PROTOTIPOAK, BIENNIAL NEW ARTISTIC FORMS
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Project Description
Prototipoak is a bienniale programme that desires to explore the performativity of the social through art, and to critically contribute to shape it from a sustainability, aesthetic and inclusion perspective. It brings together artists with sole outlooks and varied backgrounds, who propose new experiences rooted in the specificity of site and context.Through their uses of contemporary artistic forms, they each question different sides of reality and try to open up opportunities for transformation
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EU Programme or fund
Description of the project
Summary
Prototipoak, Biennial of New Artistic Forms, is part of the Project Programme of Azkuna Zentroa.
It is a transversal programming, which crosses artistic languages and disciplines; that connects the same and different; that forms and educates from the artistic practice, that crosses the racial, the sexual, the linguistic, the geopolitical and the identity in its different forms; that affects consciences and bodies; that crosses limits and common places.
Since its inception, place has been a central element in Prototipoak, understood not only as the stage on which life unfolds but also as that which is constituted through the things we do, through our actions in context.
It is a project of complexity in constant movement where the normal, the marginal, the uncertain and mysterious, the absurd, the obvious, the uninspiring and the truly exceptional, the superfluous and the essential, all coexist.
Azkuna Zentroa-Alhóndiga Bilbao is the public centre of Bilbao for society and contemporary culture, the agora that aims to promote conversation between the people and the artistic context that share this convulsive contemporary time, from the perspective of the local and international. Housed in an old wine warehouse, today this space is a city within the city, a space to coexist with the pulse of contemporary culture in all its extension and that addresses the majority of minorities that make up the world.
Azkuna Zentroa is a space that promotes respect for cultural and social diversity, integration, equal opportunities and access to information and knowledge managing on contemporary culture in different lines of programming: Contemporary Art (artistic exhibitions and interventions), Live Arts (performance, dance, experimental music), Film (audiovisual narratives), Education, and Literature that dialogue with each other through hybrid models, expanded programming and formats "co", "multi", "trans", "inter" that make the daily life of the contemporary possible.
Key objectives for sustainability
PROTOTIPOAK was born with the intention of exploring the nature, performativity and multiplicity of the social through art. We propose the place as a central element of the project, understanding it as the reality that is built through what we do every day, of the daily interactions and relationships between humans and non-humans, and therefore we are talking about sustainability at its best broad sense. Prototipoak poses questions to us about the inevitable condition of living together.
In PROTOTIPOAK it is still essential to continue deepening the role of culture in cooperation between cultures, as an exercise of solidarity, for a greater equality of presence in global cultural scenarios. Respecting and promoting cultural diversity as the great heritage of humanity.
These activities place culture as a human motion, in this roadmap is not a simple formalism, but an opportunity to concentrate efforts on a conscious experience. Some activities in terms of sustainability:
MARTXAUNDI: a four day walking march departed from a rural village to reach Bilbao crossing valleys, mountains, roads, rivers, tracks, roads, streets, squares and sidewalks. A diverse group of citizens accompanied by artists discovered the nature, gazed at the stars at night. They were all conscious of the union between human and nature.
OFF SIDE: This is a game of hide and seek with a domestic-care worker. The work of a caregiver, while invisible because it takes place behind closed doors, is life-sustaining. It sustains the lives of the families who employ them, and in many cases, the lives of their families, living in their original countries.
TRAVELER FORESTS: It is one of the proposals for this 2021 edition open to the public from May 29a prototype linear forest designed for public space. It proposes the installation of a linear arboretum in the rooftop of the centre, as a garden for public use. This project highlights the importance of trees in the evolution of our history.
Key objectives for aesthetics and quality
The biennial PROTOTIPOAK presents projects in process that allude to that culture of the prototype as an instrument to facilitate experimentation, tested on their quality and orientation because they are linked to AZKUNA ZENTROA's programming lines and also because they respond to what can be expected from the creative field of a center dedicated to the production and dissemination of contemporary culture: Installations, projections, performances, interventions and audiovisual experiences that also broaden the receptivity and experience of a viewer who becomes the axis of artistic creation.
Prototipoak is a bienniale that brings together artists with unique perspectives and diverse backgrounds, who propose new experiences rooted in the specificity of site and context. Through their uses of contemporary artistic forms, in various scenarios and formats – each with their own conventions and temporalities – they each question different aspects of reality and attempt to open up opportunities for transformation.
Some examples of quality of experience and aesthetics at PROTOTIPOAK:
NANA is a participatory performance for sleepers. It is a durational concert of experimental music, for listeners who are awake, asleep or in slumber. The concert lasted eight hours, the recommended time for a restful sleep. This activity has different phases according to the sleeping rhythms and ends with a breakfast for all the participants, the artist and technicians.
INDOOR GARDEN: photographic project open call. More than 200 people responded to the call sending over 400 images. The main visuals of PROTOTIPOAK 2018 have been drawn from these images. Brought together they combine to create a shared ‘garden’ of a section of the innumerable house plants with which we share our homes, while also depicting a shared space built from all the fragmentary personal interior views they include.
MUSEUM OF MOON: This lunar installation provided a focal and meeting point.
Key objectives for inclusion
Azkuna Zentroa is a Society and Contemporary Culture Centre opened to dialogue with different community groups.
At PROTOTIPOAK, we work with artists, agents and artistic communities with hybrid, multilateral programming models that showcase the everydayness of all things contemporary to reach all types of audiences. We pay special attention to mediation and education as a way to generate critical knowledge and transform society through art and artists.
The audience has a very diverse profile since in it we can find a representation of the local society, of all ages, of all socioeconomic levels and from different origins. In addition, the PROTOTIPOAK programme is participatory and accessible with most of its activities with free entrance.
These two activities are examples of inclusion although all programming is inclusive in different ways:
HAIRCUTS BY CHILDREN: a group of teenagers from secondary school learnt how to cut hair guided by a professional hairdresser. Then, for two days the children took over and run a real local salon where they offered free haircuts to any adults who were prepared to put themselves in their hands. This was a trust proof on the next generation.
CORBEAUX: Created by Moroccan choreographer Bouchra Ouizguen, it is an intense performance where more than twenty women, dressed in black, emerged from the darkness and, like birds, moved to a hypnotic rhythm. These women who participated, came from a previous local open call.
Results in relation to category
Azkuna Zentroa – Alhóndiga Bilbao is the public space for Society and Contemporary Culture with the aim to create connections between people and contemporary culture in order to influence the context and contribute to the construction of a more creative, critical and diverse society.
Prototipoak, the biennial of new artistic forms is one example of Azkuna Zentroa programming. Since 2018, with Fernando Perez as general director and previously as cultural director and curator, he has drawn up the 2019-2023 Program Project. This is not a strategic plan, but a proposal by the management to the board and the citizenry. Azkuna Zentroa – Alhóndiga Bilbao was inaugurated on May 2010 and since then it has become one of the essential exponents of new brand of cultural centres. For this Programme Project 2019-2023, team members have been immersed in a process of deep reflection and conceptualization in order to define the new lines of programming and services that will develop over the next years. At the same time, around 200 persons (users, artists, sector professionals, representatives of the government, art centres and other artistic entities) have participated.
On May 2020, an independent research was carried out with 800 telephone interviews to analyse the involvement and contribution of Azkuna Zentroa's cultural programming. According to this study, the greatest recognized contribution is the access and revitalization of culture, secondarily, the recovery of a historic building.
According to the survey carried out, Azkuna Zentroa has created an ecosystem where citizens have learned to enjoy culture and art in a daily way, immersed in the symbolic context of one of the most historic buildings in the city. The connections between culture, diversity, social relationships and the enjoyment of free time are shared in a center where the artistic and cultural creation of the contemporary takes shape and is personified.
How Citizens benefit
Continuing with the Azkuna Zentroa line of programming, PROTOTIPOAK proposes a ten projects by local, national and international artists that are developed in the city in collaboration with different local communities, in total 3.500 people directly and more than 50.00 indirectly had participated at PROTOTIPOAK in 2018. Through performances, installations, residencies or workshops, PROTOTIPOAK expands contemporary languages and fosters the encounter between artists and the public, with an international and community vocation. All this audience had not only attend but had been intensively part of the process of each activity of the programme contributing to evolve from a sustainability, aesthetic and inclusion perspective.
During the days of the meeting, in each edition, these projects have occupyed various spaces in Azkuna Zentroa and different places in Bilbao: streets, squares, a hairdresser, a radio set, a path between Lasierra in Álava and Plaza Arriquíbar ... Curious, wondering proposals, that put into question what we do, what we think, what we know.
People's participation is key in PROTOTIPOAK. The image of the Biennial of 2018 was born from the collaborative work ‘Interior Garden’, created through an open call. More than 200 people have participated in this proposal, submitting 400 images that show how they share their homes with plants. All of them formed a mosaic of photographs of domestic plants that was exhibited during the Bienniale.
Innovative character
PROTOTIPOAK suggests a strong endorsement of experimentation, a drive for creative inquiry and an attitude favorable to innovation. A key culture in the field of art, where times and technologies have shaken the borders of aesthetics, the channels of its representation and even the limits of its knowledge or interpretation. Nothing strange, on the other hand, when it has been a long time since the changes in contemporary art were substantiated in new codes, methods and objectives, new conceptions of sensitivity, memory or history and new tastes or even new opportunities in its offer and in your demand.
Innovation is found in the PROTOTIPOAK format as encounters for new artistic forms where the contemporary look of the everyday is mixed, open to all audiences with universal access but with an almost site-specific program making everyday something unique. However, no edition of Protitipoak is similar since they are all different without the same structure, without patterns or repetitions.
The framework of action and thought that Prototipoak proposes opens from one of the meanings of the same word in English "prototype", which refers to a first version of something, to the preliminary materialization of a device, mechanism, apparatus, from the other forms are derived. In this sense of preliminary materialization, PROTOTIPOAK is a space that invites us to work from what we do not know and promotes a way of doing from uncertainty, curiosity and the permanent questioning of what we think we know. In this sense, prototypes generate reality, they open the possibility of other worlds; From this framework we ask ourselves what reality we generate and which one we would like to generate.
