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Topic: Seven (weekly mag) 11/07/2006

Seven

Diary By Agnieszka Rakoczy

Manifesta 6: what have we lost?

This is an obituary of an the international art event Manifesta 6 that was to take place in Nicosia between September and December this year. For all those who keep on asking what it would have brought to Nicosia, here it is – a comprehensive explanation of the art school’s three departments by their curators. By the way, it is not Manifesta 6 Green Book. It really wasn’t the same as Annan 5.

Department One
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Run by Mai Abu ElDahab

Invited: artists -- Dutch Jonas Ohlsson, Indian Monica Naroula, Iranians Babak Afrassiabi and Nasrin Tabatabai, Heman Chong from Singapore; curator Francesco Bernadelli from Italy; art critic Jan Verwoert from Germany; architect and professor at London’s Goldsmiths College Eyal Weizman from Israel, plus variant editors from the UK.

Quote from Mai (taken just before the project collapsed):

“The department will have a conventional structure. It will be in a house located in the old city, which on occasions will also functions as a bar where people will gather and have a talk and see what is going on. It will be like a real school with classes going on related to architecture, fiction writing, experimental music etc. People involved in it will be constantly generating various public events around the city -- parades, exhibitions, concerts – it will be part of their educational practice. A lot of things will be happening on the spot, without too much previous planning. It will be very dynamic. We will be informing people about what, when and where is happening by leaflets. It will be constantly changing.â€

Infamous Department Two that was to be located in the north:

Run by Anton Vidokle
Invited artists: Albanian Anri Sala, Lebanese Walid Raad and Jalal Toufic, British Liam Gillick, French Pierre Huyghe, American Martha Rosler, Iranian curator, writer and critic Tirdad Zolghadr (based in Switzerland), Israeli art historian and professor at London’s Goldsmiths College Irit Rogoff, Russian Professor of Philosophy and Media Theory at the Academy for Design in Karlsruhe Boris Groys, London-based architect Nikolaus Hirsch.

Quote from Anton (taken just before the project collapsed):
“It will be located in a three-story structure located in  the very centre of the Turkish Cypriot area. The building  itself will function as an artwork: the ground  will feature a gallery, a caf?e, a library and a  cin?matheque, and will be open to general public, while the  second and third floors will house living quarters for the  Manifesta participants, a conference hall and a media lab. The programme will incorporate exhibitions, lectures, symposia and international conferences organiszed by external partners alongside  the actual production of new works of art. It will have a programme of reciprocal visits and residencies between cultural  producers of Nicosia and Beirut and a lecture and screening series featuring writers, artists and filmmakers from  Europe, the Middle East and the Americas. It will produce an art journal, a  community newspaper for the old centre of Nicosia involving a study of the  diverse immigrant populations of the place, and a book. There will also be a series of inserts for the cultural  supplements of regional newspapers in Beirut, Nicosia, Cairo, Tel  Aviv, Athens and Istanbul produced by Walid Raad, and a Sunday lecture  series for local school teachers organised by Limassol-based social anthropologist Yiannis Papadakis,  that would aim at giving them information and tools on how to teach their students about the art  history of various communities surrounding Cyprus as means of  decreasing xenophobia.â€

Department Three:
Run by Florian Waldvogel
Invited: Israeli conductor Daniel Barenboim and his East West Divan Orchestra; German artists Silke Wagner and Jeronimo Voss; Austrian architect Stefan Lehnert,
German expert on right-wing extremism Alfred Schobert, Austrian radio masterminds Thomas Edlinger and Fritz Ostermayer, and German punk group Pornoheft.
Quote from Florian (taken just before the project collapsed):
“For the Manifesta 6 School, Daniel Barenboim and the East West Divan Orchestra will give a concert during the opening days of the school as well as offer a workshop on culture in the complex political reality of Cyprus. The band Pornoheft will play a mobile concert throughout the city, reclaiming the street as a stage for artistic expression. Silke Wagner will do a project in collaboration with ‘artistes’ of Nicosia that will include the production of a publication available free of charge at selected locations around the city. Jeronimo Voss will work on different approaches to the use of images as a medium of social control, and on the connection between text, images and language. Stefan Lehnert will work with local skateboarders on a concept of skateboarding as a subculture that defines urban space through its use - rather than its exchange - value. Alfred Schobert will supervise the Manifesta 6 Online School and through it he will offer seminars and workshops dealing with issues such as de-escalation strategies, the educational approach of Joseph Beuys and the constitution of Cyprus, and Edlinger and Ostermayer will broadcast a weekly two-hour programme at a public radio station in Nicosia that will focus on geo- and sociopolitical issues in Cyprus. Students will participate in all of the above.â€

Now, do you think we have lost something? I think we have.

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Re: Seven (weekly mag) 11/07/2006

dear friends,
lets all thank cyprus mail for being so caring for cy art and artists.

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Re: Seven (weekly mag) 11/07/2006

and also lets thank our great curators for their interest about the sensitivities of the island.
so much sensitivity that they couldnt find any other solution from provoking for the good of art and freedom of expression.
i am sure they care about the periphere more than us and for sure this wasnt just another project to push theis career forward.
we meet them and spoke to them . we may be not global but we are not stubid .
and for those who knows who the selected are they can undersdant better the high standarts the scholl was based on.
it is a pitty manifesta stopped but we shall not allow to some journalist who accoually it is the first time they care so much about local art seen to play their dirty money game