Session 09: EREHWON/NOWHERE

A panel discussion with with: Bastien Gilbert, Virginija Januškevičiūtė(Baltic Notebooks of Anthony Blunt), Karen Mirza and Brad Butler (Museum of Non-Participation), Claire Tancons and Christopher Cozier (Alice Yard), Oloff Olson. Bastien Gilbert is the Executive Director of the Regroupement des centres d’artistes autogérés du Québec (RCAAQ) and has worked as a cultural administrator for more than 25 years, after having been a paleontologist and a teacher. He was instrumental in the founding of the Conseil de la culture de la région du Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean in 1978. In 1986, he cofounded the RCAAQ. It represents an interest community of over 2,250 professional artists and cultural workers. Each year, this network produces over 900 activities including exhibitions, performances, publications, symposiums, and so on. See rcaaq.org. Virginija Januškeviciute is currently a curator at the Contemporary Art Centre (CAC) in Vilnius, Lithuania. She is also one of the founders of the Baltic Notebooks of Anthony Blunt, an editorial initiative aimed to mediate, generate and suggest real events; the contributions by artists and writers are mainly published online at www.blunt.cc and in an accumulating paper edition. Brad Butler and Karen Mirza organize The Museum of Non Participation in the UK. It proposes a museum as a conceptual (geo)political construct of gesture, image, and thresholds of language. The Museum of Non Participation was conceived during the Pakistani Lawyers movement in Islamabad – protests Mirza and Butler witnessed through the windows of the National Art Gallery – and developed over an eighteen-month period. As part of the project, the artists have worked with street vendors, Urdu translators, architects, estate agents, housing activists, lawyers, hairdressers, filmmakers, wedding photographers, newspaper printers, artists, and writers to create spaces for dialogue and exchange. The project has taken the form of various media. Claire Tancons (USA)
and Christopher Cozier (Trinidad). Tancons is a curator, writer, and researcher whose work focuses on carnival, public ceremonial culture, and protest movements. Christopher Cozier is an artist, writer, and curator living and working in Trinidad. Cozier co-directs Alice Yard at once a physical space, a collaborative network, and an ongoing conversation about contemporary art and creativity in the Caribbean.