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TRANSVERSAL AESTHETICS / IMMUNITY ~ COMMUNITY
Idensitat + Consorci de Museus de la Comunitat Valenciana

IDENSITAT, together with the Consorci de Museus de la Comunitat Valenciana opens the third edition of the Transversal Aesthetics programme, which, under the title IMMUNITY – COMMUNITY, will promote three projects that combine research and production in the cities of València, Alicante and Castelló, connecting artistic practices to social spaces within specific contexts of each of the three cities. 

The project gives a series of production and experimentation activities together with artistic spaces and educational contexts, plans for which include two temporary residencies subject to a public open call, and a third by invitation. The programme will take place during 2022 and early 2023, and is part of the European project Who Cares?

One of the residencies will take place in Alicante, with the collaboration of the Centro Cultural Las Cigarreras, with two months set aside for successful applicants to work on a proposal aimed at experimentation-production in the local context. The residency in Valencia, thanks to the collaboration of the Centre del Carme Cultura Contemporània, is aimed at mediation practices related to the proposed topic, with the possibility of creating an interdisciplinary working group and/or combining onsite and online work. The residency may use the workspaces at the Centre del Carme Cultura Contemporània, and may be developed in various phases until March 2023, depending on the needs of the project. 

Transversal Aesthetics is a project for research and experimentation on the intersection between art, mediation and social space. A place of confluence between artistic practices as a vehicle for critical research; mediation activities as a vehicle for the production of content, interaction and learning transfer; and the urban context as a vehicle for connecting specific themes of work to a specific active social space relevant to these themes. 

SUBJECT AREA: IMMUNITY - COMMUNITY

The work of the project will be based upon the tensions, paradoxes or connections generated by the words Community and Immunity. Ordinarily, the concept of community is used to emphasise the importance of a group of people who share elements in common that lend the group a certain distinctive character, elements such as identity, place, ideology, beliefs; elements of belonging to a collective (or group of people) that maintains connective bonds between them, and that, for one reason or another, differentiates group members in relation to members of other groups, but which also unites, strengthens, and immunises them. In this sense , the concept of immunity is reappearing strongly in this specific context of the pandemic, and is related to community in the sense that it refers to that which protects from constant external dangers. From this perspective, community and immunity form a whole that withdraws into itself, attempting to establish protection and isolation, and to avoid any kind of external contagion, but it also offers bonding, close relationships, and organisation in the face of a threat.

Both concepts are dealt with by Roberto Espósito[1],in a direction that we are interested in taking up in order to adapt them for this project. According to the author, bearing in mind the etymological roots of the words, and interrogating the neoconservative and negative component that they imply, he suggests that the community opens up and exposes the individual, turning him towards his own exterior, liberates him towards his externality. It is not the place of identity, of belonging, of appropriation, but on the contrary, of plurality, of difference or otherness. Immunity, according to Esposito, causes the individual to withdraw inside himself, confines him in his own skin, brings the exterior back to the interior, eliminates it as outside.

In a context such as the present one, immunity is perceived as the general objective, as the globalised cure that must preserve the different communities from contagion. And, extending beyond the sanitary, it is established in policies that reaffirm national, neighbourhood and domestic territories. The techno-policies of immunity and fear contribute to generating closed communities that favor inequality.

But also, in this tension, other dimensions of the concept of community open up; dimensions in which knowledge-communities related to ecology are generated, with dissident archives, local memories, virtual communities, inter-species communities, and a long list of other communities; dimensions in which the community becomes almost activist; resistance and survival means, precisely, reinforcing its communitarian dimension in order to immunise itself to globalisation.

The philosophy of care in which this project is inserted, is premised upon imagining possible futures in which mutual care and care of our environment are foregrounded, for an improvement in subjective relationships, and a recovery of the community as a res publica, as a space of the common, of affectivity and learning, with its dangers of turning into an environment of difference and/or exclusion .It is from this perspective that we posit a critical working space, problematising the concepts of community and immunity, as a metaphor for the flux of connections with the outside, with the other, as a channel opening out and occasionally overspilling, in which contagion acquires a positive character, since it allows the incorporation of strange new organisms, to survive them, and to rediscover the equilibrium that helps in recovering the loss of sociability in the context of the pandemic.
If the raw material of social life is in-person interactive sociability[2, we are now subjected to a regime in which this in-person interaction is subject to the strategy of isolation, and the construction of the community bubble. This fruitful and contradictory relationship between community, immunity, care and territory is what encourages us to send out this open call for projects that propose creative responses to the complexity of this approach, which is at the same time the complexity of our most recent contemporaneity.

PRESELECTED PROJECTES
_ La Polinizadora, Gabriela León and María García Ibáñez (Onsite residency, Alacant)
_ Matorral, Manuela Pedrón, Carolina Sisabel and Adriana Reyes (Hybrid residency, València)
SELECTED PROJECTS
_ El ponent la mou, el llevant la plou, colectivo Las Mediocre (Onsite residency, Alacant)
_ Equipo interdisciplinario de ensayos malvidentes, Laura Arensburg (Hybrid residency, València)


WHO IS AIMED AT?

- Onsite residency: The call is aimed at artists  interested in developing an artistic experimentation project  on the specific theme proposed. The residency will take place between October and November 2022 at Centro Cultural Las Cigarreres in Alicante.

- Hybrid residency: Artistic mediation residency, based upon the proposed theme. The projects can take place until March 2023, combining onsite and online phases, and distributing the onsite work according to the needs of the project and its members. The open call demands a project that straddles mediation and research, creating a dialogue between the concepts of "Community – Immunity" from a contemporary point of view, through relational and thought-based methodologies.  For the onsite phases, the Centre del Carme Cultura Contemporània in Valencia will provide spaces, subject to availability.

FEES
The production/experimentation residency will be granted a fee of 2,400 euros for two months, a maximum of 2,000 euros for production, and 1,400 euros for travel and accommodation, taxes included.
The mediation hybrid residency will be granted a fee 2,500 euros in fees, a maximum of 2,000 euros for the process and possible production, and 1,400 euros for travel and accommodation, taxes included. 

DOCUMENTATION TO SUBMIT

At Idensitat, we are reevaluating how we conduct our open calls, with the aim of rethinking existing models to show greater consideration to artists, and to those who take part in our juries. For this reason,  we suggest an open call in two stages.
The first consists of a pre-project presentation, from which four of those proposals received (two per category) will be selected to move on to a second stage. The two pre-selected proposals (an experimental-production and a mediation residence) that are not selected, will receive a remuneration of € 200 each for having developed the pre-project submitted. In this second phase, consultations may take place between the organisers and the artists/collectives, in order to adjust proposals in accordance with the structural framework proposed by the organisation. From among these 4 projects, one per category will be chosen. Projects which have been pre-selected, but which have not been chosen, will be invited to participate in certain public presentations.

Stage 1
Proposals should be sent in digital format using the specific form, filling in each of the required fields, and attached in a single document using PDF format (maximum 8 Mb), which must  include:

- Proposal. Document of 5 pages max. A written document defining the category of residence to which it's presented, the basic lines of the project  indicating a working methodology which takes into account the elements indicated above, as specified in the basis of the open call, and for each category, including a brief portfolio of previous work and/or work related to the themes of the proposal, to facilitate understanding of the project (or link to a web page). Please, remember to indicate in the title of the document: Name and modality (Alicante or València).
- CVs of all project members, specifying one representative in the case of a group application, or an individual CV, in the case of an individual application , in free format.
- Contact details (name, telephone number, e-mail and postal address).

Stage 2
- Project defined. A project plan, including objectives, methodology, activities and a calendar of work.
- Additional materials which will help convey a deeper understanding of the nature of the project.
- An interview with representatives of the organisation.

The deadline for the first stage of the open call is Monday 4th of April 2022. The deadline date for the second stage will be communicated to those on the shortlist of four in due course.

ACCESS TO APPLICATION FORM HERE Please, remember to indicate in the title of the document: Name and modality (Alicante or València).

Questions regarding the open call: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

EVALUATION CRITERIA
Points to consider:
The quality of the proposal, the methodology,  the relevance of the actions in accordance with the main theme of the call, and the sustainability of the project.
Projects will be selected by a jury comprising José Luis Pérez Pont, managing director of the Consorci de Museus de la Comunitat Valenciana, Nerea de Diego, Co-director of Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Huarte, Carolina Fuentes Mascarell, coordinator of the Centre Cultural Las Cigarreras in Alicante, Clàudia Segura, curator of MACBA Museu Art Contemporani de Barcelona, and Ramon Parramon and Roser Colomar Palazón, members of the Idensitat team. 

DATES
The residency project will last two months, and will take place between October and November 2022 at the Centre Cultural Les Cigarreres in Alicante. 

The mediation project will be developed until March 2023 depending on the proposal and the needs of the selected project, and may take place either in the spaces available at the Centre del Carme Cultura Contemporània, or in the virtual environment, or in other spaces with significance to the proposal. The spaces available for the presentation of results and the celebration of activities related to the project will be subject to the programming of participating art centres. 

TERMS & CONDITIONS 

The selected works will be the property of the artist or artists. IDENSITAT and the CONSORCI DE MUSEUS DE LA COMUNITAT VALENCIANA, as promoters of TRANSVERSAL AESTHETICS / IMMUNITY - COMMUNITY, may reproduce and disseminate through online or paper publications all or part of the programme, always citing the respective artists  and collaborating agents. IDENSITAT and CONSORCI DE MUSEUS DE LA COMUNITAT VALENCIANA will archive all the documentation generated from this call and the development of the project in its entirety.

Learn more about past editions of Transversal Aesthetics


[1] Espósito, R. (2009). Comunidad, Inmunidad y Biopolítica. Barcelona: Herder

Espósito, R. (2003). Communitas. Origen y destino de la comunidad. Buenos Aires: Amorrortu

[2] Martuccelli, D. (2021). La tecnología anti-socioLógica y tecno-experta de la Pandemia del Covid-19. En Papeles del CEIC. http://dx.doi.org/10.1387/pceic.21916


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