<nettime-ann> Participate! DESIGN-AND-BUILD ARTIST VILLAGE

[Africoae Africoae <africoae@gmail.com>]

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Dear Colleague,

Greetings! Thank you for your interest in the 2009 Kumasi symposium,
and I hope you are enabled to make it. Attached to your attention is
an announcement about our DESIGN-AND-BUILD ARTIST VILLAGE project. It
is the 2010 project, more elaborate than this year's- that is why we
want to start as soon as possible. We are looking to put together an
International Artistic Committee and the project Manger who knows
about fundraising, at this time would be as volunteers. We ask that
you please spread this message to those in your circle of contacts who
may be (or know someone who may be) interested.

Thank you in anticipation of your attention. And see you in Ghana,
this or the next year.

Barthosa Nkurumeh, AfriCOAE General Secretary
(Artist and Educator, ILAC- College of Education, University of Oklahoma)
Project Web sites: http://afropoets.tripod.com/eta,
http://www.focusonthearts.org



Participate! DESIGN-AND-BUILD ARTIST VILLAGE

PROJECT: DESIGN-AND-BUILD EARTH ART/ARCHITECTURE CHALLENGE
WEB SITE: http://www.focusonthearts.org, http://afropoets.tripod.com/eta

Project takes in the theoretical frame of the text, “Architecture for
the Poor: An Experiment in Rural Egypt” by a known Egyptian architect,
Hasan Fathy. Fathy puts forward that an informed person can, in fact,
self-build durable, aesthetic and highly functional buildings without
using expensive materials (Fathy, 2000). Along these lines, we are
developing a model artist village in Ghana for replication in other
parts of Africa. For the locals, it will mean a resolution to the
age-old problem for artists, painters, sculptors, dancers, musicians
and others who require low-cost and expanse of space in which to live
and work; and for persons in the arts from around the world, it will
be a contact point for artist-in-residence for community-based arts
projects. Some 50 and 500-1000 acres have been speculated in rural
parts of Ghana, as are in Uganda, Cameroon and Botswana.

The project is a design-and-build Earth Art/ Architecture Challenge,
in which creative thinkers and technical specialists in the visual
arts, architecture and engineering from sub-Sahara Africa and other
parts of the world will work together for a period of time to
design-and-build dwellings or non-dwelling earthworks out of earth and
other materials from the environment, which will be attended by many
visitors. The challenge is open to traditional and modern construction
methods, and experimental approaches and sustainable solutions such as
mud bricks, terracrete, laterized concrete, compressed earth, rammed
earth, hydraform and other best practices out there that may work in
this region of the world.

If interested in participating or facilitating the project or wish to
suggest a resource person, please e-mail to africoae@gmail.com.
Additional information on the project will be upon request.





(Current Event)
*CALL FOR ARTISTS*
One means of Tapping Local Resources for Sustainable Education through Art
is by bringing together specialists form diverse parts of the world in a
trans-national platform for inter-trading of cultural and knowledge capital
in evidence-based society. In the Kumasi Curio Kiosks Project, the trade of
intellectual capital from the specialist to the generalist requires both the
sharing of existing and onward replication of the modules of knowledge that
may accrue. Interestingly, the specialist participant will create a Curio
Kiosk of 6 x 6ft for a temporary exhibition/stock of works by the
specialist, and relevant other national cultural/intellectual capital for
trading with the locals. The 6 x 6ft kiosk can be conceived as a mental
space or a constructed physical space with any material, constructed on site
or pre-fabricated, and as an individual enterprise or a collaborative one.

In the Kumasi case, we refer to the cluster of curio kiosks as a Trade
Commune; a historical allusion be made subtly but we use the term "curio
kiosks" in anticipation that the outward design will invoke curiosity or
content will bear special attraction to the locals. The setting for a Trade
Commune may be a Kumasi city street, university campus, or a village within
the Kumasi metro, as appropriate to the design of the arts participant. The
mode of exchange is open in manners of traditional lectures, demonstrations,
workshops, dialogical methods, and direct exchanges of material culture; or
the post-modernist modalities in the way of performances, slide/new
media/film screenings, and a hundred others. A trade may be by barter, cash,
gift to the local or what ever is simpler and mutual. The trade is not just
an inventory of arts data, cross-cultural process of negotiation and sharing
of evidence creation; it is an engagement in a particular kind of commercial
enterprise through use of the arts. Relying on collaboration, and free
exercise of the arts, we therefore seek to stimulate for intellectual
freedom and renewed vision of the arts as economic-cultural capital in the
city. Because the process and structure encourages integration/assertion of
the participant's institutional knowledge and national cultural capital, the
supposition is that the individual or group would attract sponsorship for
own costs from home institution or country.

The Kumasi Curio Kiosks Project is a project session of "The Kumasi
Symposium: Tapping Local Resources for Sustainable Education through Art".
The arts-based social experiment is designed to provide a context that will
stimulate the artist, scholar and activist participants to place themselves
and their practice into question and possibly resolutions through
collaboration and cultural/artistic interchange. The pre-symposium session
will run from July 31-August 8 2009 and the symposium from August 11-14 2009.
About 30 local artists will be selected to work alongside some invited
international colleagues.

If interested in participating in the project, send an introductory material
on you, and a statement of interest with sketches/description of your
proposed 6 x 6 ft Curio Kiosk that should be set up at Kumasi between July
31-August 7 2009 to africoae@gmail.com,
-indicate if any local needs will be required (max. one page). Space is
limited; all submissions will be reviewed until space is filled. We are also
accepting nominations for the Project Co-Curator, Convener, Provocateur and
Roundtable Discussants.


*FIVE-MINUTE VIDEO DOCUMENTARY*
 The participant will then develop a Five-Minute Video art piece that will
document or frame the process and structure of own/others' (Curio Kiosk)
practice in context of the largeness of The Kumasi Symposium. The project
needs a producer to guide the artists in creating a multi-media documentary
of their practice- one who will enable the artists to shoot and edit the
video films.


CALL FOR PLENARY SESSIONS, DEMONSTRATIONS/WORKSHOPS,
EXHIBITIONS/INTERVENTIONS, AND CONTEXT-SPECIFIC PERFORMANCES

THE KUMASI SYMPOSIUM: Tapping Local Resources for Sustainable Education
through Art
Department of General Art Studies, College of Arts and Social Sciences,
Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Kumasi, Ghana
July 31-August 14, 2009


Our 2009 Kumasi event uses arts-based social practice to bringing together
specialists from diverse parts of the world in a trans-national platform for
inter-change of cultural and knowledge capital in evidence-based society to
strengthen visual arts practice and promote cultural entrepreneurship in
Ghana. A call is, thus, made for contributions addressing one or more of the
symposium sub-themes: Art Education Practice, Studio Practice,
Curatorial/Museum/Community Arts Practice, Art History/Criticism, Arts
Administration/Management/Marketing Practice, and Open Session.
Specifically, the symposium entails plenary sessions and support activities
such as demonstrations/workshops, exhibitions, and site-specific tours of
local national resources. Expression of interest and proposals for Plenary
Sessions and Exhibitions/Practical Workshops will be reviews until January
17, 2009. Applications for individual presentation and participation will be
reviewed until the space is filled. We expect about 200 participants from
around the world. The working language of the conference will be English.
All abstracts and brief biographies should be submitted to
africoae@gmail.com. More at http://afropoets.tripod.com/eta

Attachment: seeksprojectmanager.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document

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