Green light – Shared learning

Green light | An artistic workshop
Green light – Shared learning

http://www.tba21.org/#item--Shared-learning-Full-Program%20--1264

Conceived by Olafur Eliasson as a metaphorical green light for refugees and migrants in Austria and beyond, the project testifies to the agency of contemporary art and its potential to initiate processes of civic transformation. Green light consists of an artistic workshop and the learning platform Green light – Shared learning surrounding the making of lamp modules designed by Eliasson. The lamps are assembled on-site from materials and components that are made available at TBA21-Augarten. In addition to Augarten’s regular audience, young refugees, migrants, and university students are invited to take part in this process of collaborative artistic practice and learning, giving rise to a space of exchange and encounter for contributors from a range of linguistic, social, geographic, and educational backgrounds.

Over the course of the three-month Green light project at TBA21-Augarten the participants and students will partake in a multifaceted curriculum of shared learning initiated by TBA21. An evolving sculptural environment made from hundreds of modular Green light lamps will accommodate a multidirectional weekly program. Within the framework of this program, artists, thinkers, students, refugees, migrants, and collaborating organizations are invited to host and to be part of a series of workshops, seminars, performances, screenings, lectures, and artistic interventions responding to socio- and geopolitical, cultural, and personal issues and narratives of migration and arrival through collaborative creative activities and critical discourse.

The program features films by artists such as Marine Hugonnier, Omer Fast, Walid Raad, Christof Schlingensief, Sean Snyder and many others. Workshops, interventions, and lectures by Olafur Eliasson and Displaced (the project of Department of Social Design of University of Applied Arts Vienna with Department of Architecture and Urban Planning of Technical University Vienna), Johannes Porsch, David Rych, Mario García-Torres, as well as lectures and discussion rounds with Matti Bunzl, Raimund Haindorfer, Oliver Rathkolb, and many others.

ARTIST INTERVENTIONS
In addition to the public seminars, artists are invited to choreograph research-based, process-orientated interventions with participants on site at TBA21–Augarten. These intimate, procedural works unfold over several days and are based on the belief in transformative potential of collective and embodied artistic production.

Johannes Porsch
What Acts Upon Us When We Are Acting
Ongoing, weekly, Fridays. Public is welcome

What Acts Upon Us When We Are Acting? is theatre without theatre: We (the participants) are not acting within the theatre or on a stage, playing characters and roles within the unfolding of a given plot, but we are acting outside and around the theatre. Without the guidance of a story we are working with the means at hand, the given situation and circumstances: we are engaging in an action that displaces and expands theatrical action into life and interrupts the familiarity of the everyday.

Johannes Porsch is an artist, curator and architect, living and working in Vienna. He teaches at The University of Applied Arts. His work generally looks at narratives and the processes of mediation, between text, image, language and space.

Shuddhabrata Sengupta / Raqs Media Collective
Memory and Mobility: On What it Means to Get up and Go
March 14—15, 2016

Everyone who leaves a neighborhood, village, a city, a country carries the place they have left behind with them into the world. Memory becomes home when you are homeless. In this workshop on memory and mobility, the participants of the Green light project will interact with the Raqs Media Collective’s work with memory, mobility and the migration of dreams, ideas, stories and concepts. Participants will work with paper, with found objects, with images, sound, music, conversation and language to create portable worlds carried aloft by translation.

The Raqs Media Collective was founded in 1992 in New Delhi by Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, and Shuddhabrata Sengupta and enjoys playing a plurality of roles, often appearing as artists, occasionally as curators, sometimes as philosophical agent provocateurs. They make contemporary art, have made films, curated exhibitions, edited books, staged events, collaborated with architects, computer programmers, writers, and theatre directors and have founded processes that have left deep impacts on contemporary culture in India.

David Rych
Border Act
April 12–13, 2016

In Border Act participants are prepared for dealings with the authorities in the fictional context of improvised theatre. Among other things, it is about visualizing processes that generally take place behind closed doors and therefore remain hidden from the public eye. Where the staging goes hand in hand with a protagonist's personal position and story and thus explores real circumstances, it opens up new space for critical questioning of the present world, investigating existing conditions in politics, media and the public.

Austrian artist David Rych lives and works in Berlin. A continuing theme in his work is the construction and representation of identity. His projects, videos and films engage with matters of cultural, social and political transformation as a background of aesthetic decisions. In frequent collaboration with other artists, his practice explores different approaches through documentary film and the compilation of moving image archives, for the most part dealing with production of knowledge in relation to collective identities, personal and official narratives of history, and their visual representations.

Mario García Torres
April 16 – 17, 2016

Following Green light, Mario García Torres’ exhibition at TBA21–Augarten is opening in June 2016. Proposing to remove, detach and hybridize his works from their original contexts, he plans to offer them as a collection of narratives and artistic experiments open for re-inscriptions of “tales of arrival” by engaging interested Green light participants. The works are exploring notions of testimony and the importance of translating. This gesture is intended to open up new possible readings, thus allowing for speculation on the possibilities of reinvention and transcendence. The concept is signposted loosely by two narrative moments; the arrival and the return.

Tarek Atoui
April 22–23, 2016

Tarek Atoui is a Lebanese artist, composer, and musician trained in electro-acoustic music and sound art. Preferring a collective approach in performance, composition, and improvisation, Atoui will work with the Green light participants to gather a variety of recordings – of instruments, speech, chants, the city, or else – in this two-day workshop, to compose a collective acoustic experience. Exploring the construction of community, spatial compositions, and the diversity of listening abilities, this joint archive elaborates changes that take place through acoustic encounters, listening together, and conversations about music. The workshop will be followed by a public presentation on Sunday, April 24.

Born in 1980 in Beirut, Tarek Atoui lives in Paris and studied contemporary and electronic music in Reims. Recent performances have taken place at the ZKM (2016), dOCUMENTA13 (2012), New Museum, New York (2010), the Sharjah Biennial (2009), amongst others.

SEMINARS
These discursive or artistic seminars unravel a variety of perspectives on migration, citizenship, statelessness, arrival, memory and the multiple thresholds of belonging. Tackling specifically the intersection between art practice and experimental institutional formats, the seminars foster active participation and discussion uncovering missing knowledge and hidden aspects of the present socio-political climate as well as personal narratives.

With Ahmet Ögüt (The Silent University) and Displaced and History(ies) of Migration.

The Silent University / Ahmet Ögüt
May 7–8, 2016

The Silent University, initiated by artist Ahmet Ögüt, is an autonomous knowledge exchange platform by and for refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants who have had a professional life and academic training in their home countries, but are unable to use their skills in their novel environments due to their (legal and other) status. The Silent University aims to address and reactivate the knowledge of the participants and attempt to make systemic failure apparent. Its aim is to challenge the idea of silence as a passive state, and explore its powerful potential through performance, writing, and group reflection.

Displaced
Ongoing, weekly

Displaced is composed of Faculty of Architecture and Urban Planning and Institute for Art at Technical University, Vienna. Once per week throughout Green light – Shared Learning architecture students will work with young refugees (PROSA students) in 1:1 teams. This direct physical overlap/interaction occurring in the spaces of education such as university and contemporary exhibition reveals and questions (invisible) barriers: Refugees involved in the production of Green light lamps, young asylum seekers from PROSA, students, teachers, visitors, members of TBA21 form a heterogeneous community by chance, united in the project-related and process-oriented doing, communicating, negotiating, and learning from each other.

History(ies) of Migration
Ongoing, weekly

History(ies) of Migration is composed of faculty of the Department of Social Design of University of Applied Arts. The project organizes reading and debate (in the sense of edification) groups, which put together persons of 2nd, 3rd and 4thgenerations of immigrants and refugees. They are considered as “Experts of Mobile Stories“. History(ies) of Migration is multi-language envirnonment of experience transfer and translation.