In Malta, three African teenagers stand accused of terrorism. They were among a group of migrants who fled Libya on a rubber boat on the 26th of March 2019. At risk of drowning, 108 people were rescued by the crew of the cargo ship El Hiblu 1. Instructed by an aircraft of the European military operation Eunavfor Med, the crew sought to return the rescued to Libya, a war-torn country where migrants live in appalling conditions. The migrants protested their return and convinced the crew of El Hiblu 1 to steer north, to Malta. During the protest nobody was hurt and nothing was damaged. Three African teenagers were arrested and imprisoned for 8 months. Now before a Maltese court, the El Hiblu 3 face serious charges of terrorism and could, if convicted, spend many years in prison. On the 28th of March 2020, the campaign “Free El Hiblu 3” will be launched, several human rights organisations, rescue NGOs, international lawyers and local NGOs are involved in the solidarity campaign.
Month: March 2020
The Crisis Collective
EFAP members were due to meet during the SAR conference, which unfortunately was cancelled due to COVID-19.
Statement by the SAR organisers: Due to the current Coronavirus outbreak, we unfortunately find it necessary to cancel the conference in Bergen. We apologize for the inconvenience this entails for the participants. The decision is founded on an overall joint assessment by the University of Bergen and SAR, based on the current advice from The Norwegian Institute of Public Health in relation to the growing concerns on the quick spreading of the virus.
The Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design and SAR are truly sorry for having to cancel the conference due to these unfortunate circumstances, but are looking into the possibility of transforming the contributions into a more permanent format, like a publication or through digital dissemination.
Performance Knowledges: Transmission, Composition, Praxis
The seventh Annual Conference of the School of Performing Arts (University of Malta) considers knowledge in relation to performing arts practices. More specifically, the conference aims to explore, question, and discuss the different types of ‘knowledges’ that emerge from or are involved in performing arts practices including creation, production, performance, and spectatorship.
The conference’s focus on performing arts practices—dance, theatre, and music—acknowledges an affinity with Performance Studies, which originated in American universities as a new ‘knowledge formation’ (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1999) with the aim to integrate performance into interdisciplinary scholarship and offer a counterbalance to the emphasis on texts and literature within cultural studies. The conference focus on practices is also strongly connected to developments originating around the same time for artistic research in the context of European higher education. The debates about artistic research have posited basic questions about the constitution of knowledge and its valorisation (Borgdorff 2012). The conditions and opportunities for artistic research in higher education continue to evolve, but many questions about its status and relevance, in connection to knowledge production in particular, remain.
The aim of Performance Knowledges is to offer an opportunity to refresh some of these discussions and debates through a focus on performing arts from the perspectives of transmission, composition, and praxis. This is a chance to include research cultures working at the borderline with the social and cognitive sciences, where the vantage point of the performing arts should provoke a robust discussion of embodied and relational forms of knowledge. It also encourages participants to rethink how in composition and transmission processes knowledge is diversified into different types, including tacit knowledge—with emphasis on process and experience (Polanyi 1958). This should include addressing the question of skill—which is so often overlooked in academic debates about the subject.
We are looking for presentations that engage with questions of varieties, generation, transmission, and implications of performance knowledges. We are looking for inter- and multidisciplinary approaches that might contribute to the analysis of ways of knowing in the performing arts, and to the scholarly study of collaborative encounters between directors, choreographers, composers, performers, designers, and spectators. We are particularly interested in alternative and diverse conceptualisations of practice-generating knowledges, as well as knowledge-generating practices,
Presentation topics might include, but are not limited to, issues and themes of performance knowledges in relation to practices, methodologies, and technologies. We welcome submissions across a number of areas that address the multifaceted understandings of knowledge as emergent in theatre, dance, and music, including but not limited to:
- the artist’s perspective on languaging and documenting practices
- embodied cognition and moving beyond dualism in the practice of the performing arts
- problematising hegemonic knowledges, implications for performing arts
- training processes and compositional strategies as intangible heritage
- practice turn in contemporary theory, communities and ecologies of practice
- habits, skills and contexts for tacit knowledge acquisition and transmission
- perspectives on and from diverse atypical modes and mixed abilities
- historical, analytical, and theoretical understandings of embodiment in the performing arts
- case studies of creators, performers, spectators, and other agents of performance
- technologisation and the impact of digitisation on performance practices
- translation, transformation and/ or appropriation of performance forms
Digital Culture Overload
The last cultural event visited before the Lockdown of Malta due to Covid-19 was the talk of Klio at Valletta Contemporary on ‘Digital Culture Overload‘.
New media art curator Klio Krajewska gave a talk about the prevalence of digital culture in contemporary life.
During the talk works by the following artists will be presented and discussed: !Mediengruppe Bitnik, Disnovation.org, Guli Silberstein, Winnie Soon, Esmeralda Kosmatopoulos, Shota Yamauchi and others.
Klio is a member of the curatorial team of WRO Art Center and the WRO Media Art Biennale. She is also Head of New Media Arts at Watermans Arts Centre in London and associated with the Parisian environment of sound art.