[ecrea] Circulating Critical Practices conference

The Culture@Work network invites applications for the workshop



| Circulating Critical Practices  |




Barcelona, April 24-25, 2015


Deadline for applications: March 23, 2015





The first workshop organised by the Culture@Work network in Copenhagen 
identified a substantial background of critical practices. An entire 
range of activities loosely connected around academic, cultural and 
political platforms emerge as a powerful thread that challenges the 
actual institutional map. A new division of labor appears as a 
consequence of these transformations leading to an increasing 
circulation of critical practices. Beyond established university 
departments and cultural institutions, nowadays research demands an 
innovative model of organization that should be able to exploit 
collective and heterogeneous agents. Although most of these 
cross-disciplinary initiatives have been contemplated as being strategic 
and transitional, they deserve closer examination before they wither 
away or else get inscribed as new wings of old institutions.



This second workshop will focus on the mutating nature of critical 
practices in as much as they traverse institutions of all kinds as well 
as non-institutional spaces. The questions arising will tackle the 
paradoxes that riddle the economy of these practices –sometimes 
considered marginal and experimental– as they become integrated in the 
neoliberal framework. Their rapid assimilation raises doubts as to 
whether alternative and critical positions can be maintained at all. Is 
there any chance to expect an antagonistic structure in the sphere of 
cultural production? Location, temporality and genealogy are to be 
considered key features of those practices which are contingently 
referred as research, teaching, curating, activism and more generally 
speaking, outputs of the creative class. Thus, there is an urgent demand 
to identify the different forms of knowledge and capital that flow 
productively, simultaneously creating alliances and interrupting mutual 
instrumentalisation.



Special emphasis goes to the contextual analysis of cultural policies 
that more and more are left out of the state administration. In a 
changing scenario critical practices risk to be dissolved among the vast 
number of autonomous initiatives of the cultural field. At this 
particular moment we welcome reports and diagnoses on these 
transformative trends informed by cultural agents coming from different 
perspectives. We are interested in contributions either coming from the 
core of the creative process or from the mediating sphere in any of the 
disciplines. And we would like to take into account that the two venues 
chosen to host this conference, the Museum of Contemporary Art Barcelona 
MACBA and the Universitat de Barcelona UB, invite to consider the 
affective dimension that brings together institutions of all sizes and 
colors as well as cultural agents operating in a wide range of fields.


*

The conference is the second of two gatherings organised by the 
Culture@Work network, a joint European project aimed at gauging how 
contemporary culture is put to work in new contexts. The network is 
founded by the School of Human Sciences at the Catholic University of 
Portugal (The Lisbon Consortium) in collaboration with the Barcelona 
Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA) and the Department of Arts and 
Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. The Barcelona 
workshop is co-organized by MACBA and Universitat de Barcelona (UB) Art, 
Globalization, Interculturality / AGI Research group



*

The conference will feature public lectures and presentations by Maria 
Lind (Stockholm), Eyal Weizman (London), and Nanna Bonde Thylstrup 
(Copenhagen).

Program subject to changes.

On the second day of the conference, a number of parallel working groups 
will be organised on the backdrop of the input provided by the submitted 
proposals from the participants. The group sessions will be based on 
presentations and discussions, but will also involve an aspect of 
production, as the groups will present their findings in a final plenary 
discussion, paving way for a concluding debate.


Participants are invited to submit proposals for 20-minute contributions 
to the working groups on the second day of the conference. In addition 
to the traditional academic paper format, we welcome performative work, 
presentation of relevant material for discussion, screenings, etc. 
Please include a 300 word abstract of your contribution and a short 
description of your work when applying.


Submission deadline is March 23, 2015. For submissions and queries, send 
an email to (criticalpractices /at/ macba.cat)



There will be a limited number of EU sponsored grants for travel and 
accommodation costs for participants from the partner institutions, 
please indicate if you will also apply for the grant.



The workshop is co-funded by the Culture programme of the European Union.


For more information on the conference in Barcelona visit www.macba.cat 
and www.cultureatwork.eu.



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