dripfeed_CRITICAL

Arteles Creative Center Arteles Creative Center in Finland is one of the largest and most international creative residencies in Finland/ Scandinavia. Welcoming over 90 selected visual artists/ curators/ musicians/ writers/ performance artists/ photographers/ designers / architects per year. It is an inspiring place to produce original work and collaborate with other energetic and ambitious artists & creative professionals for a concentrated period of time from 1 to 3 months.

This conversation between David Goldenberg and Patricia Reed probes into models and the development of participatory practices. Fragments of the discussion have been culled and elaborated from issues raised during a series of online debates between practitioners experimenting in participatory practices in the Post-Autonomy chat room, November 2007 to February 2008. The question “What is a participatory practice?” is a continuous thread linking the start of Goldenberg’s Post-Autonomy project with the following set of concerns.

In late 2006, members of the La Makabra circus, expelled from the factory in Barcelona’s Poble Nou neighbourhood, where they had been squatting, chose to put into practice the guiding precept of the local squatter movement: un desalojo, una ocupación, the immediate occupation of another space in response to a police-enforced eviction. La Makabra decided to occupy a warehouse in the near-empty nineteenth-century industrial complex of Can Ricart, the largest of its kind still intact in Barcelona.