- Code:
02-049 - Publisher: Creative Books
- ISBN: 978-0-262-01734-3
Intro: In the 2nd lecture from Encounter series, the consultant of sustainable urban Marco Kusumawijaya presents many successful interactions between creative groups of artists, writers, architects, curators, poets… and community citizens in Indonesia. On large scale, there are a lot of creative projects following this motivation. One of the most important exhibitions in art history about the social role of artists is ‘Living as form – Socially engaged art from 1991-2011’ curated by Nato Thompson. This exhibition was then published into catalogue, introducing more than 100 projects by solo artists or independent collectives. They transformed the artwork into a wander, a game, a lifestyle, a critical forum for many communities. Some distinguished projects include: Time/Bank by Julieta Aranda and Anton Vidokle in which money was replaced by time – it made the users gradually aware of their labor value and the exchange of such value with other people not using money; Wikileaks revealing secrets of economic and political corporations for worldwide community to read, analyze, and provoke; or Land Foundation in Chiangmai inviting the artists to live, experience and create in agricultural environment with the farmers.
Quote: ‘[…] often, just as artists and architects lack awareness of the specific political and social knowledge embedded within these marginal communities, community activists also lack the conceptual devices to enable their own everyday procedures, and how their neighborhood agency can trickle up to produce new institutional transformations. It is in the context of these conditions where a different role of art, architecture, environmental and community activist practices can emerge. […] New knowledge-exchange corridors can be produced, between the specialized knowledge of institutions and the ethical knowledge of ‘community’, and artists can have a role to facilitate this exchange, occupying the gap between the visible and the invisible.’