migrating mobility: intermedia practices- beyond/between cities - transcultural resistance

Migrating/Resistance Edition is launched with the T.R.A.C.E.S Meeting organised by Transcultures at Via Festival in Mons and explores creative and critical engagements with the city and new ways of collaboration between artists, curators, and researchers in order to reflect on and question the existing and new conditions of the contemporary cultural scene across various forms, media, institutions and audiences.

TRACES explores the concrete and philosophical implications of working/creating in urban landscapes, with/between and beyond cities. Gathering information and exchanges through our range of experiences in diverse practical and conceptual backgrounds, we aim to extend these conversations in a trans-disciplinary context through the organised activities and spontaneous input of the participants. Migrating/Resistance Edition focus is on specific projects, strategies of resistance, informal knowledge transfer and the trans-european multi-disciplinary context of our various organisations and personal experiences.

Jodi Rose – Initiator, Mediator and Co-Curator of TRACES

European nomadism of artistic hybrid approaches,
taking the time to share...

Initiated by Transcultures in close collaboration with Jodi Rose, sound artist and internationalist «liaison agent», T.R.A.C.E.S (Transcultural Research Artist Curator Exchange Series) is based on the necessity for dialogue and thinking between the various contemporary artistic approaches using the digital technologies («low tech» or «high tech), with a site specific and innovative dimension.

In a hypermodern society dominated by speed and ultra consumerism, it seems to us that this ability to take time is all too rare in our overbuys lives, although equally crucial for the artistic and critical process. This necessity to ‘take a break ‘ in the flux of actions, to concentrate on the exchange in an open vision of the current nomadic European creativity was a spur to launch the TRACES project. The artist is invited not to create another piece of work but to participate in the discussion and share their experiences and practice with the curator/researcher. The co-organisers of TRACES, Transcultures (Mons), IRZU (Ljubljana), Nida Art Colony and associated partners Pixelache (Helsinki), Kitchen Budapest and Migrating Art Academies (Cologne, Poitiers, Angoulème, Vilnius) share this joyful «interdisciplinarity/indisciplinarity» which stimulates multiple projects. In today’s tighter global economy, the artists, cultural workers, committed viewers and other ‘awakening dreamers» have to struggle constantly not only to survive, but to claim again and again their differences/interferences inopposing the established conformism, they also have to develop a concrete and public oriented project driven by passion and faith in their own visions of utopia.

After the first «workshop» during the sound art festival Earzoom organised by Irzu in Ljubljana in October 2010 and the TRACES lounge inspired by ‘slow culture’ and welcomed in Open Zone of Transmediale Festival Berlin in February 2011, TRACES lands in Belgium. The organisers first met creative media labs and digital arts research centres in Brussels (FoAM, OKNO, iMAL, Labau/Media Ruimte). Then participated in the professional encounters of the festival VIA (VIA PRO, «Happy digital?» organised by CECN/lemanège.mons) with a presentation TRACES on March 25th at Theatre le Manège and attend other meetings and performances in Mons. On the 26th, the Fine Arts Museum of Mons (BAM) welcomed the TRACES debates, presentations on the theme «migrating mobility: intermedia practises- beyond/between cities - transcultural resistance». Each TRACES organiser will invite an artist, curator, «thinker» to participate to this think tank always in progress. In the evening, the dialogue will go on in a multisonic way with three electro organic live sets créations live linking Mons with Ljubljana, Vilnius, Nida and Berlin.

The next steps will be in May at the Arts Academy of Vilnius and at Nida Art Colony welcoming TRACES artists and curators in Iinter-format symposium: reinventing interdisciplinarity and artist residency on the Curonian Spit, Baltic sea at the frontier between Lithuania and Kaliningrad (Russia).

Welcome to T.R.A.C.E.S - Transmissions Reflections Artivists Critics European Singularities

Philippe Franck - Transcultures, TRACES