SEMINAR DAY 2 : EVOLUTION

12·00 – 15·30 — Seminar Day 2 : EVOLUTION
Location: Tou Scene, Kvitsøygata 25

12·00 — Welcome and Introduction
By Pedro Soares Neves (PT), Lisbon Urban & Street Art Creativity

12.05-12:45 Trash Talk
Presentation by Carlo McCormick (US)

What do rats, Dada, wheat fields, the radical posturing of Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers, pink trash, fallen monuments, public shame and commodified space have in common? Carlo McCormick, legendary pop cultural critic and Nuart fellow takes us on a journey down the rabbit hole of cultural obscurity to shine a light on transgressive public art practice.

13:00-13:45 DIY Culture & New Utopia’s
Presentations by Adrian Burnham (UK), Pascal Feucher (DE) and Addam Yekutieli aka Know Hope (IL)

14:00-14.30 Panel debate: DIY Culture & New Utopia’s
Discussion led by: Carlo McCormick
Panel: Adrian Burnham, Pascal Feucher and Addam Yekutieli

14:45-16.05 Creating New Cultural Heritage and ‘Rights to the City’
Presentations by Laima Nomeikaite (PT), Javier Abarca (ES), Emma Arnold (CA) and Susan Hansen (UK)

Challenging the prevailing paradigm demands rights to the city and the resources to give citizens agency - resources currently locked into cultural heritage and public art budgets. This series of presentations will explore how intangible and ephemeral art practice can usurp and supplant the staus quo for the benefit of the many, not just the few.

Laima Nomeikaite: Street art as heritage: right to the city?

A presentation about the challenges and opportunities of framing street art as heritage. Referencing case studies of the preservation of Dolk and Banksy street artworks, Laima will present the challenges of formal heritage frameworks in ensuring rights to the city, and advocate for a performative approach to heritage. By using performative and experimental methodology, she will illustrate an alternative way to preserve and protect street artworks.

Javier Abarca: Street art, murals and power in public space

This talk looks into the intrinsic differences between unsanctioned street art and institutional murals from the point of view of power relations in public space. While murals are, in essence, part of the controlled environment imposed by architecture and advertising, street art is one of the scarce empowering tools for any city dweller to build their environment from the bottom up. But these roles can be upturned. On the one hand, street art is often recuperated by land speculators, guerrilla marketers and by the artists themselves, and transformed into a sales pitch that serves the established power, even posing as activism while directly exploiting the impoverished. On the other, some artists and arts administrators have come up with ways to detourn the rapidly growing mural machine and make it work in ways closer to the street level.

Emma Arnold: From rights to the city to a politics of the city: graffiti and street art during Québec’s printemps érable

Québec’s student uprising in the spring of 2012 – dubbed the ‘printemps érable’ or ‘Maple Spring’ – led to one of the largest acts of Canadian civil disobedience. Appropriating a small red square as its symbol, protesters symbolically painted the city of Montréal red with political graffiti and street art. Sharing photographs of the uprising taken during psychogeographic walks of the city; this talk reflects five years later on how enacting one’s rights to the city can lead to a politics of the city.

Susan Hansen: The right to write the city: breaking the law of untouchability

Street art is a form of democratic conversation not captured by conventional understandings of how art works. It provides a point of potential connection with others, and a sense of attachment within a potentially dehumanizing urban space. The fleeting moments when we are ‘arrested’ by work on the street may in turn afford the potential for ethical engagement and indeed the radical realization of one’s own right to write the city. While street art’s invitation to engage in the city’s ephemeral dialogue may be antithetical to traditional heritage frameworks, this presentation will address how this may fit within an understanding of street art as a living tradition, or "intangible cultural heritage".

16:05-16.30 Panel debate: Creating New Cultural Heritage and ‘Rights to the City’
Discussion led by: Susan Hansen
Panel: Laima Nomeikaite, Javier Abarca and Emma Arnold

• PROGRAM 2019
• PROGRAM 2018
• PROGRAM 2017
• PROGRAM 2016
• PROGRAM 2015
• PROGRAM 2014
• PROGRAM 2013
• PROGRAM 2012