HOW TO MAKE EUROPE DREAM?
A CULTURAL CONGRESS
Chelsea College of Art and Design, London
Saturday 15th and Sunday 16th March 2008
In association with Allianz Kulturstiftung and Chelsea “Critical Practice” group.
Agenda of the Congress
Saturday 15th March : Transnationalism in the Arts
Introduction: How to make Europe dream?
The Congress will open with an address delivered by European Alternatives on the importance of renewing the arts and literature in Europe and the inspiration artists and writers may find in the field of European futures.
Afternoon Workshops
What are the implications for the arts, literature and music of thinking beyond national boundaries? What are the relationships between universalism, europeanism and transnationalism in the arts?
Workshop 1: Language, point of view, audience, overture:
Who is the audience of the European artist? Are the European arts cosmopolitan, and what does this mean? What are the implications of multilingual and multicultural communities in Europe for the writer, the artist, the musician, the cineaste? Must the writer think beyond any particular language? The artist beyond any particular point of view?
Workshop 2: The tradition and the future
To borrow an image from Valery, what questions does the European Hamlet now ask the skulls of Europe’s most famous artists? What answer does he expect? Does he still know his way around the cemetery, or has its geography changed? Is the future of the arts in Europe revolutionary aiming create everything new, or does it speak from the ghosts of tradition?
Evening debate: Dreaming of Europe in the Arts
Hans Ulrich Obrist will chair a public discussion with several invited artists, writers and musicians on the implication of ‘Europe’ in their work.
Sunday 16th March: European Engagement in the Arts
The second day of the congress turns towards the question of political engagement in the arts: what is it to be an engaged European artist? Has the meaning of engagement changed in Europe since Sartre’s employment of the term?
Workshop 1: Aesthetics and politics: what does engagement mean in Europe?
This theoretical discussion will ask what the consequences of resituating thde arts in the new European and trans-national political context are. Has the meaning of political engagement changed in the arts along with changing political paradigms? In a context of global causes and local effects, can the artist achieve what the politician can’t, and show ‘the whole world in a grain of sand?’
Workshop 2: European Action and the Arts
Does European politics offer particular opportunities for collaboration between cultural practitioners and political actors? Might a strong cultural engagement with the reality and future of Europe lead to a radically re-conceptualised understanding of the unification project? What is the potential nature of this collaboration, and how to avoid instrumentalism of the arts?
Workshop 3: technology and the arts: the future of the European spirit
Coordinated by Critical Practice Research Group, Chelsea College of Art and Design
Following Bernard Stiegler’s opening lecture to the London Festival of Europe, how do new technologies of communication implicate the European spirit? Is there a ‘symbolic misery’ in Europe? Is there a need for a collaboration between artists, programmers and politicians to create a new European way of life based on the artistic use of new means of communication?
Evening public debate: Towards a European Cultural Avant-Garde
As a conclusion to the congress the theoretical basis for the construction of a European cultural avant-garde is publicly debated.
Including the participation of Gianni Vattimo and two other participants from the cultural congress.
Towards a Cultural Congress
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