For the programme of Urban Interventions, click here!
 

09:30>12:30: Plenary Session (CCJF)

Enlightener: Saskia Sassen (NL/US)
Speakers: Jay Pather (ZA), Nuria Güell (ES), Foradelugar (ES), Nimis Groupe (BE)

12:30 >13:30 : Lunch (Maison Pelgrims)

13:30>16:30: Workshops (chose one workshop)

1. "Blind spot" mené par Jay Pather (ZA)
(in English)
Infecting the City is a public art festival that Pather curates in Cape Town, South Africa. Cape Town was the ideal apartheid city and twenty-one years after democracy, remains largely segregated since land was not redistributed. So black townships and squatter camps remain geographically inscribed as they were at the time of apartheid.  Several artists performing at the Infecting the City Festival therefore create public art interventions that wrestle with this continuing legacy of otherness, race, centre and periphery, displacement, invisibilities and poverty. Beginning with an audio-visual introduction of some of these works by several artists from South Africa as well as other parts of the Africa, Pather will lead a physical workshop around the notion of Blind Spots: an investigation of displacement, belonging, visibility and invisibility, of being witnessed or overlooked. Pather employs the use of games, ritual in performance, formal as well as interrupted choreographic principles, improvisation and group dynamics to develop languages of performance that explore both the personal and the political. The workshop will culminate in improvised interventions in appropriate sites.

2. "Goodwill is not enough" led by Nuria Güell (ES)
(In Spanish with Facilitation to French)
As in previous artistic projects led in Sweden, Spain, Cuba and Austria where we have achieved to subvert the Migration law getting positive results for the collaborators, the workshop in Brussels intends to look for cracks in the Belgian Aliens Law. We will start by analyzing some of these projects and then we will devise together an artistic strategy that could be applied on the Belgian context, in order to challenge the exclusionary policies since the law and the moral victimizing prevailing in Europe.

3. "King Gaspard in different contexts" led by Foradelugar (ES)
(in English)
In this workshop, Foradelugar will discuss about the seed of their project "King Gaspard"; the original novel, inspired in the social context of the author, Gabriel Janer Manila, who relates the immigration of his city, Majorca, in the 60’s, put in relation to the actual context. They will explain what is their intention by developing this project in different countries, adapting the performance to different contexts, doing workshops with local people who tell us their own personal experiences.

16:30>17 :00: Sharing and feedback of the day (CCJF)

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17:00: Signal - Urban Interventions
"Géographie subjective"
Presentation of the map of Saint-Gilles
Centre Culturel Jacques Franck

Lois Keidan (UK)
Lois Keidan is a co-founder and the Director of the Live Art Development Agency which offers resources, opportunities, projects and publications to support Live Art practices and critical discourses in the UK and internationally. She was Director of Live Arts at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) where she devised a year round programme of new performance and initiated numerous new ventures for established and emerging artists. Lois Keidan is a major proponent and advocate for Live art in the UK and has been instrumental in the development and support of artists who have tended to be “marginalised, misunderstood and misrepresented...”
Prior to the ICA, she was responsible for national policy and provision for Performance Art and interdisciplinary practices at the Arts Council of Great Britain. She contributes articles on performance to a range of journals and publications and gives talks and presentations on performance at festivals, colleges, venues and conferences in Britain and internationally.
http://www.thisisliveart.co.uk

Fiona Whelan (IE)
Fiona Whelan is a Dublin based artist committed to exploring power relations through durational engagements with people and place. Her practice has been positioned in one urban locality for 11 years collaborating with a community youth project, working with individuals’ lived experience to explore broader societal issues. In 2014 Fiona published a critical memoir, TEN: Territory, Encounter & Negotiation, focusing on a long-term project exploring young people’s relationship to power and policing. This project manifested in a series of works including The Day in Question in IMMA, Dublin  (2009) and Policing Dialogues at The LAB, Dublin (2010), both of which brought young people and police together in untypical engagements where power was explored and tested. Fiona and her collaborators are currently in the final year of a five-year intergenerational project exploring female experiences of hope in a working class urban context, which will manifest in a major public performance in Project Arts Centre Dublin in 2016. Fiona is also joint Coordinator of the MA Socially Engaged Art at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin. www.fionawhelan.com

Catherine Jourdan (FR)
After a master of philosophy at the University of Paris X Nanterre in 2002 and a short teaching time, Catherine Jourdan moved towards artistic practice. Sculpture, installation, video, performance... to invent trajectories. The last artistic project she has been leading since 2009 is called “Géographie Subjective” (Subjective Geography). Cahterine Jourdan also works as a psychologist, she shares her time between clinical listening and documentary practice.

Joanna Turek / Ewelina Bartosik – Fundacja Tu  (PL)
Joanna Turek is a cultural anthropologist, coordinator and cultural manager. In recent years she has cooperated as a coordinator and producer with several foundations and institutions based in Warsaw and Berlin dealing with projects concerning visual arts, design, architecture as well as socio-educational activities, including international projects. In 2009-2012 she was engaged in the works of the Institute for Public Space Research at the Warsaw Fine Arts Academy, where she has co-led series of discussions and workshops on the topic of urban space in cultural and social context and have organized and coordinated projects and events in the open city space in Warsaw. She is engaged (in theory and practice) in the work on the widely understood public space, combining her interests in institutional critique, artistic practices in social and political context and the role of cultural and creative capital in local and international projects dedicated to urban space.
Ewelina Bartosik is a cultural anthropologist, cultural animator and educator engaged in various projects dedicated to children and young people. In recent years she was engaged in the works of, among others, Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw and the Forum for Dialogue Among Nations. In 2012 she has worked on the first polish publication dedicated to the public art collection in Warsaw, “City of Warsaw Public Art Collection”, by one of the leading Polish foundations – Bęc Zmiana New Culture Foundation. She also coordinated international projects, worked as a co-curator of Plateaux Festival in Warsaw dedicated to new media. Currently she works with several non-governmental organizations and institutions working in the field of art and culture, public space, local communities non-institutional education.

Lise Duclaux / Chris Straetling (BE/US)
Lise Duclaux lives and works in Brussels. Lise Duclaux interferes in our ways of being, of looking at and of understanding what surrounds us. The choice of the living is her starting material. She cultivates and looks daily at life and works at grasping its poetic and fragile dynamics. Writing, performance, typesetting, drawing, video, photography and gardening are her mediums. From one project to another, she recycles and adapts its features, her works are constantly changing feeding each other to create half-real “zones of poetic intention” annotated with literary quotations and diverted scientific information. In 2014 she created the Observatoire des simples et des fous (Observatory of the simple an the mad) in a field, ellipse of 845 sqare meters full of wild and medicinal plants with a chestnut tree in its center, adjacent to Le Carrosse, a home for adults with mental disabilities. An invitation to experience a longer period of time. Opened to the public in 2015, from April to October, accompanied by an artist's book and punctuated by workshops and lecture-performances.
Chris Straetling, Washington D.C. 1960, lives and works in Antwerp since 1986. After being engaged in the art strike call of 1991* Chris Straetling, occasional facilitator of alternative art spaces (inexistent, AK-37, Factor 44... currently Bureau Gruzemayer and it's interdependent dependencies) and user of multiple identities, has turned his attention progressively to participation-projects, collaborations and interventions with no specific relation to established art circles. Engaging in non-art and anonymous interventions (along with more classic formats) while also commenting and illustrating collaborative efforts of all kinds. After an attempt to engage in a long-term project by Lise Duclaux offering a measure of autonomy to the pumpkin family (prematurely abandoned due to the closure of the Herman Teirlinckhuis museum in Beersel in 2013) he has been enlisted as subjective documentalist in  her current work L'Observatoire des simples et des fous.
* see manifest art strike perpetuum mobile Ritter/Straetling/St. Auby (iput) 1991: http://www.sztaki.hu/providers/nightwatch/szocpol/stauby/tarlatvez/munkak/art-strike.html

http://home.scarlet.be/gruzemayer/

Saskia Sassen (NL/US)
Saskia Sassen is a sociologist and economist, known for her analyses of globalization and international human migration. She is Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology at Columbia University and Centennial visiting Professor at the London School of Economics. Her new book is Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy (Harvard University Press 2014) forthcoming in 2016 in both French (Gallimard) and Dutch (ACCO). Her books are translated into over 20 languages. She is the recipient of diverse awards and mentions, including multiple doctor honoris causa, named lectures, and being selected for various honors lists. Most recently she was awarded the Principe de Asturias 2013 Prize in the Social Sciences and made a member of the Royal Academy of Sciences of Netherland.
www.saskiasassen.com

Núria Güell (ES)
Núria Güell’s work reformulates and deals with the limits of legality, analyzes ethics practiced by the Institutions that govern us detecting abuses of power committed through the established legality and hegemonic morality. Flirting with the established powers, the art world privileges and the complicity with different allies, all of them are the resources on which Núria bases her artistic operations that, dissolved in her own life limits, are developed as disruptive tactics in specific contexts in order to subvert established power relationships. Her work has been exhibited in many places around the world.
http://www.nuriaguell.net

Jay Pather (ZA)
Jay Pather is Associate Professor at the University of Cape Town where he directs the Gordon Institute for Performing and Creative Arts (GIPCA). He is also Curator for Infecting the City Public Art Festivals and Artistic Director for Siwela Sonke Dance Theatre. He has collaborated with visual artists, architects and urban planners, since 1984, taking his inter-cultural performances into public spaces and working with the architecture of Johannesburg, Durban, London, Zanzibar, Amsterdam, New York, Barcelona, Mumbai, Muscat, New Delhi, Copenhagen and Cape Town. His recent works include Blind Spot, a city walk based on the experiences of immigrants. Recent festivals and conferences for 2014-2015 that Pather has convened include Infecting the City in Cape Town and Mbombela, the GIPCA Live Art Festival and Reimagining Place, a symposium on urbanism and public art practice.  In 2014 he was appointed as member of Jury for the International Award for Public Art.
http://infectingthecity.com

Foradelugar (ES)
Foradelugar is a company that works almost exclusively in unonventional spaces with multidisciplinary resources. Their practice questions the audience and its context. Far from conventional and rigid forms of theatre, they conceive spaces where they work differently in order to include and engage physical and human territory of the places where they are. Their projects can be participative and leave an important space for the imagination of those who take part in it.
http://foradelugar.com

Nimis Groupe (BE)
“For many years, actors of the Nimis Group sought to better understand the European migration policies. Gathered thanks to a European exchange program, the group notes that Europe funds and promotes meetings between member countries, while at the same it spends a lot of money to build barriers against the rest of the world. Eager to go to the borders of our societies to meet those that our Union excludes, we questionned social workers, activists, police officers, researchers, jurists. We attended a hearing at the Foreign Litigation Council. We have traveled to the borders of Europe. We went to visit a centre where we met asylum seekers awaiting a decision by the Immigration Department. Their need to say in public what they experience and the joy we shared together with them have sealed our determination to write a show with their collaboration. It is precisely because documentary researches have led the group to human encounters that theater began. Today, Europeans and asylum seekers together, we have been creating ‘Those I’ve met may have not seen me’, a theatre show we perform together in front of spectators, that may be or not citizens of the European Union. The tour of our show will be built upon the many partnerships that we have already planned to initiate with the ngo's milieu, open centers and theatres that will host us.”
http://www.nimisgroupe.com