Repairing the Present :REWORLD :REWILD :RETOOL exhibition

The two STARTS residency project hosted by In4Art & Witteveen+Bos, will be shown during Repairing the Present exhibition triptych called :REWORLD :REWILD :RETOOL. The work of Penelope Cain will be featured at :REWORLD at MAXXI Museum in Rome from October 14^th until November 13^th 2022. The work from Grow Your Own Cloud will be featured at :RETOOL at ZKM | Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany from November 18^th until December 18^th 2022.

The exhibition mark the artistic outcome of the residency. However, to understand the process and accelerate the next steps, we have worked on some supporting material to guide your curiosity and connect with the theme of Reimagine City Nature. We do so through introducing a new framework of analysis: the Ways of Seeing and the first two Ways of Seeing articles will touch upon the STARTS residency projects. Next to that, we have created two process video documentations of the residencies.

This project has been realised with the support of the Local Export Groups and benefited from discussion, collaboration and insights from different experts. To give an insight into the ecosystem, we have created a network overview.

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WAYS of SEEING

Repairing the Present brings an artistic perspective to the innovation process and addresses the challenges of today’s society. To explore in which directions the work can be accelerated, we need different ways of seeing.

This approach is inspired by the following quote:

“We never just look at one thing: we are always looking at the relations between things and ourselves”

– John Berger, Ways of Seeing 1972

With translating this Ways of Seeing into an approach, we create the setting to elaborate on the artistic outcome and explore the innovation spill-overs a residency project might lead to. The projects are works-in-progress towards understanding a certain challenge and the in-between insights or results could lead to new artistic innovation, social innovation, ecological innovation, political agenda setting, process-, product-, or business model innovation.

We believe in having experiments, integrating art, science and technology, to direct responsible innovation, because the projects follow an alternative method of experimenting and embed an ethical framework. It provides possibilities for radical innovations, overarching the short term mindsets of incremental innovation. The residency projects reply to the challenge through providing directions and questions that are positioned and supported with visual (or sensible) experiments and prototypes (often enabled by technological tools). In Ways of Seeing, we don’t give a project description, but the interpretation In4Art formulates based on the collaborations in the STARTS residency projects. The structure we follow is:  we start with a statement, followed by a challenge and leading to different ways of seeing.

Articles:

Did you get interested in this Ways of Seeing approach of analysing the STARTS residencies? Join us during the Ways of Seeing Seminar opening weekend of the :RETOOL exhibition on November 19^th, 2022 at ZKM. Reach out to get more information on the program and how to subscribe.

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About “Repairing the Present”  :REWORLD :REWILD :RETOOL exhibition

As a corollary to 21 international residencies developed within the framework of S+T+ARTS Regional Centers and its Repairing the Present programme, a triptych of exhibitions and a series of accompanying events will be presented throughout the fall of 2022 at Ars Electronica (Linz), MEET (Milan), MAXXI (Rome), ZKM (Karlsruhe), and CINQUANTENAIRE (Brussels). Enabling artists and creative agents to develop their research in collaboration with innovation catalysts, clean tech hubs, and art institutions across Europe, each of the S+T+ARTS Residencies within Repairing the Present, points to an EU Green Deal or a New European Bauhaus goal and reflects pan-European or global challenges that require situated and collaborative approaches.

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An urgent call to collective inspiration and joint creative effort, Repairing the Present fosters dialogue between science, technology, and the arts as key players in the exploration of new scenarios for ecosystemic improvement. The very notion of repairing the present evokes a hands-on attitude to the immediacy of contemporary issues—from climate change to post-pandemic social dynamics, decolonial processes, and identity politics—while emphasising the importance of anticipating challenges and opportunities in the years, decades and centuries to come starting in the now. The Repairing the Present exhibition series :REWORLD :REWILD :RETOOL, curated by Manuel Cirauqui, explores the productive tension between the urge to project and the urge to care for; between the presentness of the living and the futurity of technological development; between the immediacy of bricolage and the mediation of prototypes in our path to enhanced co-existence.