International Conference "Taking part in art and culture"

The international conference “Taking Part in Art and Culture. Practices, Theories and Policies in Today’s Cultural Mediation” is focusing on the issue of “participation” in the cultural field. We will be looking into the ways in which it has evolved (notably since the 1970s) and in which it influences the role of cultural mediation today. The Conference takes place in Marseille, 22-24 October 2020.

Zusammenfassung

Beschreibung

The international conference “Taking Part in Art and Culture. Practices, Theories and Policies in Today’s Cultural Mediation” is focusing on the issue of “participation” in the cultural field (see CFP enclosed). We will be looking into the ways in which it has evolved (notably since the 1970s) and in which it influences the role of cultural mediation today.

The conference presentations will follow three main axes:

  1. The genealogy of participatory mediation practices (notably interrogating the role of cultural mediation in the educational turn in curatorial practices)
  2. Mediation and cultural rights (questioning the influence of the increasingly important topic of cultural rights on the conception, interpretation and reception of the collective cultural and artistic heritage) 
  3. What teaching cultural mediation and training cultural mediators means or (could mean) today.

The purpose of this conference is to present an overview of these issues through the particular prism of the posture of mediators, a posture that may be characterised as paradoxical, notwithstanding its precarious status in the cultural field. Mediators are the depositaries of the link existing between the public and artistic or cultural offers, and their voice can never be captured as the voice of the public, the voice of artists, nor even as the voice of their employing structures. Their ceaseless engagement is therefore to struggle out of the confining roles that may result from this posture, because these roles give foundation to an order of things they precisely attempt to abolish. In this order of things, figures of exteriority are constructed within the walls of institutions, and embodied by members of the public who are labeled as unadapted to cultural spaces.

The conference will take place in Marseille (France), in Aix-Marseille University and at the Tiers QG of Manifesta 13, from October 22nd to October 24th 2020.

Kontakt

Dokumente senden an

mediation.prendrepart[ at ]gmail.com