DIY: 2011 – Cecilia Wee “I can’t live on vitriol alone!”

Professional development projects BY artists FOR artists across the UK

DIY 8: 2011 – Call for Participants

A workshop exploring the conditions and possibilities for art that enacts social change, through 3 days of thinking and dialogue, inside and outside urban contexts.

THIS DIY PROJECT IS NOW FULL.

Project summary:
In the ‘current climate’ where the very need, impact and agency of creative action is being undermined, it is easy to become distracted, disregarding what we need to flourish, only seeking the basics for survival. This workshop aims to provide a critical yet supportive environment in which participants consider and experiment with positive and pro-active approaches to art’s participation in current social conditions.

Drawing from aspects of action research, the project invites individuals to become part of a learning group who wish to orient their practice towards further engagement with social, political, economic and environmental issues through critical affirmative activities. This will centre around small-scale action research projects, which will be reflected on by the individual participant and the group, testing how these ideas can be carried on outside the hermetic workshop context.

Predicated on the potential that several minds working with similar concerns can come together to create something that is more than the sum of the individuals, this workshop encourages participants to bring hope, playfulness and open-mindedness to oppose the assumption that art-political critique is doomed to appropriation by a spectacular media discourse.

Inspired by: Escalate collective, UK Uncut, David Bohm’s theory of dialogue and Theodore Roszak’s writing on counter culture.

This workshop is open to artists working in the fields of performance, live art, digital media, transmedia, site specific work, sound, installation and text. We welcome artists with different levels of experience, a sense of humour and those who are eager to challenge the relationship between art and society and what their creative practice is able to achieve.

Dates, times and locations:
Saturday 24 September, 2011 (10.30am-6pm) – central London.
Friday 30 September (starting 10am in central London, then to overnight stay in Kent) and Saturday 1 October (arriving back in central London c.7pm)

Free including meals + simple accommodation (for overnight stay in Kent), except for a contribution to train tickets, from London to Kent, c.£15.

Application procedure:
Please email:
– Statement of interest (up to 1 page), including answering the following:
1. I need… We need…
2. My knowledge/skills/experience in  …are underused at the moment
3. I can’t live on vitriol alone! because….

– Up to 3 samples of work (website link or attachments smaller than 1MB please)
– CV and artist biography

Applications should be sent to [email protected] by Friday 22 July, 2011.

Shortlisted participants will be invited to a telephone/skype/face-to-face interview on Saturday 23 July.

The artist:
Cecilia Wee is a London-based independent writer, broadcaster and curator who produces art projects, particularly in the fields of experimental sound, performance and visual art practices, in the UK and internationally. She has worked with organisations including Tate Britain, Magazin 4 Bregenz, Whitechapel Gallery, Akademie der Künste Berlin, Chelsea College of Art, National Review of Live Art and Resonance FM. Cecilia’s research interests include narratives of technological ‘progress’, the theory and practice of dialogue, cultural understandings of militarised combat, civil society in the Global South and environmental change. www.ceciliawee.com

Contact information: [email protected]

This project was a response to the DIY 8 Call for Proposals