"Space&Place" and "LAND2" get it on

Look what took place in June! Summer studio about art, geography and re-placement... right up my alley.

Space&Place is hosting a summer studio with LAND2, a U.K. visual arts network, to begin a dialogue about creative/research practice and to explore the possibilities of an international partnership.

Space&Place (click here for bibliographies etc) is an interdisciplinary, intellectual and creative collaborative begun in 1999 by Drs. Sonja Kuftinec (Theatre Arts and Dance), Jani Scandura (English) and Karen Till (Geography), and, since 2004, co-directed with Dr. Margaret Werry (Theatre Arts and Dance). We have become a vital interdisciplinary and experimental forum that bridges the methods, concerns, theories and practices of the Humanities, Performing Arts and Social Sciences, bringing faculty and postgraduates in conversation across the University.

LAND2 (wow, very cool group!) is a creative practice-led national research network of faculty, artists, and research students started in 2002 by Dr. Iain Biggs (Reader in Visual Art Practice, Bristol School of Art Media and Design, University of West England (UWE)) and Dr. Judith Tucker (Lecturer in the School of Design, University of Leeds); currently, artist Dr. Ruth Jones is an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Fellow (Appendices II and III). Members share a common interest in how art can engage with the possibilities and problems associated with landscape, place, and space, as they are understood today.

"The main focus of the studio will be presentations of works in progress that will refer to participants’ self-understanding of their location, positionality and social situation, and of how their various geographies may have framed their theoretical understandings and practice-based deployments of place, matter and memory..."

"To begin the summer studio, we reframe questions both groups have explored in recent years: Why, how and when does memory matter? What is the matter of memory? How do people negotiate the temporal and spatial landscapes of becoming and being subjects in and through memory and forgetting? How do we think about, represent and respond to a modernity seeped in the oldness of its newness? Although intellectuals and artists have interrogated these questions in recent years, few institutional spaces foster translocal intellectual and creative projects that interrogate the very terms that divide them: place, space and memory. The main focus of the studio will be presentations of works in progress that will also refer to participants’ self-understanding of their location, positionality and social situation, and of how their various geographies may have framed their theoretical understandings and practice-based deployments of place, matter and memory. By initiating, articulating and discussing the similarities and differences related to participants’ current practice, work and locations, the studio will also seek to create “re-placements” as a basis for further work in an international context."

Love it.

R