Event Schedule

 

Communication Station

 

Workshops

 

Screening

 

Discussion

 

Performance

 

communication station

 

During the residency period itself the participating artists will take as their base an old disused building in the district. They will be located within the community itself, living amongst the local residents, carrying out their everyday lives together. The artist will create a space within the neighbourhood which creates a new function through the provision of an open platform in which local people can stop by and gather at any time, share their experiences and opinions in relation to the local area and contribute to further investigation upon the function of the community itself.

 

 

workshops

 

A Letter to Zempukuji (via India and Laos)

While considering the history, the local problems, the function of community, the identity of the area, its diversity and its future the participants will also be connecting with communities in India and Laos, discovering about the different ways in which their neighbourhoods function and different utilizations of the shared spaces which make up their communities. In this exchange each participant will be asked to consider what it is that they wish to say to their community and how might they express this to others who have limited knowledge of such locality. This exchange will allow for an appreciation of the points of difference and commonality between communities in different parts of Asia and through such comparison also lead to new discoveries of one’s own familiar environment.

 

These workshops will include face to face and skype mediated forms of communication, as well as the exchange of physical objects including letters, pictures and maps for example. These dialogues will be brought together in generating a shared narrative between all three points, the collectively created stories being formed into a continuous manga /animation strip for example, along with other forms of documentation and creative expression, finally to be output into the town itself for example in the form of original post boxes which act as portals to the world of an individual member of that community or to a completely different community entirely. These post boxes will be presented along the road way between the Shinmachi Shopping Street, through Zempukuji park and onto Yuyu Zempukujikan (senior citizen’s centre).

 

 

Screening

 

A screening of a special selection of work by artists, film makers and independent media activists from across Laos and India will be presented with a particular focus upon "community". From documentary to fictional narrative to experimental art video, these works will offer a diverse vision as to the meaning and function of "being in common".

 

discussion

 

A discussion will be held as part of this program in which participating artists and guest speakers will examine the cross section of art, society, community, public space and citizen engagement.

 

Public Space / Public Knowledge

 

What is the public domain? And as the name suggests are we really all masters of this territory? How do we formulate knowledge, opinions and judgement as a public? What platforms and spaces do we have to share this information as both individuals and as a collective? How are we able to construct this domain or are we simply its passive inhabitants?

 

In this discussion participating artists along with guest curators, media activists, public researchers and proponents of community media will come together to debate and critique our definitions of the public domain. Confronting issues of access, citizenship, tools and literacy, this panel of diverse experiences will dissect the tendons which connect physically shared public spaces with those of information, examining how one may impact upon the other and highlighting their indispensability in the fostering of public awareness and public expression.

 

Here we will investigate the issue from a range of perspectives including art, social science, politics and community, making the discussion relevant also to the particular locality of Zempukuji.

 

How can art open up the possibilities of our shared spaces?

How can independent media production transform and empower communities?

How can our sense of public increase our freedoms of expression and debate?

 

puppet show

 

One output of the above workshops will also be a public presentation of  a live narrative performance essentially led by local people themselves (and anyone else who wishes to join), communicating through intergenerational cooperation a multilayered story of the local area.

   In previous workshops participants will have been introduced to traditional performing arts of Laos and India, especially the art of puppet theatre, which will also be combined with local cultures of the Tokyo district and applied to contemporary issues which local people face.

street film & Performance festival

 

 

The culmination of the project will take the form of a nomadic distributed "film & performance festival" through the local streets of the area. With the cooperation of local residents and businesses we hope to present a series of screenings of work produced by the artists and local participants through this 2 month residency through the public spaces of the neighbourhood, including mobile projection upon building surfaces, the provision of monitors in local stores and even with the hope that locals will cooperate by presenting work in their windows overlooking the streets. Accompanying these screenings will also be a series of actions devised in collaboration between the artists and participants to allow for a  new form of expression within the public space and allow us to question our ability to shape the share space around us,