free movement of culture
Free Movement of Culture was a two day international gathering of artists, activists, architects, designers and writers self selected via open call in 2017.
It created a space for open dialogue; knowledge sharing in various forms and connected many disparate people and places (UK, Spain, South Korea, Syria, Canada, Chile, Belgium).
Contributors were asked to devise an intervention and ‘bring a friend’ either physically or via other means. The two days aimed to bring people to gather to reflect on how our relationships to thresholds, borders and limits...
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frame, influence or taint a broad spectrum of experiences.
To share something of what is proximate to us culturally, socially, geographically, personally and politically - in that moment.
Acknowledging that borders are a concept and a reality (physical, social, psychological) that hold slow and hold fast, restricting and permitting people in different ways and measures.
FMoC was an open forum for sharing and debate rooted in the experience of cultural producers as active, global citizens with common insights, intentions and senses that unite - even when interpretations are undecided or conflicted.
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Discussions around...
cooperation and cultural agency foregrounded any objects, images or situations that were produced.
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Those present learned about an online school supporting displaced refugees, witnessed a live attempt to access a government building in Seoul and were joined by dinner guests Daniella Valz Gen (Ecologies of Care), Mijke van der Drift (Nonnormative Ethics, Radical Trans Feminism) and visiting members of PARADOX (European Forum of Fine Art).
Guests were invited to eat from table cloths made from enlarged Leaked Brexit Documents (Sophie Chapman + Kerri Jefferis, various dimensions, 2017) and took home Raju Rage’s text “when issues become a commodity to own.”
Contributors: Yaiza Schmid, Paula Schmid, Mark Smith, Maria Teresa Chadwick, Rosadito Raton, Felicity Allen, Jeanette Gunnarsson, Jordan Heighes, Carol Mancke, Dari Bae, Rosa Farber, Noura Alnassa, Miki Shaw, Catherine Wynne-Paton, Catherine Maffioletti, Elzbieta Buslowska, Samiya Younis, Anvi Goyal. Mijke van der Drift, Daniella Valz Gen, Jade Monserrat, Samer Alagha, Raju Rage and Sophie Mallet.
The project was supported by: NAFAE (National Association for Fine Art Education), PARADOX (European Fine Art Forum), ELIA (European League of Institutes of Art), UAL (University of the Arts London) and a small cluster of UK Fine Art Departments working through the Erasmus links.