October 28^th 2017
ZK/U – Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik
Siemensstrasse 27, Berlin

Organisers:
ZK/U – Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik (Berlin)
MoTA Museum of Transitory Art (Lublana)
LAZNIA Centre for Contemporary Art (Gdansk)

 

The theme of the meeting "Modular Relations" will be an attempt to analyze the challenges of the contemporary cities and its dwellers. What are the good practices and development strategies that can improve the living conditions in cities today? We will reflect on the new approaches to urban realities and the components that generate public space. We will take a closer look at works that focus on localities and residents that  have been forgotten and left behind. What are the issues of those places and the associated memories or lack of it?

List of the Gdansk based speakers and artists (full programme of the event available on www.zku-berlin.org):

Piotr Czyż and Lucyna Kolendo
Piotr Czyż and Lucyna Kolendo will present their subjective report on art in public space of Gdansk. It will be conducted from the perspective of two speakers: a socially oriented architect and an artist. It will cover their main works, as well as their choice of other, interesting pieces around the City.

Main goal of the presentation is to introduce the artistic landscape of the city to someone who has never been before to Gdansk. Piotr and Lucyna will make an attempt to show it with the help of a one day photographic report of a bike tour through the main districts of Gdansk. They will start in the historic downtown area and then move to the areas oftentimes forgotten or currently under transformation. It is where the presence of art and the dialogue between artists and the inhabitants plays a crucial role in revitalizing the city.

Presentation will be conducted in two parts: a classic lecture followed by a performative presentation of video installation and comments.

 

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Łukasz Pancewicz
The individualistic mode of architecture production - based on competition and the strong focus on the promotion of the "brilliant, solitary designer" - rarely helps in situations where work with the community and other specialists is involved. Also urban planning needs to engage with critical questions of relations of power and capital. Hence complex urban projects, in order to be successful and meaningful, shall involve different personal, intellectual and professional perspectives.

During the lecture I will present how the live, situated learning projects have been used to facilitate the cooperative action by a group of students - future professionals, who have worked on realistic projects of urban regeneration. The objective of our work was to expose the students to messy realities of urban projects as well as to challenge the conventional perceptions of the role of architect.  
 

It’s another kind of skin
A project by Simone Basani
curated by Alice Ciresola
Performed by: Dana Chmielewska and Katarzyna Pastuszak

Can we do something with the remembrance of places belonging to our collective and individual past?  How do those places work on the construction of our subjectivities today? In ‘‘It’s another kind of skin” two performers investigate these questions from their autobiographical point of view. The result is a diptych of reconstructed places, chosen because they are sites of events fixed in individual or collective memory. The act of re-creating their physical dimension, through ekphrasis and embodiment, is shared with the audience.

Simone Basani and Alice Ciresola have researched on the relationship between memory and physical spaces and have created a performative methodology to make it visible. During their residency at Laznia CCA (Gdansk), they collaborated with a group of local dancers guiding them to reconstruct collective or private places that are not accessible anymore or have been completely transformed.

‘’It’s another kind of skin’’ was presented for the first time in the frame of What Remains of a Rembrandt Torn Into Four Equal Pieces and Flushed Down the Toilet, a performative project presented at Sopot State Art Gallery (Poland) is September 2017. The site-specific project - focused on narration, empathy and memory - inhabited the gallery for a week transforming it in a temporary laboratory to produce and stage memories in a collective dimension.

Simone Basani and Alice Ciresola (IT/BE) are an artist and curator duo currently in residency at CCA - Łaznia. They create collective services and educational devices for communities and cultural institutions. For their residency they are working on transcultural and transhistorical narrations conceived by and for Gdansk citizenship, on the border between museum and public spaces.

* It’s another kind of skin is borrowed from a line of Anne Sexton’s poem Housewife (1962)

Basani and Ciresola are developing their residency in the frames of the international project “Artecitya”, financed by the European program Creative Europe 2014-2020.

For more information on “Modular Relation” event please visit: www.zku-berlin.org
“Modular Relations” is co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union 2014 – 2020  and part of the Artecitya project.