KONTAMINÁCIE: UTOPIAN IMAGINARIUM - LARGER ECOSYSTEMS FOR ECOLOGICALLY SUSTAINABLE PRACTICE

Duration: 150 min.

 

Utopian Imaginarium - Utopia in involuntary degrowth.

Sharing resources in a time of crisis. 
Imagination of Utopian frames and collaborations.
Resources: Renewable and Non-renewable art resources 
support, friendship, collectivity,  
Preparing for the end of the art / preparing for the new world.

 

Facilitated: T. Žďárský (NaZemi), M. Hriešik

Guests: Ula Zerek (Academy for Sustainable Production), Biljana Tanurovska (Lokomotiva), Heike Albrecht (dancescape), Marketa Málková (Rezi.dance), Boris Meluš (Nadácia Cvernovka) 

 

 

​​Tadeáš Žďárský

is one of the leading advocates of degrowth in Central Europe. He works with the organization NaZemi, where he co-founded the degrowth team and leads the Degrowth Academy and Degrowth Summer School. He lectures, writes, and facilitates workshops on degrowth. His interests include self-organization, facilitation, nonviolent communication, and transformative education as tools for social change. He holds a master’s degree in Environmental Studies from Masaryk University and studied at the University of Oslo (Norway) and Hampshire College (USA).

 

Maja Hriešik

works in dramaturgy across art, activism, theory, and practice. She’s been a dance magazine editor, theatre festival curator, Slovak public radio host on public space and activism, and co-founded the PLAST Slovak Contemporary Dance Platform. For over a decade she’s freelanced with Slovak and Czech choreographers. As lecturer at the Dance Faculty in Bratislava and author of On Corporeal Dramaturgies in Contemporary Dance (2013), she co-curated Micro and Macro Dramaturgies in Dance and mentors art organisations. She values human and nonhuman connections, collaboration, intersections, and dialogue as strategies in ongoing crisis.

Ula Zerek

A freelance creative producer, based by the Baltic Sea, a co-founder of polka dot foundation which creates spaces for interdisciplinary dialogue between arts, science, social life and creative business – where art of dance and choreography can play a meaningful role and initiate real changes. Polka dot is one of partnering organisations leading NATURE OF US project since 2022. Since 2023 Zerek has run the Art Spaces - Dance program for the Urban Culture Institute in Gdańsk (Poland), organizing workshops, education programs, performances, publications, and conferences. She coorganised Polish Dance Platform 2019 in Gdańsk. She has an experience of over five years in theater production and management for young audiences at Miejski Teatr Miniatura in Gdańsk. She is a graduate of the University of Gdańsk and the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk. She is also a choreographer and dancer working in interdisciplinary contexts. A multitasking full time mother of three.

I create spaces where art has a meaning. I am an artist (dancer/choreographer), as well as a creative producer. Both activities are closely related for me. The experience of artistic practice gives me a deep sense of the meaning of art's presence in actions that can bring about real social change.

 

The Academy of Sustainable Production

is an initiative founded on conviction about the potential hidden in creative thinking and cross-sectoral cooperation between arts and

business. The program is created by the curatorial and production team Julia Asperska,

Karolina Wycisk, Ula Zerek with the participation of invited cultural producers and business representatives.

Adopting an active attitude towards the global crisis and innovative solutions that will

contribute to the well-being of people and the natural environment is only possible through joint actions of various sectors. Artistic practices play an important role in developing cross-sectoral cooperation with busienes, science and technology.

The Academy of Sustainable Production is the first program of its kind in Poland, during

which business representatives meet with producers from the world of culture and art to

jointly develop tools and recommendations for a better - sustainable system. Combining

skills and experiences, participants are invited to a joint experiment and creative

improvisation. In the partnership dialogue of the group, producers play a mediating role,

which is why their participation is important and will allow for the introduction of a fresh,

creative perspective.

 

Biljana Tanurovska-Kjulavkovski

is a curator, researcher, writer and cultural producer at the intersection of dance, theatre and visual arts performance, art history, cultural policy, independent cultural scenes, activist, feminist and environmental (curatorial) practices. She works as a freelancer and as a programme director of Lokomotiva, Skopje. Currently, she is a co-researcher for the NADA Digital Archive of Dance and Performance; Dance Map research project; co-curator of the exhibition Dancing, Resisting, (Un)working (in Zagreb and Ljubljana) and Performance Platform festival in Skopje (2023-); curator of the international school Curating in Context, and co-mentor of the Critical Practice (Made in Yu) and Re-Imagine project. She teaches and writes, is an art historian and holds a PhD from the Faculty of Drama Arts in Belgrade. She works collaboratively, believing that meaningful creation and art/cultural production thrive through connections and relations with others.

 

Heike Albrecht

works as a curator in the interdisciplinary programme area of the performing arts, with a focus on contemporary dance and performance.

Her work focuses on intentions and interactions that translate / keep translatable the concreteness of the body. Aspects of contemporary history and urban space developments within a changing society and its communities are connected in order to negotiate them artistically. The integration of dance studies, body history and the reflection of image cultures also play a central role.

Artistic direction (selection): know your rights WESTEND 05 Leipzig, 2007-2010 artistic director at the Sophiensaele Berlin, As we speak - Future Languages Goethe-Institut as part of the “European Capital of Culture Maribor 2012”, Tanznacht Berlin 2006 & 2014, What the Body Remembers. On the Actuality of Dance Heritage at the Akademie der Künste Berlin, 35 Years of the Environmental Library an der Zionskirche Berlin, Syrian Cassette Archives at the Akademie der Künste Berlin. Since 2022 Dancescape – a Research project for landscape-based dance and performance practice.

 

dancescape

Heike Albrecht uses the term "dancescape" to refer to research into choreographies and body-based performance works that are set in landscapes. As performances outside of architecture and conventional stage spaces, these include diverse performance formats, aesthetics, practices and concepts, each developed in a site-specific way. Aspects of landscapes as “shared space” are reflected in their cultural arrangements, historical concepts or geopolitical spatial relationships and the particularities of regional ecosystems in the mirror of anthropocentrically caused climate and environmental changes. Aspects of landscapes as “shared space” are reflected in their cultural arrangements, historical concepts or geopolitical spatial relationships and the particularities of regional ecosystems in the mirror of debates on anthropocentrically caused climate and environmental changes, but evaluated in the economic-capitalist appropriation of nature and land in the Capitalocene.

Landscape is understood as a compositional concept that always involves territorial, political, economic, social, aesthetic, ethnological, philosophical, geographical and ecological attributions.

 

Markéta Málková 

Cultural manager, curator, director of an artist residency house REZI.DANCE, chairwoman of the professional organization Vize Tance, member of grant committees, expert on regional cultural policy, curator of projects for České Budějovice -

European Capital of Culture 2028 z.ú. She is interested in connecting artistic disciplines - mainly dance and architecture/ contemporary art. In the past she has collaborated with Michal Škoda from the House of Art in České Budějovice on several projects dealing with this topic. V Currently she is interested in land art and artistic interventions in the landscape (both visual and movement) and how to work non-violently with the local community and involve them in the process of active spectatorship or creation. She is the artistic director of a performance art festival in the landscape SKLIZEŇ in Komařice.

 

Boris Meluš

is a graphic designer and cultural developer. He co-founded Nová Cvernovka in Bratislava in 2016 which became the largest creative and cultural center in Slovakia built from the bottom up. Nowadays, he helps to transform its campus from the 1940-50s into an environmentally and socially sustainable and resilient living lab. His designer practice involves communication, book and interface design.