Avamaa 2011

1.-7.08.2011

Art Symposium AVAMAA

MoKS, Mooste, Estonia

Piret Karro, Patrick McGinley, MoKS

AVAMAA is a multi-purpose, cross-discipline, mixed-media, context-specific artistic and social event of creative interventions. AVAMAA encourages the exchange of ideas and the realization of short term artistic projects within a 6 day event.

Keywords: open platform, community, self-initiated, site-specific, knowledge sharing, public space

AVAMAA seeks to locate and identify an open space for the development of creative activity within this rapidly changing and developing environment. It debates the availability and possibilities of this public territory and its future use, and presents its ideas and experiments for the wider community. In 2011 the symposium will move towards a more self-determined space: projects, workshops, and performances will be proposed, conducted, and presented largely by the participants themselves; In this way we will continue to blur the boundaries between knowledge-giver and -taker, and create a communal space for collective creation and exploration. Participants will take part in both creative and practical propositions, also sharing responsibility for the planning and preparation of group meals, and cleaning and organisation of the space.

AVAMAA 2011 will include two main workshops, taking place in the morning sessions of the event during the whole week. The afternoon sessions will be led by a different festival participant every day. The main workshops will present their work at the end of the week in an event open to the public including performances, concerts, and presentations.

Workshops:

Every (no)thing A site-specific performance workshop led by Bruno Humberto

This is a sound, movement and writing workshop on creating performance for empty spaces and shifting landscapes. The participants will have opportunity to try different compositional tools of performance making, exercising and dissecting the different layers that constitute a piece of work. They will be invited to generate new material, using methods borrowed from absurd, landscape theatre, improvised music, photography and poetry. The final outcome of the workshop will be a large scale site specific/ landscape performance promenade devised with all the participants, taking place in Mooste and in the surrounding area.

Visual Archaeology: a cinematic material experience by Gonçalo Leite Velho

Since its beginning, cinema has had a relation with materiality. From scientific experiences, to modernist sight, the exploration in composition of textures and forms, through the cinematic device capabilities has attracted many artists. While cinema was more and more invaded by sound and speech, the properties of this cinematic experience have come to lose their exploratory practice. Cinema has come to privilege speech over gesture, language over technique. In this workshop, through projections, discussions, visual exercises and exploratory practice, we will try to develop a movie experience that not only closely relates with materiality, but that also calls into question the notions of time and temporality. A visual archaeology that explores materiality and it's relation with being, but that challenges the vision of Time as sequence and Archaeology as a plain narrative about the past.