice. Through historical archeologies and socio-spatial interventions his work is dedicated to developing radical spaces of critical learning and acting within his context “Libya” and beyond.
