Archipelago of Artistic Practices
The Eavatea team, together with nadine, Kunsthal Gent, Festival Publieke Werken (Ghent), M HKA and Flemish Center for Art Archives (CKV), are working on Archipelago of Artistic Practices, an artistic and discursive programme that runs from July 2024 to July 2025. The programme questions the Eavatea prototype as an innovative relational infrastructure. The programme of artistic presentations is a prism to have conversations about it that are precise, ambitious and public.
Eavatea is currently a prototype in development, which means that there is room for improvement, both in terms of the architecture and design of the tool. But even more important are the discussions and efforts that still need to take place in terms of its use, management and distribution. The public programmes proposed here, consisting of discussions, workshops, film screenings, presentations of inspiring historical and contemporary examples and artists experimenting with the mapping prototype, will delve deeper into the new possibilities of the prototype: both in terms of (collective) research, presentation, archiving and distribution, as well as questions around management, collective ownership, and commoning in order to allow other communities use their own version of the tool with their own interpretation.
Consultation at the level of use, management and distribution of the tool are the three basic anchors of the Archipelago of Artistic Practice programmes. They address the possibilities and implications of the prototype, but are also relevant to broader trends in the arts field and society: mapping versus countermapping, archiving and reactivating ephemeral practices, commoning and cooperatives, single and multiple authorship, memory and collection…
This brings us to three programme anchors.
1. Eavatea as artistic experiment: forms of counter-mapping
The dominant systems of indexing, archiving and geolocation on 2D maps are based on a Cartesian grid. Surveillance and data tracking of online maps do not allow for alternative narratives and different knowledge systems. How can knowledge systems be confronted and intermingled? The Eavatea prototype functions as a counter-mapping infrastructure and as such takes into account what we consider important in our art practices: an in-situ knowledge based on direct observation, discussions, collaborations. Our practices arise in encounters with people, in the urban or rural landscape, in narrative telling, in a time-lapse with relations and dependencies.
2. Eavatea as a collective instrument
From the need for a pluralistic perspective, the digital infrastructure raises questions about its management and legal framework. The legal questioning will focus on solutions that fit the values of commoning practices. Forms of co-ownership, co-authorship, licenses such as the ‘copyfair’ licenses where both the individual and the collective can share in the added value will be discussed. The organizational framework that we will create for this will be located in the play field between digital commons and cooperative enterprise.
3. Eavatea as a multiple community
Eavatea can bridge disciplines such as art, architecture and social practice and enrich them with practices from heritage, technology, cartography, etc. Eavatea can become an agora that encourages collective research with and for a public, and wants to enable a diversity of voices. Organisations and collectives can unite in different mapping communities. Together they form a federation in which they share values and commitments.
The Archipelago of Artistic Practices programme formats include artistic presentations (small exhibitions and showcases) in context of which there are open workshops with guests and peers invited from their specific expertise. These discursive programs are rounded off with public activities such as screenings, performances, walks, bike tours…
Programme chapters