CIFAS is a place of thinking and practice for the art in the city and its surroundings, socially and politically engaged.
It proposes a collective learning space with a programme of workshops, debates and artistic public interventions that support experimentation, alternative knowledge, being together, public space and artistic desire.
Its aim is to think about public space and to approach learning from a holistic and living perspective, integrating rurality, the edges of wild life, valuing so-called peripheral knowledge and activating all our senses.
CIFAS is an organisation that puts the city at the centre of its activity, and trains future generations to take care of the city, a city that is at the crossroads of all disciplines.
With the mission to accompany and support multidisciplinary artistic creation in the public space, CIFAS intends to continue to:
- Develop artistic practice in the public space
- Open up horizons
- Supporting artists and venues that reinterpret new formats.
With live art in the city and its edges as a vector, CIFAS plays a role in the exploration and transformation of this public space that we want to be common, united, plural and resilient.
We conceive all our actions as opportunities for exchange and transformation. We offer a space for risk and experimentation, for open enquiry and learning by doing.
We believe that creation is a way of building relationships and bringing forward new collective ways of being in the world.
We value: cooperation and the creation of shared imaginaries.
We are inspired by and take our place in our original environment: Brussels, a world city, a party city, a place of connection between people, cultures and ideas that encourages resourcefulness, hospitality and embracing multiplicity.
We value: openness.
We believe that everyone has important and valuable skills and knowledge to contribute.
We build equality and inclusion into all our activities and actively work to overcome barriers to access to our programme and workshops.
We advocate for cultural rights, support emancipation and social justice and fight against all forms of discrimination.
In line with our feminist, decolonial and inclusive values.
The project has three main components:
1. LEARNING: Lifelong learning and co-learning
2. FERAL: A highlight and artistic programme, a signature
3. HOW TO SHARE: A resource centre for live art in the city, for the circulation of resources, locally and internationally
1. LEARNING: Lifelong education and co-learning
- Workshops by and/or for artists. Ex: School of Love
- Creation of CONSTELLATIONS: setting up of an artistic solidarity through the constitution of a group of artists that we will accompany throughout the year, on projects in the process of being written that touch closely or by far on the notion of public space (contextualisation, social justice, participation, insitu...)
We have imagined constellations in which project leaders and artists come together around their prototypes to test their ideas and to work on their methods. We will invite different artists or collectives for whom learning is a subject of investigation and experience to share their research and lead a large peer group on the theme of knowledge sharing.
We will offer masterclasses, taking care to accompany those who give them in the context of their words.
2. FERAL (ex-SIGNAL): an artistic signature
- Reflection and questioning on today's political and social emergencies and their handling by artists
- 3 days of programming artistic interventions that influence the daily life of Brussels through art
- A collective moment:
o Focused on the relationship between the rural and the urban
o Fun and light, intense and stimulating
o To launch future generations
These interventions follow the rhythm of the seasons.
They can take place on a boat, at the slaughterhouse, in a shop or at a carnival. They are urban, interstitial, peripheral, natural and feral.
These actions are always co-produced with various actors from Brussels (residents, partners) and elsewhere. They all concern art living in the city and its edges, in other words, art insofar as it questions the common and its asperities, urbanity and rurality, landscape and intimacy, the crossroads, the joy that propels us.
3. HOW TO SHARE
- Sharing knowledge
- Transformation of the website into a real resource centre, a curated library: with articles, listings, contacts, networking... in order to open up all the accumulated knowledge to as many people as possible, where we also take up all the existing material via Klaxon and the CIFAS archives.
We also propose to equip ourselves with digital tools to encourage these cooperations and their contagion, to make visible and transmit this plural knowledge: to document, archive, share.
All this knowledge and practice (vocal, corporal, writing games, collective intelligence techniques, rituals) will be reported, stored and circulated via a digital platform, from the website and by integrating existing Klaxon articles in a referenced way. We will rely on open source tools and philosophy: inclusiveness, facilitation of access to information, hacking of methods and good practices, co-creation, respect of authors. We therefore propose to redesign the website and turn it into a resource centre. We will develop an editorial line based on a rhythm of sharing and a dynamic of contents.
From today's CIFAS, our ambition is to focus on contexts, new solidarities, holistic thinking and sensory exploration.
Partners
Cifas is a member of Réseau des arts de Bruxelles (RAB).
Cifas is a program supported by the Service of the French speaking Government of Brussels and Actiris.
