Arte e Educação - Fundação Bienal do Mercosul

point out some possible models and directions.
Unitednationsplaza is exhibition as school. I realize
that this sounds somewhat oxymoronic, yet
it’s the only way to describe the project that started
as Manifesta 6, European Biennial of
Contemporary Art, scheduled to take place on
Cyprus in Nicosia in the fall of 2006. Despite
being an artist rather then curator, I was invited
to join the curatorial team developing a concept
for this biennial. Our thinking at the time was:
why do another biennial? The incredible
proliferation and monotony of such events has
largely rendered them meaningless. To overcome
this and to justify their social mandate and
budgets, most have deployed an ever-increasing
level of rhetoric art shows can rarely live up to
(the most recent example is usage of Giorgio
Agamben’s passages on the state of exception in
concentration camps as promotional tool for Documenta
12.) So our proposal was to suspend the
exhibition and use the funding and network of
Manifesta 6 to start a temporary art school on
Cyprus. The school was to be structured in three
parts of which I was responsible for one.
There were several reasons why we were interested
in an art school model rather then art exhibition.
Schools are one of the few places left where
experimentation is encouraged, where emphasis
is on process and learning rather then product.
Schools are also multidisciplinary institutions by
nature, where discourse, practice and presentation
can co-exist without privileging one over the other
(a very good example is Staedelschule in Frankfurt
that has a strong program to train artists, a
theoretical institute that organizes symposia and
publications, and a public exhibitions program
at Portikus – all equally as important). Finally an
art school is the key place where artistic practice
and what it means to be/become an artist is
continually re-defined. In recent history, schools
like the Bauhaus or the Black Mountain College
probably had more impact on the development
of art then any exhibition. No country in the
Middle East has an advanced art academy.
Nicosia is a divided city, split in Greek and Turkish
speaking parts. The two communities do not get
along, and after decades of ethnic tension and
much violence, they are separated by a UN
monitored buffer zone. While the larger Greek
side claimed for itself the official Republic of
Cyprus, the Turkish north is a breakaway state,
not recognized by much of the world and living
in semi-isolation. The Manifesta school was
supposed to operate on both sides of the city, yet
six months before the opening, local officials
abruptly cancelled the project and fired us.
Following the cancellation, I spoke with the group
of artists and writers I was closely working with –
Boris Groys, Martha Rosler, Liam Gillick, Walid
Raad, Jalal Toufic, Tirdad Zolghadr and Natascha
Sadr Haghighian – and we decided that it was
important to realized the programming we
developed even in the absence of the biennial, as
an independent project. Berlin was very much a
central location for all the participants from
Europe, Middle East, Eastern Europe, etc. Berlin
is also one of the most inexpensive cities in Europe.
Together with an architect Nikolaus Hirsch, we
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