The foundation event of Shared Campus includes an official opening ceremony as well as a two-day conference to discuss and illustrate basic questions and principles of transcultural collaboration, which is the key motivation and working method of the whole initiative. The final presentations of the semester programme Transcultural Collaboration 2019 are embedded in the format.
Programme
The conference is divided into five sessions. South Korean curator Binna Choi, director of the Casco Art Institute, will open proceedings with a talk about a key issue of Shared Campus: the art of sharing and communing, followed by a concert and the first ever collaboration between experimental turntablists dj sniff (Tokyo) and Dimitri de Perrot (Zurich).
On 6 December, the morning session — “Collaboration (in the Arts)” — will open with a keynote by Ade Darmawan, founder of ruangrupa, the first art collective to curate documenta. Playwright and director Sabine Harbeke will discuss methods for a democratic, collaborative practice. This will be followed by a panel on “Co-researching for Alternative Knowledge” with sociologist Sik Ying Ho, design researcher Yanki Lee, both from Hong Kong, and art historian Annemarie Bucher from Zurich.
The afternoon session — “Dealing with Otherness” — opens with a keynote by Chow Yiu Fai, the award-winning writer and lyricist of Cantonese pop songs together with his partner, Jeroen de Kloet, director of the Amsterdam Centre for Globalisation Studies. Artist and researcher Heather Barnett will offer insights into co-creation practices with non-human others along with artist Zheng Bo. Heather will also run a practical workshop on how we understand otherness through experience and experiment. Artist duo Mayumi Arai and Nina Willimann will offer an interactive, multimedia workshop on the potential of self-reflection latent in the misunderstandings arising in communication and translation processes.
On 7 December, we will begin with “Coping with Contradiction and Uncertainty” and Audrey Tang’s hologram keynote. As Taiwan’s first Digital Minister, Audrey will consider radical transparency and digital social innovation. Mihaela Drăgan and Zhao Chuan, two theatre practitioners, will discuss how to address critical issues in different cultural contexts or political systems. Finnish artist Tellervo Kalleinen invites conference participants to a workshop exploring the challenges of collaboration while, in parallel, former students of the international semester programme Transcultural Collaboration will share their thoughts “On the (Im)Possibility of Long-Distance Artistic Collaborations.”
In the final session (“Institutional Framing – Structure vs Dynamics”), artist and designer Jerszy Seymour will present the ongoing radical art school project “The Dirty Art Department” and projects related to his idea of the Magic Space. The final panel, “Challenges and Potentials of Shared Campus,” will involve Venka Purushothaman, Oussouby Sacko and Jeremy Till, three heads of Shared Campus partner institutions. The panel will be moderated by Swetlana Heger-Davis, Vice-President of Zurich University of the Arts.
Everyone is warmly invited to attend the final presentations of the 5th international semester programme in Transcultural Collaboration in the evenings of 6 and 7 December. Twenty-six young international artists from diverse artistic practices will present various performances and installations. The conference will close on 7 December with a concert by local matadors Dirty Slips and DJ Ms Hyde at the “not to be missed” end-of-conference party!