WHAT COULD/SHOULD CURATING DO?—WCSCD was established as an educational platform in 2018 around notions of care. From 2023 we will further institute WCSCD exploring what it means for an art institution to become custodian of the land while working towards an economically and ecologically sustainable future. We prioritize long-term ways of working together, based on equal sharing of resources, creating conditions for equal participation within economically uneven contexts.
Cross-border/international
Serbia
Serbia
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Serbia, Belgrade and Sumadija region, council of countryside G. Gorevnica, City of Cacak
It addresses urban-rural linkages
It refers to other types of transformations (soft investment)
No
No
Yes
As a representative of an organisation
Name of the organisation(s): Civic Association What Could Should Curating Do Type of organisation: Non-profit organisation First name of representative: Biljana Last name of representative: Ciric Gender: Female Nationality: Serbia Function: founding director Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Strahinjica Bana 66a street 2nd floor Town: Belgrade Postal code: 11000 Country: Serbia Direct Tel:+381 63 8968674 E-mail:what.could.curating.do@gmail.com Website:https://wcscd.com/
URL:https://www.facebook.com/whatcscdo/ Social media handle and associated hashtag(s): https://www.instagram.com/whatcouldshouldcuratingdo/?hl=en
Yes
New European Bauhaus or European Commission websites
From 2023 WCSD will become the custodian of a piece of land in central Serbia and we will open this process of thinking and practicing what this gesture means through 2 years of activities: an educational program. situated research, new commissions, and work with communities. We are aiming that this will be an open and collective learning process.
The first phase of the project in 2023 will be implemented through an educational program for young practitioners. It will include orientation activities with the team including an introduction to the space and the context. The education program will be held for 2 months in fall 2023 and in spring 2024. It will be open to artists, curators, farmers, sociologists, anthropologists, architects and other cultural workers.
The main objective of the first phase is research into the heritage and current uses of local eco-cultural productions. This will be followed by a range of introductions and meetings with a variety of local actors, who will be able to support this research. The first stage of the project will be creating relational and physical infrastructure within the village.
Relational infrastructure 1. Research on ancestral knowledge in the region with a focus on relationships to land in the central part of Serbia and more than human world, ways of collective production within the community, and how that intergenerational knowledge can be an active part of our knowledge structure ( interview with elders as well as archive research). 2 Historical research and mapping practices of cultural workers who have been developing a relationship with rural as the internal part of the work.
Physical Infrastructure: together with architects Jelica Jovanovic and Sergio Montero Bravo we will build a structure where program participants can stay in the village as well as where workshops can be held and community hosted. The use of local materials as well as the engaged community in the productions will be one of the aims.
education
sustainability
land /rural
relationality
agriculture
The expected outcomes are gaining significant insight into the key questions and challenges facing the community and coming up with a proposal for a beneficial intervention. During the educational program, we will identify an area of interest, which reflects an understanding of existing resources, traditional knowledge that will generate an idea on how to transform this knowledge into a work that rethinks land and resources to support the creation of new economic forms.
Building of physical Infrastructure-We are aiming at a simple and low-cost structure that rethinks our relationship to environment and community where program participants can stay in the village as well as where workshops can be held and community hosted.
The activities during different stages of the educational program will include an introduction to the local context, field trips, presentations, knowledge exchange workshops, collective cooking and making workshops, and a feedback forum. This will culminate in the external aspect of this work- a public event, where the project and work of the participants is presented to the local community in the village. One public event in the format of an open forum with partners and community members will be planned in Belgrade introducing contexts and projects to cultural workers. The open forum will be organized in collaboration with the Museum of Yugoslavia. The expected output of the open forum is a presentation of the project and its aims to a broad arts-interested audience, as well as public discussion about the role of art in rural area. This talk will also be recorded and shared via the website to introduce audiences unable to attend the event to the project.
Through long-term engagement we aim to reclaim various knowledge regarding rural, fusing it with cultural imagination, in order to collectively create new ways of approaching social, cultural, and ecological systems
Carrying for land as carrying for culture is a collective gesture that will be practiced through slow modes of working based on proximity to land and people who live in the village. We are hoping to bring aspects of art practice as part of every day and be together where mutual interconnectedness is practiced. That interconnectedness is based on horizontality and openness to share our vulnerabilities but also dare to imagine our possible common futures. Throughout our activities we are hoping to empower communities acknowledging that they have knowledge that is valued and should become an active part of the contemporary knowledge structure. We also understand the importance of sharing physical space together and we are hoping that physical structures built on the land will also play important part in sharing space and ideas in close proximity.
The education program and all activities will be public and free of charge. We will balance presence within the rural and urban bridging the gap between the two accommodating presence of rural discourse and inquiries we develop in the urban setting, but also decentralizing contemporary art practice relocating ourselves in rural . We hope that the work of our partner and what we are trying to achieve is the basis for rethinking the dualism between nature and culture, urban and rural.
We offer inclusive space for the research and practice of artists, curators, cultural practitioners, farmers and specialists and nonspecialists from different disciplines. The knowledge generated through encounters will be shared in different formats is public talks, meals, walks, symposiums, workshops and publications.
We will also pay special attention to ways of dissemination
Besides sharing the project progress through the website and via WCSCD social media channels the communications manager will pay particular attention to disseminating this information to the target groups online. Special strategies and formats will be implemented to reach out to local communities and different age groups ( printing in Serbian, local radio collaboration, local school etc)
The work will be promoted with the support of the local county council to create a targeted press campaign for local newspapers and interest groups both in print and online in the Serbian language.
A series of flyers announcing the events will be disseminated in the county as well as promotion of the resulting podcast noting audience responses on local radio.
Publication at the end in Serbian and English will collect research together for the first stage of the project.
Serbia after Second World War witnessed a decline in agricultural activities from 3/4 of the population to today one-sixth of population engaged in agriculture. Central Serbia, known as fertile region for agriculture where the plot of land is situated, witnessed a decline in farmers activities due to depopulation of villages caused by devaluation of land and activities on it, as well as, climate change that in recent years caused long droughts and lack of food supplies for animals. The political right wing has been using these ecological crises for its own political purposes further alienating village communities from the rest of the country using them for their political causes manipulating nationalistic narratives.
We are aiming to learn from local knowledge that elders have and have it become an active part of our educational program. We engage in research on ancestral knowledge in the region with a focus on relationships to land in the central part of Serbia and more than the human world, ways of collective production within the community, and how that intergenerational knowledge can be an active part of our knowledge structure. We will develop relations and long-term engagement within the village community as well as their different ways of engagement as part of educational programs.
Village population decline has also been an ongoing problem as many young people don't see a future in agricultural activities. We are hoping through different public workshops that we plan to organize in the community to encourage youth to think about villages as an active part of their future and where different futures can be made that are economically and ecologically sustainable. In particular, we will work to engage those members involved in the initial research phase, groups of young people, who we hope will be the legacy for this new work, and local businesses, development agencies, and investors, who will support the continuation
This research phase in 2023 will be continued in 2024 with strong educational component bringing good practices from Europe that have been developing solutions for more sustainable production of knowledge making rural part of the discourse and practice: Inland ( Madrid, Spain), Casa delle Agriculture ( Puglia region, Italy), Green Network of Activist groups ( Zagreb, Croatia). Partners engaged in the inquiry have created economically, ecologically, and relationally sustainable ecosystems and ways of working together that we are hoping to learn with. They will be engaged in the program through mentoring sessions in formats of workshops as well as collective engagement with different communities in the village. Learning from peers with comparable and different experiences is something of particular interest. We are keen to learn from invited partners about new economic models for organizations working with environmentally regenerative aims. Through participation our partners will be also able to learn about situated knowledge that this part of the world holds in relation to land. Research-based commissions activating local knowledge through ongoing long-term research will be done by colleagues Milica Bilatovic ( artist currently based in Tuzla, Jelica Jovanovic ( architect Belgrade) and Sergio Montero Bravo ( architect, Stockholm), Stealth Unlimited ( artistic collective Belgrade/Rotterdam). They have been engaged in the project due to their already extensive practice related to sustainability.
Participants of educational program will benefit from the program gaining historical knowledge in the region through research, and learn understanding of different practices from Europe that provide alternatives to the mainstream institutional art system. They will be also able to gain embodied knowledge through different workshops in the village.
The local community will be engaged through local council, neighbors, and personal connections that we will start developing.
Partners engaged in the inquiry have created economically, ecologically, and relationally sustainable ecosystems and ways of working together that we are hoping to learn with. They will be engaged in the program through mentoring sessions in formats of workshops as well as collective engagement with different communities in the village. We believe that building long-lasting alliances with invited partners will be of great support to WCSCD. Learning from peers with comparable and different experiences is something of particular interest. We are keen to learn from invited partners about new economic models for organizations working with environmentally regenerative aims. Partners through their engagement will share on different levels to different communities their experience confronting problems of a collapsing environment on a cultural and financial level and what work they do on daily bases through creating the collaborative and holistic models for living otherwise. Their work merges agrarian and artistic production affecting agrarian and cultural policies in their local and regional contexts as well as Europe( for example Inland advises the EU on the use of art for rural development policies while facilitating shepherds’ and nomadic peoples’ movements)
We will work on the intersection of knowledge from art, culture, agrarian knowledge, economy, ecology, and modes of collectivizing, to long-term policy-changing initiatives and its implementations.
The research phase plans to explore different ways of inhabiting and interacting with the biosphere, through mechanisms of education, commissions, community engagement, engaging artists, curators, local youths, farmers in the process.
The initiative is tempting to revitalize the relationship between village and land as part of contemporary culture acknowledging our own interconnectedness with humans and more than the human world. For that to happen we need to reinstate cultural practices and knowledge as cultural responsibility where we understand carrying for land as carrying for culture, as well as carrying for the life and livelihood of humans and more than the human world.
Decolonizing our usually extractivist relationship to land, through education as direct intellectual and bodily engagement, we are opening gaps to think together about what our possible future can be.
Long term intention is that this work would have a practical implication for us and the local community in terms of new models of land use and economic models.
We believe that building alliances, and creating space to learn from each other is of tremendous support for our transition. The facilitation of research visits between places, and learning from peers with comparable and different experiences is very important. Offering people alternatives to the current formal learning systems, allowing people from all walks of life to engage with new ways of thinking about creativity and ways to support and nourish the environment.
We practice situated slow modes of working. Process-based learning that would bring long-term impact rather than short-time events is the methodology that we implement. Through the learning process, we are acknowledging the collective effort of different people engaged in a struggle creating different forms of knowledge as part of active citations on how to live and practice in a damaged world. We depart from decolonial thinking and practicing within arts, learning how to listen, and practice different modes of relationality as well as new working methodologies. We learn, teach each other and experiment with collective practices that reflect on ownership, governance, environment, technique, discrimination, attention, and knowledge, and contribute to building a more diverse and sustainable society. We are committed to eco-feminist ethics of practice acknowledging that we are all interconnected and interdependent in the world and that denial of relationship led us centuries into extraction and colonialism as an outcome of patriarchy.
The transition of our societies from extracting life towards more sustainable living lies in going beyond the dualism of nature/culture, urban and rural creating conditions for local economies, and resilient communities on the basis of different relationality. Globally we are turning to different knowledges that survived the impact of colonization, displacement, and brutal natural conditions. We are learning about their resilience, and ability to observe, adapt, and sustain use and manage natural resources deeply rooted in relationship to that very environment.
Rolando Vasquez reminds us that the decolonizing process starts with questions about what is your relation to colonial differences. This question should be asked throughout different fields including art and culture. As cultural workers, we need to contribute with our way of practicing in this process that is long and will take us generations to unlearn.
Local situated micro process of decolonization is a contribution to that change and we are starting with that.
In Fall 2022 for three months as part of the educational program, we explored possible working methodologies related to commons, sharing resources, and working with marginal communities. Some of the partners have already visited Serbia and did workshops through the educational programs in 2022 making a very important base to continue conversation and work together.
March 2023 open call for educational program to go public
End of April select participants for the educational program
March 2023 introduce the project to local community and municipality
March 2023 start local research on ancestral knowledge through archive and interview
March 2023 architects to define solution
April define materials and people needed for construction
May start building process
May announce project as well as program participants
June to end of august preparation for the program in September in the village together with partners and program participants
September 5th start of the educational program
September 10th to 20th mapping of existing practices in rural and interviews
September 20th to October 5th workshops in the village
October first week discussion in local community
October 15th public forum in Belgrade introducing the project and initiative as long-term strategy
by October 30th through a series of workshops to generate guidelines for further engagements in 2024 and onwards together with the community, partners and program participant
spring 2024 produce the publication
spring 2023 last set of workshops
The second stage of the inquiry from spring 2024 will be working on clear guidelines for sustainability and along-term plan creating steps how they would be developed together with communities, partners, and educational program participants.
The final step in 2025 will be the implementation of guidelines with a reminder that they stay dynamic. All steps will be followed by different public events.
We are committed to education as a crucial aspect of sustainability. These aspects of education include empowering and educating others but also educating ourselves towards more sustainable practices across different fields. We are committed to practicing this learning process as a form of life.
Canadian indigenous Donald Dwayne reminds us that issues of climate change and sustainability are not problems that science and technology can solve. They are cultural and spiritual problems. We can change things, not by telling people what they should do but by changing the way they live. The way we live.
