Keynote address at the last stage of the European Capital of Culture, Guimarães2012, Portugal.

Guimarães is in the north of Portugal and is a listed World Heritage site (I was naively expecting sunshine, but in this mountainous region it was decidedly the winter end of ‘alpine’). The year-long program has a number of strands (music, theatre, etc.). I was invited to do the keynote for the final stage of the ‘Curator’s Lab’ – intended for all contemporary art and cultural workers, including arts and urban cultural policy. The Curators' Lab’s stated intention was to ‘…create a meeting platform for different cultural producers within curatorial practice and artistic production’…. Involving exhibitions, symposia, public debates, master classes, and workshops… a temporary architecture, a collective artist-in-residence project and a publishing project. It attracts ‘artists, architects, curators, critics, writers, designers, publishers, philosophers, educators and researchers’, who all were (and still are) ‘…invited to carry out physical interventions, residences, talks, events or specific performances linked to the concepts, conversations and critical debates programmed for this space’.

The Curatorship and Concept was by the talented Gabriela Vaz-Pinheiro; Co-Curatorship and Programme Coordination by Lígia Afonso. Also, great contributions and management by TRANSFORMA – the cultural catalyst and mobile arts ‘lab’. I had the pleasure of talking at length to them all.

My talk was called ‘Location Production’, as the theme of this third stage opening was devoted to the reflection on aspects and models of production and the locations of production. The opening symposium lasted two days – with wonderful food and places to visit in and around the event. The event was themes on territorial shifting, nomadism, dissemination as practice and theoretical paradigms of recent artistic production and education. It also featured wonderful speakers: Jane Rendell, Charles Quick, Michael Asbury (the Brits), and Gonçalo Leite Velho, José Maçãs de Carvalho, and Paola Berenstein Jacques/Fabiana Britto, who were all fascinating.

The event took place in the great FÁBRICA ASA, which was used for many Guimarães2012 events.

Jonathan Vickery : 09 Nov 2012 16:43 |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem