Cosmopolis #1

Arquitectura Expandida

Founded in 2010 in Bogota by Felipe Gonzalez, Ana-Maria Lopez Ortego, and Harold Guyaux, Architectura Expandida is conceived as a laboratory of autonomous urban construction. The collective thinks and builds in collaboration with communities that wish  to appropriate the political, social, and cultural management of their public space. By building a neighborhood  movie theater, planning a skating rink, or painting a staircase, they collectively seek to respond creatively to a common need. Arquitectura Expandida also often acts as a think tank, by exploring issues that go beyond specific actions. For Cosmopolis #1, the collective undertook a three-month residency in the suburban area of Clichy-Montfermeil, in conjunction with the multudisciplinary organization Ateliers Médicis. They worked in particular with the associations of Clichy-sous-Bois on the housing estate of Chêne Pointu, in order to imagine interventions in the public space that would foster a sense of collectivity. The research and‚tactical provocations‘developed during their residency are presented here.

PorEstosDías

Created in 2012 in Medellín by Olga Acosta, Juan Moreno, Alejandra Jaramillo, Juan D. Restrepo and Jaime Carmona, PorEstosDías center their projects on the sharing of knowledge and experiences. Through projections, meals, and workshops, they craft opportunities to broaden dialogues between disciplines and people. Social and political questions posed in an informal context aim to enable participants to reappropriate issues of life in common, public space, and art, helping to repair rents in the fabric of cities. For Cosmopolis #1, PorEstosDías exhibit their artistic edition ‘La Faltante‘: each of the seven pieces of this series was imagined from an existing magazine, for which the collective designed a missing issue. Every Thursday from 4pm to 6pm, within the Cosmopolis exhibition space, PorEstosDías present a public workshop to create two new editions of  ‘La Faltante‘. After studying the editorial and visual line of a selected magazine, the participants collectively create a’missing‘ issue, composed of drawings, collage and text. 

Laagencia

How is knowledge produced, shared, and disseminated? This is the main question addressed by Laagencia, founded in 2000 by Mónica Zamudio, Santiago Pinyol, Mariana Murcia, Diego García, and Sebastián Cruz, and based in Bogota. As part of their research, Laagencia works to map desires and expectations around art and learning. Their project ‘Escuela de garaje’, or ‘Garage school’, brings together groups of local and international artists, architects, and experts from other disciplines to participate in workshops, projections, study groups, and conversations. Laagencia is in residence throughout the duration of Comospolis to develop a series of interventions for the exhibition’s discursive program ‘Collective Intelligence: Circulations’. On Sundays at 5pm, the collective presents a workshop, open to the public, in connection to the discursive program’s themes, in order to digest and archive the contents of the readings groups, workshops, and conferences presented each week. 

Polit-Sheer-Form Office

Polit-Sheer-Form Office (PSFO) a été fondé en 2005 par les artistes Hong Hao, Xiao Yu, Song Dong, Liu Jianhua et le commissaire et critique Leng Lin. Face à ce qu’ils considèrent comme une fuite en avant vers le capitalisme et l'individualisme, PSFO cherche à revenir de manière critique sur les traces du collectivisme en Chine. Au sein de la génération qui a traversé l’expérience de la Révolution Culturelle et du collectivisme forcé, des habitudes de sociabilité collective et un vrai tissu social perdurent. Des groupes d’amis d’âges similaires continuent à se rencontrer très régulièrement dans l’espace public (parcs, salons de thé) pour jouer aux échecs, débattre ou danser. Cosmopolis #1 présente l'installation Fitness for all qui reprend le titre de l’une des campagnes sanitaires de la République populaire de Chine. Les machines d’exercice peintes en bleu – la couleur emblématique de PSFO – déjouent avec ironie un dispositif étatique chinois : plusieurs machines pour faire de l’exercice physique placées côte à côte dans les parcs publics, invitant chacun à l’effort commun. Wallpaper est composé des reçus de dépenses des sorties du collectif depuis sa création, renvoyant aux moments de travail collectif et de sociabilité. Five Chairs recrée quant à elle la scène de la première discussion de PSFO dans une galerie, avatar des cinq membres du collectif et emblème des processus collaboratifs.

Council

Founded in Paris in 2013 by Grégory Castéra and Sandra Terdjman, Council brings together different collaborators and forms of knowledge — including arts, science, and civic culture — to foster new understandings of social issues through the production of works and an international program of exhibitions, conferences, and publications. For Cosmopolis #1, Council presents The Against Nature Journal, a project focused on the legal interpretation of the concept of ‘nature’, still widely used to criminalize sexual orientation or regulate individual freedoms and impose norms. The inspiration of the journal dates from 2009 when the Lebanese judge Mounir Souleiman studied the legal basis for an arrest for ‘acts against nature’. His verdict in the case (read by the judge in a video presented here) proposes a philosophical and poetic interpretation of nature that confirms the hypothesis that new tools are needed to interpret this protean concept. Building on the work of Mounir Souleiman and of the Lebanese NGO Legal Agenda, Council initiated their research project in 2013 in collaboration with the Ashkal Alwan art centre in Beirut. Developed with Aimar Arriola (chief editor) and Julie Peeters (designer), The Against Nature Journal is the result of this research and brings together professionals working at the crossroads of law, humanities, arts, and activism. An event organized by Council on November 9 will discuss the first issue of the Journal, dedicated to India. 

Chimurenga

Chimurenga, a research and publishing platform founded in 2002 in Cape Town, South Africa by Ntone Edjabe, works across the fields of publishing, curating, and broadcasting. It brings together artists, researchers, and musicians around projects that question the history and present of the African continent, as well as the forms of knowledge this generates. Chimurenga‚ means revolutionary struggle‚ in Shona language and also refers to a musical genre linked to the struggle for social justice, created in Zimbabwe by Thomas Mapfumo. As part of Cosmopolis #1, Chimurenga occupies La Colonie (128 Lafayette Street, Paris) from December 13 to 17 with its radio, the PanAfrican Space Station, and a series of discussions, performances, and installations related to the project Who killed Kabila?, the subject of a forthcoming issue of Chimurenga‘s newspaper ‘The Chronic‘. The different narratives surrounding the murder in 2001 of Laurent-Désiré Kabila, then president of the Democratic Republic of Congo, are at the heart of the event. The project approachesone of the most complex political events of recent history from multiple viewpoints, and through the structuring lense of the Congolese rumba, in order to narrate it anew.

Chto Delat

The collective Chto Delat (‘What is to be done?’) was founded in 2003 in Saint Petersburg by a group of artists, critics, philosophers, and writers including Dmitry Vilensky, Nikolay Oleinikov, Natalia Pershina, and Olga Egorova. Their work brings together political theory, art, and activism in unexpected ways. A platform for artistic actions aimed at, in the collective’s words, ‘politicizing the production of knowledge’, Chto Delat has developed multiple actions, videos, and installations crossing the boundaries of theater, folk music, and theoretical thinking. For Cosmopolis #1, they present an installation stemming from research conducted in 2016 in Chiapas, Mexico. Seventeen participants of a summer school lived for two weeks in the pastoral context of a dacha in order to study the communitarianism of the Zapatists. The process of sharing a rural life and the studies they conducted aimed to explore possibilities for the transformation of neoliberal society. 

ruangrupa

ruangrupa a été créé en 2000 à Jakarta à l’initiative de six artistes, Ade Darmawan, Hafiz, Ronny Agustinus, Oky Arfie Hutabarat, Lilia Nursita et Rithmi. Depuis lors le collectif a fondé un festival d’art vidéo, un journal en ligne, des festivals de musique, une bibliothèque, une station de radio, une école d’art et bien d’autres activités et structures. ruangrupa conçoit également des installations plastiques et des dispositifs qui questionnent la manière dont la population d’une ville de plus de dix millions d’habitants en manque d'infrastructures peut s’approprier l’espace public. « ruang » veut dire « espace » en sanskrit et en bahasa indonésien, et  « rupa » signifie « forme visuelle ». Le collectif se compose d’artistes, de curateurs, d'architectes et d'écrivains qui varient en nombre de 6 à 50 selon les projets. Pour Cosmopolis #1, le collectif parasite le Centre Pompidou pour créer un centre de ressources au sein de l’espace d’exposition. Élaborée à partir de matériaux recyclés provenant de l’institution hôte, la bibliothèque est conçue artisanalement, avec les moyens du bord, et évolue en permanence tout au long de l’exposition. Dans le cadre d’événements publics et d’installations dans des musées, ruangrupa expose comment le savoir peut être produit et partagé à travers des situations sociales informelles. L’une de leurs maximes est «  Don’t make art, make friends* ».

* « Ne fais pas d’art, fais-toi des amis. »

Invisible Borders

Founded in 2009 in Nigeria by Emeka Okereke, Invisible Borders investigates the spectrum of knowledge and artistic practices that it may be generated by the road trip. Through collective journeys of photographers, videographers, and writers, Invisible Borders conducts research into possible artistic responses to the unexpected. Okereke comments: ‘’In a world obsessed with artefacts — the physical, final object — as the preferred artistic outcomes, Invisible Borders shifts the gaze to the never-ending, evolutive nature of process. The work produced by the participating artists are precipitates of aesthetic experiences that are ephemeral but contain the seeds of further conversations. The artist’s presence on the road is as important as the work that commences from that presence’’. The work presented for Cosmopolis #1, A Trans-African World Space (Third Iteration) draws from the archives of road trips undertaken in 2012 (Lagos to Libreville), 2014 (Lagos to Sarajevo) and 2016. Borders Within, the trip made in 2016 across Nigeria, explored the fault lines of the country 100 years after the unification by Great Britain of the North and the South colonial protectorates. The resulting works combine photographs, texts, and video to present the critical inquiries of the travelers, their daily journals, and the voices of those met along the way. 

Art Labor

Art Labor is a collective founded in 2012 in Ho Chi Minh City by artists Phan Thảo Nguyên and Truong Cong Tung and curator Arlette Quynh-Anh Tran. Their practice combines research in the field of social sciences with artistic tools to interact with the public. They have previously collaborated with experts from a variety of disciplines, including anthropologists, archivists, ophthalmologists, farmers, and craftsmen. For Cosmopolis #1, Art Labor recreates a hammock cafe of the type commonly found along the highways, offering Vietnamese-style filter coffee to the public, and presents also a new video work. The cultivation of Robusta coffee in the central highlands of Vietnam begun with the arrival of French missionaries in the 19th century. The Jrai people, who are subsistence farmers, are still living on these lands. The video evokes the stages to be crossed after death in a bodily transformation to dew according to the Jrai cosmology, against the background of the local industrial coffee culture.

The Tentative Collective

The Tentative Collective a été créé à Karachi en 2011 par Hajra Haider, Yaminay Nausir Chaudhri, et Fazal Rizvi. Chaque projet du collectif réunit une constellation variable d’artistes, de curateurs, d’enseignants, d’architectes et souvent de collaborateurs issus de milieux différents, tels que des pêcheurs, des femmes au foyer et des travailleurs domestiques. De nombreux dispositifs collaboratifs in situ sont réalisés, comme par exemple cette action où une centaine d’habitants se sont réunis sur le muret d’un parc public en voie de privatisation, réagissant ainsi à une politique de réduction de l’espace public à Karachi. Pour Cosmopolis #1, The Tentative Collective a créé une œuvre inédite : une installation vidéo s’intéressant à des travailleurs et des lieux de travail à Karachi, qui reflète les écarts entre différents modes de production dans cette mégalopole en pleine croissance (environ 27 millions d’habitants). Cette installation, Shershah and other stories, dresse un portrait de quatre sites de la ville. Les artistes souligne « les décalages globaux dans la production qui heurtent les rythmes de travail locaux », ouvrant ainsi une série de fenêtres sur les stratégies de survie dans la vie urbaine, mettant en question la valorisation de ce qui est précieux versus ce qui est jeté — les biens comme les êtres. La notion de déchet est pensée comme un revers de la modernité, et le collectif explore la signification économique et symbolique de la face cachée d’un système de profits à courts termes.

Mixrice

Founded in 2002 by Cho Jieun and Yang Chulmo and based in Seoul, Mixrice presents new perspectives on migration in their works, particulary movements of South Asian workers to Korea. Mixrice often works in collaboration, elliciting personal narratives memories, and aspirations. Based both on research and on very human encounters, their works may take the form of dialogues, video workshops, installations, drawings, and performances in the public space. For Cosmopolis #1, Mixrice provides unique insight into issues of urbanism and ecology by drawing attention to the intersection between the migrations of people and those of plants. Their installation The Vine Chronicle documents the uprooting and displacement of trees, some of them over a thousand years old, in the context of Seoul’s urban development. The collective invites us to reconsider migration and architectural renovation through a broader lens, one that goes beyond the perspective of the human species.   

Foundland Collective

Foundland Collective was founded in 2009 by Lauren Alexander (born 1983, Cape Town) and Ghalia Esrakbi (born 1978, Damascus). Based today between Amsterdam and Cairo, the duo explores numerous artistic forms, ranging from filmmaking and design to performed lectures. The works presented in Cosmopolis #1 turn around the relations of Europe and the United States with the Middle East, furthering a focus developed by the collective since 2011, in the context of the Arab Spring and the war in Syria. The video Maher’s groundplan drawing presents the testimony of a Syrian refugee who maps the layout of his home, recounting his life during the war and his fleeing. The New World evokes the history of the first waves of Arab immigrants to the United States, beginning in the 1880s, through elements drawn from the archives of the Faris and Yamna Naff Arab American Collection at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History in Washington DC. The installation incorporates a map and a video narrating the travels of Amer and Sana Khaddaj, Lebanese musicians of Palestinian origin who migrated to the United States in 1947.