Call for partners: Participatory Baltic Sea Network and Event “Inter-format” (Vilnius, Lithuania)

Contact: Vytautas Michelkevicius – vytautasmi@gmail.com, Vilnius, Lithuania

(to be updated soon...)

Local context. In 2010-2011 Vilnius is suffering the hangover after being European Cultural Capital in 2009. The tide of spectacular and bombastic events is gone; however lots of issues in art have stayed as they were before. There are almost none artist run spaces, new media organisations and interventions into highly commercialized public spaces. Beside that the economic crisis has really affected the cultural scene and flattened out nearly all small art & media operators. It means that now it is very good environment for trying out new sustainable forms of cultural organisation and techno-ecologically minded forms of art presentation.

Inter-local context. It is already 20 years of Independence after Soviet Union collapse. The post-soviet condition is over, the dream that global influences will save local art is blurring, the new media hype has transformed into everyday use of new media. What does define our contemporary situation? What forms of organization in the artists’ realm are up-to-date? What kind of condition have we arrived at?

Short concept. In 2010-2011 NGO Mene.cc is starting to build up a network of small cultural operators (NGO’s and artists groups) around Baltic Sea. The first event of the network is planned to happen in 2011 in Vilnius. It is going to be Baltic Region Symposium “Inter-format” which has the goal to gather artists, curators, researchers and practitioners to look for new forms of art re/presentation and re/creation. It is going to be a 24h performance with constantly running lectures, discussions, presentations, coffee/national herbal tea drinking circles, dinner with conceptual sentiments (to everybody’s health), eco-minimal-media events, audio-foyer, digital baroque screenings, eco-party, audiovisual sightseeing, etc.

To cut a long story short we are looking for collaborative curatorship and contributive participation to the network and event in Vilnius.

Mene.cc experience in the field:

Mene.cc is a collective of young curators, artists and researchers who explores new media and new forms of cultural collaboration in Lithuania and neighbourhood countries. Mene.cc is usually exploring the politics of new media and its interaction with local culture. Most of the collective members are doing their PhD‘s, however they don‘t treat their activities as boring academic work and involve themselves into various experimental practices. Mene.cc has produced a number of seminars (including on grassroots new media in Belorussia), exhibitions and books on old and new media. Ongoing projects: www.balsas.cc (since 2005)and www.3xpozicija.lt (since 2006).

CVs’ of event/network curators