11 October 2013 / Various locations
The project consists of a series of four “keynote” artists’ productions; local “action research” projects led by each organization involving artist’s projects that will be developed with the participation of communities who share the concerns of the project.
It also connects with the activities of Cluster, a wider network of eight visual arts organizations, each located in residential areas peripheral to large cities in Europe and its edges, which also involves CAC Brétigny, Brétigny s/Orge, France; CA2M Centro Dos De Mayo, Madrid, Spain; Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, Aubervilliers, France; The Israeli Center for Digital Art, Holon, Israel; Zavod P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E., Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Each of these organizations are actively involved in their local contexts, fostering their embeddedness within their surroundings. Cluster has the goal of facilitating knowledge exchange in relation to how our organizations operate within our local contexts, which will take place during 2012-2013 through a series of meetings hosted by each organization in the network.
COHAB activities thus far:
Publishing in Process: Ownership in Question
Tensta Konsthall, May 2012
A series of public seminars led by Marysia Lewandowska and Laurel Ptak in which artists and writers presented projects and perspectives around the intersection of art, intellectual property, political economy and the public realm. The project asked, at a moment when the distribution between what is privately owned and publicly shared in society is being fundamentally scrutinised, questioned and protested in many parts of the world, what do notions of production, property, ownership and exchange mean to us right now?
I Can’t Work Like This
Casco, 1 May–23 June 2012
Departing from Casco’s long-term “living research” project The Grand Domestic Revolution – User’s Manual, I Can’t Work Like This examined how workers from variant sectors can get effectively organized through a collaborative and transdisciplinary approach involving art, design, action and theory.
Invisible Spaces of Parenthood
The Showroom, 26 June–28 July 2012
Realized in the context of The Showroom’s ongoing programme of local participation work, Communal Knowledge, artist Andrea Francke realized a series of workshops explored pragmatic propositions for a better future explores issues surrounding childcare in collaboration with The Showroom’s local nurseries, childminders, children’s centres and parent groups, seeking new models and possibilities, feeding into a Manual, to be launched on 24 October 2012.
The Grand Domestic Revolution GOES ON
The Showroom, 12 September–27 October 2012
This multi-faceted long term ‘living research’ project initiated by Casco explores the domestic sphere, imagining new forms of living and working in common. Inspired by US late nineteenth-century “material feminist” movements that experimented with communal solutions to isolated domestic life and work, GDR involved artists, designers, domestic workers, architects, gardeners, activists and others to collaboratively experiment with and re-articulate the domestic sphere challenging traditional and contemporary divisions of private and public. In traveling to The Showroom, the GDR came into contact with The Showroom’s long term programme of local participation work Communal Knowledge.
Beatrice Gibson: The Tiger’s Mind
The Showroom, 13 November 2012–12 January 2013
The Tiger’s Mind is based on an experimental narrative score of the same name, written in 1967 by the radical British composer Cornelius Cardew. Departing from the character based and improvisatory nature of the score and working with a fixed group of artists for over a year long period, the film deployed the score as a production structure inviting the participants to develop its varying components: soundtrack, set, special effects, music and text, to form a mediation on collaborative work.
