Seminar
A.C.T. Democ[k]racy
Seminar Education and Freedom
Education and training in their contributions to democratic creativity
Thursday 21 February 2013
EESAB - Rennes
The Art Cooperation Transmission Democ[k]racy project brings together seven institutional players, more than forty artists and around thirty researchers. Combining residencies, seminars and exhibitions, A.C.T. will move on from Rennes to Eindhoven in the Netherlands, Cluj in Romania, and finally Belgrade in Serbia, until August 2014.
Because the withdrawal into separatist identities that occurs in many European countries in an alarming symptom of a crisis of democracy within Europe, the partners of A.C.T. choose to promote Art as a critical space in the fundamental debate on the future of Democracy. This involves both recognising the importance of a freedom of creation, while questioning the training methods and the anchorage of artists’ works in the social space. This project is passionately in favour of movement, interchange and openness as the first conditions for the free circulation of ideas and works.
The seminar Education and Freedom
Experimenting a critical research pole on Art and Democracy, and gathering more than thirty multidisciplinary researchers, A.C.T. offers, from January 2012 until June 2014, three seminars and one symposium around four issues: education, freedom, urbanism and poetics. Trough these themes, the conditions for intellectual and artistic emancipation within Democracies will be explored. When artistic practices offer the conditions for intellectual emancipation, they form the place and the moment for the implementation of a democratic practice.
In Rennes, the seminar of the 21st February will gather, around two roundtables, artists, teachers, professionals and researchers around the question of artistic education and training in their contributions to democratic creativity. During the morning, the statements and debates will focus on the issue of artistic and cultural education in schools: what place does it hold in Europe? How to train our perceptions and to form tomorrow’s critical citizens. During the afternoon, the discussions will focus on the teaching of Arts and culture in Art schools and Universities in Europe: what is the importance given to reflection, critical thinking and political education in Art schools and Universities? More broadly, the role of Art students in the public democratic areas will be questioned. The debates will be enriched by an audience of artists, students, associative and public policy workers, teachers, for a participative and collective thinking.