Care in Action / L'art de faire attention

Care in Action
-
L'art de faire Attention

 

a Sticki-Wiki installation
at
Art in Action

11-15 nov

Concordia 

Hall Building 7th floor

by Pascale Brunet and Anne Goldenberg

The Stickywiki (also known as ourcollnectiveminds) is a three dimensional wiki, which has travelled the world for art-science festivals and a few conferences, looking for hands to make sense of a conceptual framework. The installation consists of a giant cube, made of bamboo pieces, allowing participants to hang concepts on hanging pieces. It invites participants to play and build together, their representation of a corpus of data, to experiment with collective and discursive thinking. Our hypothesis is that devices and discourses can represent a silently consensual practice (reinforcing the determination of the structures or of those who would talk a lot) whereas some others do the contrary, pushing forward argumentative thinking and a critical mind (including justification, explanation and negotiation). 

For ART IN ACTION, we would like to propose an installation dealing with care and Activism, untitled CARE IN ACTION. The installation will stand into a 2x2x2 meters bamboo cube allowing the participants to enter it and circulate around it. The participants will be invited to use the cube to hang concepts representing the relation between care (self care, mutual care, collective care) and activism, based on their own experience. Close to the cube of exhibition, participants will have access to a semi private space (the cocoon), to think and craft in a confortable environement. We will provide the participants with three types of material : 

• red wool: to create links. to network concepts and to tie social links to.
• recycled flyers and other kinds of artefact, remembering of political actions. 
• white clothes (scissors and pen) to draw and write concepts on. 

This project reflects an attention that was given, during the maple spring, to care issues. It also talks about the social links that we have weaven in that period of political engagement and the actions we took together. It is finally a proposal to consider that care, in action and in activist circles, is a political stand in it self. We tend to disconnect what's political and what's emotional, but they are interconnected, we are interconnected. Our installation will try to reprensent in 3d those preocupation, while offering to the participant a moment and a space to reflect on those issues. The walk towards social justice is long, we need to make sure that while we're radicaly transformaing society, we're also building sustainable communities. 

About the Artists: 

Pascale Brunet nourishes a fascination for the interaction between art and social movement, popular education and poetics politics. She is social knitter and tries to open spaces where we can weave the social fabric that holds us together. She's involved in different social justice, queer, feminist and anti-oppression project while studying visual and media arts at UQAM. She is a member of the feminist art center La Centrale. She is active in the project www.cecinestpasunepub.net 

Anne Goldenberg is interested in the political, epistemic and poetic aspects of collaborative platforms and participative devices. She has a PhD in Communication (UQAM, Montreal) and in Sociology (Unice, Nice) and wrote her thesis on "The Negotiation of Contributions in Public Wikis". This theoretical work led her to observe the poetics of collective contributions through various forms – multimedia, social sculpture, performance and installation. Inspired by free culture, she mostly explores the relationships between digital material, participative devices, the public and collective action. She facilitates open spaces and booksprints, and likes to make visible, readable and malleable the processes of co-construction of knowledge. She teachs and works as a researcher at UQAM. As an artist, she is an improvisation dance performer http://goldjian.info/ and has been working with the stickywiki (aka ourcollnnective minds) since 3 years.