As part of the activities concerning the 31st Bienal de São Paulo exhibition (September 2nd - December 7th 2014) São Paulo Bienal is hosting a three-week curatorial workshop titled A Tool Box for Cultural Organization. 

Leaded by 31th Bienal curatorial team (Charles Esche, Galit Eilat, Pablo Lafuente, Nuria Enguita Mayo and Oren Sagiv), the workshop will give 15 young curators, artists, writers or cultural activators the possibility of engaging in a discussion about organisation and intervention in artistic and cultural contexts, and intends to provide them with key tools for engaging critically in artistic and cultural production today.

Invited speakers include: Ana Longoni, Charles Esche, Ekaterina Degot, Gali Eilat, Ivo Mesquita, Oren Sagiv, Orlando Maneschy, Nuria Enguita Mayo, Pablo Lafuente, Ricardo Basbaum, Sandi Hilal & Alessandro Petti, Suely Rolnik, Vasif Kortun and Walid Raad.

PRATICAL INFORMATION 

A Tool Box for Cultural Organization
Workshop in three parts
27-31 January 2014
12-16 May 2014
6-10 October 2014


 

Monday to Friday, 1pm-8pm 
São Paulo, Brazil 

Applications

The workshop is free of charge and 15 participants will be selected after an open submission call. The selection will be made on the basis of their past activities and a written presentation articulating the reasons for their interest in the programme. Applicants must speak Portuguese or Spanish + English and be engaged in artistic and cultural production. 

Applicants should send CV or Portfolio + Cover Letter (up to 500 words) to 
[email protected] until 25 November 2013.

Applications will be assessed by the curatorial team, and successful applications will be notified by 16 December 2013.

Bienal Some provisional guiding interests

The 31st Bienal de São Paulo, is currently being developed by Charles Esche, Galit Eilat, Nuria Enguita Mayo, Pablo Lafuente and Oren Sagiv in cooperation with an extended team that includes the permanent staff of the Bienal.

The curatorial team started working in August 2013 and is concentrating over the next months on the research, selection, production and arrangement of the Bienal at the pavilion in Ibirapuera Park. There is currently no fixed theme or organising device for the Bienal. Instead of predetermining the nature or meaning of artistic practice, the curators have drawn up some provisional interests and will rely on research, exchanges and conversations in the months to come in order to shape the event. This process, which is intended to be accessible throughout, is grounded on a series of open meetings across Brazil and elsewhere, the workshop on cultural organisation announced here, and intense travels in Brazil and Latin America. 

The wide social, political and economic field seems to be in an unusual, precarious state today. A strange kind of balance holds sway in which it is hard to believe that things will remain the same, but just as difficult to imagine how and to what extent they might change. The uncertainty of the prognosis has many effects on the cultural field, from protest to resignation, from complicity to doubt. Out of this comes the curators’ interest in the ‘turn’ as a phenomenon and ‘trans-’ as a notion, both of which suggest a change in state at a ground level, not connected to higher or more generalised goals. These turns are probably irreversible (you cannot put the paint back in the tube), but they happen without a clear direction. They are disorderly perhaps, dishonest or strategic too; they work not through representation and ‘legitimate’ structures, but emerge as urgent responses to specific situations, and result in change that is not progressive or cumulative (i.e. modern). In the face of this situation, inconstancy can be considered a virtue, something that allows tactical withdrawals or punctual interventions. 

The curators’ intended intervention in today’s cultural and artistic field will operate through the creation and support of collaborations between individuals and groups questioning conventional definitions of artist, participant, user and spectator. On their research they will look for affective responses to current conditions and will move text, discourse and explanation to the background. Through the format of art, the plan is to reach towards things that do not seem to exist, things that might be experienced but are not articulated; felt but not explained; believed but not proven. These are the things that are often ignored when it comes to the hard logic of competitive efficiency and economic survival.

Finally, every aspect of the 31st Bienal (research, art and discourse production, display) is understood as part of an education process that is problem-posing, exploratory and unresolved. The curators intend to offer the audience a plethora of dynamic experiences connecting the interior public space of the pavilion with its surroundings – the people in the park, the city, the country, the continent, the world – and address these levels with different forms and modes of artistic practice.

> via bienal.org.br