NEW THEATRE INSTITUTE OF LATVIA

contemporary performing arts in Latvia and abroad

100% CITY
International Forum on active creative practices and forms of living, experiencing and making the city

December 5–6, 2014, at Ģertrūdes ielas teātris, Ģertrūdes iela 101a
Working language: English
Free entrance, registration required
Please register by sending your name, field of professional work or studies, email, phone number, and attendance dates to gundega@theatre.lv
Phone: +37167228477, +37126516665

The event is organized by the New Theatre Institute of Latvia in close collaboration with Global City-Local City (theatrefit.org) partners and design platform for creative industries in Latvia FOLD (fold.lv). The Forum is an event of Riga – European Capital of Culture supported by the EU programme “Culture”, Culture Capital Foundation of Latvia, Ministry of Culture, Ministry of Economics.

For the past two and a half years, the Global City — Local City project, organised by 10 international festivals, has been focusing on cities and local implications of global processes in particular. An international group of artists looked inside the vibrant outskirts, conflict zones, allotment gardens, immigrant ghettos, and even family homes to examine local issues that can always be traced back to a wider social, political and economic context. They have responded to these issues with city–specific, custom–made artwork. They have been working closely with local residents, learning from their knowledge and keeping a global perspective in mind. It is no surprise that this experience made them to become an activist, an advocate of something they have found vulnerable, valuable or simply fascinating.

100% City will conclude the Global City — Local City project, and will bring together proactive professionals from different sectors who have made a deliberate transition from criticizing to suggesting solutions. The Forum will focus on active creative practices and forms of living, experiencing and making the city, and will discuss the effects of different unique and continuous activities, issues related to public space and impact of globalization on various local phenomena.

During the two days two approaches will be discussed and presented: the ‘constructive one’ represented by urban planners, designers, architects, who come up with long-term initiatives and try to implement them more or less legally, and the ‘destructive one’ when artists, activists, communities change the city and make a difference by destroying the established order of things by sudden, unexpected and surprising actions and interventions.

During the Forum days we offer city-specific artistic programme: participatory performance ‘100% Riga’ by Rimini Protokoll (Berlin), video installation ‘Garden Affairs’ by Katrīna Neiburga (Riga) and Christina Umpfenbach (Munich) and site-specific participatory performance ‘Cinema Imaginaire’ by Lotte van den Berg (Utrecht).

PROGRAMME

Friday, December 5

Registration from 9:30

10:00 – 10:45
Keynote
Matthew Passmore (San Francisco)
In his keynote Passmore will discuss the social, spatial and political implications of the new tactics of cities and citizens in crafting public spaces.
Matthew Passmore is an artist, teacher and pioneering public space advocate. Best known as the original founder of the Rebar Art & Design Studio, Matthew has generated the concept for many well-known public art projects, including PARK(ing) Day, an annual global art event he has led since 2007, and the PARKcycle, the world’s first pedal-powered public park. In 2014, Matthew founded MoreLab, a creative endeavour focused specifically on developing innovative public art, museum exhibitions and public spaces. Recent projects include the Latham Square Pilot Plaza, a temporary plaza in downtown Oakland and Urbanauts, an 18-month long artist fellowship and urban exploration project at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. Matthew speaks globally on topics of contemporary art and participatory design, most recently at TEDx in Vienna, Austria and d.Talks in Calgary, Alberta. He has taught a wide variety of courses at the San Francisco Art Institute and the California College of the Arts (CCA).
morelab.com
rebargroup.com
parkingday.org

10:45 – 13:30 (incl. coffee break)
Presentation of visionary and real practices of making a good city

Marten Kaevats (Tallinn)
Marten Kaevats is an architect and city planner who studies the impact of various scalable technologies on the spatial behaviour of individual people and communities, as he believes that the subject field and field of impact of the third industrial revolution and the hyperlocal model of life create already today – but in near future even more – reformatory changes to the spatial and social behaviour of people. Marten is also an active member of several civil society organisations. He has been one of the founding members of the Uue Maailma Selts (New World Society) in 2007 and contributed to the creation of freeware community web platform Community Tools, established in 2008. Recently he was chosen to be the curator of the TAB 2015 – Tallinn Architecture Biennale “Self-driven city”.
uusmaailm.ee

Evelīna Ozola and Toms Kokins (Riga)
Evelīna Ozola has worked as an architect and urban designer at MADE arhitekti in Riga and SVESMI in Rotterdam. Next to design work, for the last 7 years Evelina has been writing about architecture and cities or online and printed media, and currently she is the editor of FOLD, an online platform for creative industries in Latvia. Evelina is a lecturer at RISEBA Faculty of Architecture and Design.
Architect and urbanist Toms Kokins has established himself as a defender of public space and bicycle culture in Latvia, as well as the author of inventive small scale architecture, such as the modular house Osis. He has recently completed the Cycling Transport Development Strategy for Riga, therefore dubbed by the press ‘the father of Riga’s cycling lanes’. Toms is a lecturer at Riga Technical University.
Together Evelīna and Toms run their studio Fine Young Urbanists and organise the annual Riga Technical University International Summer School. Their most recent project is a 1:1 scale model of a more liveable street space on Miera Street in Riga.
fineyoungurbanists.tumblr.com
fold.lv

Ania Molenda and Cristina Ampatzidou (Rotterdam)
Ania Molenda is a Rotterdam-based independent researcher and curator. Her work to date has spanned academia, an experimental think-tank (The Why Factory, TU Delft, Faculty of Architecture) and the architectural practice (MVRDV, Powerhouse Company, SVESMI). She is interested in cross-fertilisation between spatial practices with other disciplines and the role openness and communication play in spatial, cultural and technological realms.
Cristina Ampatzidou is an independent researcher and writer, currently affiliated with UvA and a regular contributor to Uncube and Bettery magazines. Among others, she has collaborated with Play the City! foundation and the AFFR. Her work investigates the affordances of new media for ‘city making’ and the changing roles of professional designers, policy makers and citizens in that process.
They both run Amateur Cities, an online platform for emerging urban processes and a yearly magazine.
amateurcities.com
ruimtevolk.nl/stad-wijken/naturally-amateurs

Followed by discussion, moderator Evelīna Ozola

13:30 – 14:30 Lunch break

14:30 – 17:30
INSIDE/OUTSIDE
Presentation of the city-related artwork that blends urgent social, political and city-specific issues by Enrico Casagrande and Daniela Nicolò / Motus (Rimini)
Motus was founded in 1991 by Enrico Casagrande and Daniela Nicolò. Motus has always sculpted its projects by action and reaction with regard to everyday facts large and small, like litmus paper, feeding on the contradictions of the contemporary, translating them and making them active material for reflection and provocation. The company independently produces numerous theatre shows and space-specific events/happenings conceived for unusual venues. For Motus there are no borders, no frontiers between countries or eras or disciplines, and no separation of art from involvement in society. Freethinkers, who have performed all over the world, Motus blends different expressive forms together, driven by the urgency to tackle subjects, conflicts, topical wounds.
motusonline.com

Followed by discussion. Moderator Kaspars Vanags

Saturday, December 6

10:00 – 11:00
Keynotes
Matjaž Uršič (Ljubljana)
In his lecture Uršič will analyse relationship of public art and urban space from the perspective of various city users.
Matjaž Uršič is a researcher at the University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Social Sciences. He is a member of the Centre for Spatial Sociology. His research interests focus on the processes of socio-cultural transformation of cities and contemporary urban phenomena in the circumstances of globalization. Important research interests also include society development, cultural geography, analysis of (sub)cultures, urban migration and spatial systems with particular reference to transformations due to processes of urban regeneration, revitalization and renovation.

Kaspars Vanags (Berlin / Riga)
Art curator and writer Kaspars Vanags will give an overview of various artistic intervention practices in public space.
Kaspars Vanags (1970) is a Berlin based curator and art writer from Latvia. Back in the 90s together with like-minded culture activists he founded art production company Open, and organised interdisciplinary events where visual arts were mixed with electronic music in the framework of newly established club culture movement (Open, 1995, Biosport, 1996, Aktuelle Tanzen, 1997, Party Animals / Animal Farm, 2001). He has curated some of the first socially and politically engaged art projects in post-soviet Latvia, turning against or promoting alternatives to consumer culture and institutionalised art world (Slideshows, 2000, T-shroom, 2000, Subversion in the City Space, 2001). He later turned to the studies of art history, gaining MA degree cum laude at Courtauld Institute of Art, London. Lately, he has collaborated on international art exhibition projects with Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), Kromme Gallery (Berlin), ibid.projects (London). He is the curator of Latvian Pavilion at 56th Venice Art Biennale in 2015.

12:00 – 13:30
Unauthorised art and activism in public space / part I

António Brito Guterres (Lisbon)
António Brito Guterres graduated Urban Studies (ISCTE – IUL). Before he studied Social Work and his graduation thesis looked at social and cultural impacts of rehousing policies. He is a member of Dinamia´CET and has participated in various territorial development projects. Antonio has been Director of Critical Urban Areas Initiative – Vale da Amoreira Operation, and coordinator of the Performance & Arts Center in the same neighbourhood. Currently he works for the Aga Khan Foundation Portugal with issues such as participation, governance, education, youngsters, diversity and pluralism. He also takes part in URB – development of TV series about the diversity and imaginarium of Greater Lisbon daily life. He has been working as a freelancer and volunteer with grassroots organizations and informal groups in neighbourhoods all around Lisbon Metropolitan Area. He is often invited to give lectures on participation, urban regeneration, gentrification, commons and about the role of arts and culture in urban development. Antonio is a member of the International Network for Urban Research and Action.

Bani Brusadin (Barcelona)
Bani Brusadin is a freelance producer and researcher in the troubled water where art, digital technologies, popular cultures and politics clash. In the last decade he has been involved in several art, activist and research projects, exploring the power of fake, improper identities and new forms of subcultural epics. In 2004 he co-founded The Influencers, a small cult festival about non conventional forms of art and communication.
theinfluencers.org

13:30 – 14:30 Lunch break

14:30 – 16:30
Unauthorised art and activism in public space / part II

Luca Chiaudano (Milan)
Torre Galfa is a 31-story high-rise from the 1950s that stands in the middle of Milan. On May 5, 2012 the building (empty since 1997) became the site of the Europe’s largest occupation: ‘Macao’. Far from being an isolated case, this occupation belongs to a network, comprising Cinema Palazzo and Teatro Valle Occupato in Roma, Sale Docs in Venice among others. Macao was intended to provide a space for cultural expression, as well as an answer to the heavy budget cuts that all governments have been imposing on cultural activities over the past years. It is a response to a story that too often has seen the city ravaged by public procurement professionals, unscrupulous building permits, in a neo-liberal logic that has always humiliated the inhabitants and pursued a single goal: the profit of few excluding the many. Luca Chiaudano is a film maker and activist, who has been part of Macao movement since its beginning.
macaomilano.org

John Jordan (UK/France) via skype
John Jordan is co-founder of The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination (Lab of ii) that merges art and life, creativity and resistance, proposition and opposition. Known for touring the UK recruiting a rebel clown army, running courses in postcapitalist culture, initiating global action Reclaim the Streets, throwing snowballs at bankers, turning hundreds of abandoned bikes into machines of disobedience and launching a rebel raft regatta to shut down a coal fired power station; they treat insurrection as an art and art as a means of preparing for the coming insurrection.
labofii.net

Followed by discussion. Moderator Zane Kreicberga

16:30 – 17:00
Documentary about Lucavsala allotment gardens. Director Jaak Kilmi (Estonia, 2014)

 

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