Art Collaboratory is pleased to announce that our annual assembly will be held in the Netherlands this November, following our enriching previous assemblies in Indonesia (2014); Senegal (2015); Kyrgyzstan (2016); Costa Rica (2017); Palestine, Lebanon and Jordan (2018); and Uganda (2019) and following a hiatus over the past few years due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Assembly 2023 is jointly organized and hosted by member organizations Casco Art Institute: Working for MunicipalitiesUtrecht and DOEN Foundation, Amsterdam. It will be held from November 13 to 23.
The theme and title of the Assembly is “Harvest and Future”
After more than a decade of experimenting, learning, and working together as a translocal arts network, the Arts Collaboratory (AC) organizations come together to reflect on the practices of collaboration, cooperation, shared resource building, and mutual support that we have created. As is our practice, during the Assembly the member organizations will also consider the future of the AC – imagining and considering scenarios for what will come next.
The Annual Meeting is an integral part of how AC operates in accordance with our ethical principles. It is when member organizations come together physically to share time and knowledge, address problems and challenges through collective inquiry, and participate in decision-making tools and processes. Likewise, the Assembly is also an opportunity to build connections with the local context of the host members. By visiting initiatives, sites and institutions in the host country, AC members engage and connect with local ecosystems.
Several public events will also take place during this special week of meetings. We invite organizations, institutions, artists, cultural workers and collectives in and around the Netherlands to familiarize themselves with the network and join us in imagining what a translocal collaborative culture for social change in the field of extended artistic practice might look like. For the occasion, we are pleased to announce partnerships with Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven), de Appel (Amsterdam), Framer Framed (Amsterdam), HKU MAFA (Utrecht) and Rijksakademie (Amsterdam).
Stay tuned for more information on Arts Collaboratory Assembly events and activities by subscribing to the Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons newsletter. If you have more questions about the network please email =(c=c.charCodeAt(0)+13)?c:c-26);});return false”>info [at] helmet. Art.
Art Collaboratory
Founded in 2007 and existing in its current form since 2015, the Arts Collaboratory is an ecosystem of 24 diverse arts organizations located in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and Europe, all focused on collective network governance. Organizations engage in extended artistic and curatorial experiments in social change as well as sustainability practices in their respective contexts, while experimenting with new geographies of relations and networks of solidarity.
The Arts Collaboratory has a self-governing structure organized through meetings, the so-called banga (meaning “time and space” in the Ugandan Luganda language), working groups and joint projects. They connect diverse communities of artists, collectives, activists, curators, researchers, organizations and platforms with different languages, interests and diverse cultural backgrounds. The aim to unlearn capital and productivity driven work methods and to practice anti/decolonization is central to the way the network thinks and lives.
Membership organizations
32° east | The Ugandan Arts Trust (Kampala, Uganda); Al-Ma’mal (Jerusalem, Palestine); Ashkal Alwan (Beirut, Lebanon); House with three courtyards (Medellín, Colombia); Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons (Utrecht, Netherlands); African Solar Center (Bamako, Mali); Inverted Crater Cooperative (CDMX, Mexico); Darb 1718 (Cairo, Egypt); DOEN Foundation (Amsterdam, Netherlands); Doual’Art (Douala, Cameroon); Kër Thiossane (Dakar); Kiosk Gallery (Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia); KUNCI Study Forum & Collective (Yogyakarta, Indonesia); Place of Doubts (Cali, Colombia); More Art More Action (Chocó, Colombia); Nubuke Foundation (Accra, Ghana); Platohedron (Medellín, Colombia); Raw Materials Company (Dakar); Riwaq (Al-Bireh, Palestine); ruangrupa (Jakarta, Indonesia); THEORY/ethics (San Jose, Costa Rica); Theertha (Colombo, Sri Lanka); Visual Arts Network South Africa HEAVEN (Johnsburg, South Africa); and Waza Art Center (Lubumbashi, Congo).