initiated by Chto Delat collective and supported by Rosa Luxemburg Foundation 

We invite you to apply for the Summer school which will take place in Berlin from 30.07.2015 until 09.08.2015

The participation in the school is free. Travel and accomodation costs can be provided for a limited number of participants from Eastern Europe and the countries of the former Soviet Union. The number of participants is limited to 30 people and travel grants will be considered on each personal case.

Application deadline – 21.06.2015. The decision on participants will be announced till the end of June.

The program addresses a young generation of artists and activists those who lives or originates from ex-socialist countries and want to find new ways to influence their society through a variety of experimental practices which question the notion of art and conventional approaches to politics.

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What is socialist art?

Since 2013, the Russian Collective Chto Delat (www.chtodelat.org) has conceptualized and implemented an experimental educational platform – the School for Engaged Art in St. Petersburg, supported by Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung (Moscow). The project has gained serious recognition in the Russian public sphere and among young professionals who use the school as a tool of political and civic empowerment. The school has also gained significant attention among the international scene as a unique attempt to reclaim and reconsider new forms of emancipatory education through art practice.

General outlines

The collective Chto Delat is well known for its utopian questioning and promoting the communist imaginary and desires. With the project of our summer School, we want to focus on a more pragmatic approach to the arts and scrutinize different artistic practices, which operate today in a hostile world of commodity fetishism but are structured in a fundamentally different way.  We think that it has become  more urgent than ever, since we, the cultural workers, are challenged by developments of the new European left popular movements and parties which demonstrate the courage to claim the power and thus have to restructure not just urgent economic issues and fight against austerity but also to provide a new vision of cultural politics (as the case of Syriza or Podemos) providing a possibility of true socialist political change for a future.

There is a certain numbers of artistic positions in contemporary art which do not subjugate to the logic of capital and profit but try to establish a viable alternative to the current system. These practices will be discussed in the School with a team of tutors (4 artists from collective Chto Delat) and guest teachers who will help us to gain an overview of urgencies and traps of these issues. Among the guest teachers will be: Boris Buden, Alice Creischer and Andreas Siekman, Marina Naprushkina, Vincent van Gerven Oei, Konstanze Schmitt and David Riff.

At the end of the School the participants will present the results to a Berlin public in the form of a collective performance: a learning play.

Applications:

please send a short CV, motivation letter, and short essay – your choice of example of socialist art practice of today and motivate what socialist about it to the mail dmvilen@gmail.com