16 Feb 2010

2nd Roma Pavilion - Call the Witness - Open Call for Submissions

The curatorial team of The 2nd Roma Pavilion - Call the Witness announces its open call for artists, researchers and media archive.  

This project, which will be presented in Venice in 2011, is conceptualised and curated by the interdisciplinary collaborative curatorial team: Suzana Milevska, Vladan Jeremic, Rena Raedle and Enisa Eminovska.
 

The 2nd Roma Pavilion - Call the Witness is an interdisciplinary collaboration that aims at fostering, producing and presenting contemporary and new media art by Roma artists from different regions and cultures. At the core of the project lies the concept of the contemporary artist as an instantaneous witness of his/her time who is not a passive viewer but rather acts as an active participant in solidarity with the events and people that provoked his/her art work. Such a phenomenon, wherein art becomes a potential agent of social makeover, acquires a completely new prospect in this period of digitalisation and globalisation, and may greatly affect Roma communities.  

We issue a “Call for Witnesses” to bring to light testimonies and statements from artists and researchers that will raise awareness of the different situations of Roma communities throughout the world, ranging from displacement and discrimination to successful emancipatory processes. The question: who has control over the means of representation and has the power to promote the dominant cultural and moral values concerning Roma communities provoked us to put emphasis on new media art as an available means for self-presentation and self-reflection.  

We invite artists and researchers to submit proposals that address these issues in a way that will allow further collaborative development, both of content and media-wise. The selected contributors will be invited to present and discuss their proposals at a working meeting to take place in Belgrade (April 2010) where we will discuss the possibilities of eventual further productions of individual works or collaborative projects. The conditions for production will be agreed for the most promising concepts to be realised in 2010 and presented at the 2nd Roma Pavilion in Venice (2011).

The project 2nd Roma Pavilion - Call the Witness is organised by the Roma Media Base - A Skopje based organisation for archiving, producing and presenting contemporary and new media art by Roma artists and communities, and the Biro  for Culture and Communication from Belgrade. The project is supported by the Open Society Institute and other organisations and sponsors.  

The First Roma Pavilion took place in 2007 as a collateral exhibition at the 52nd Venice Biennale and was initiated by the Open Society Institute.

HOW TO APPLY?
Address: callthewitness@gmail.com

1. Call for artists/researchers
Deadline: 15 March 2010

The applications should consist of:

- comprehensive narrative CV (up to 500 words),
- motivational letter and draft (up to 500 words) that  will draw on your interests and the main issues addressed in this project
- your e-mail/phone contacts

Optional:
- visual materials (screenshots, links to videos, pdfs, links to websites, etc) from existing works or works in progress and proposals for new research, photographs, video, animation, performance, comic strips, sound art and other new media projects.
 
Who can apply: all Roma artists and other emerging Roma professionals (art researchers, theorists, curators, activists, etc.), working individually or in groups in the fields of contemporary art and culture from any country and region.  

2. Call the Witness Media Archive
Deadline: 1 May 2010

We invite Roma cultural centers, archives, festivals and other organisations and producers to submit existing new media productions (photo archives, video research projects, etc.) to the Call the Witness Media Archive that will be presented at the 2nd Roma Pavilion in Venice.  

At this stage please submit only a description of the media production(s) or the content of your archive, the address of your organisation and samples (texts, images jpgs, links to video excerpts, existing online archives, etc.)