Disonancias

Methodology sesions

We organise work sessions in which all the participants in the current edition of DISONANCIAS come together, with various objectives:

- to enable participants, both host bodies and artists, to get to know one another and benefit from each other’s projects and experiences, both in terms of processes and of content;

- to develop creative sessions using methodologies that can then be transferred to their own projects.

For the present edition, a first session entitled Take on the improbable was organised at the Bilbao School of Engineering on 20 and 21 November 2007, bringing together both artists and host bodies. The seminar was run by François Deck, an artist consultant and teacher at the Ecole Supérieur d'Art de Grenoble (France), who is developing method art in interaction with different fields. You can download the text of his intervention, in which he develops the idea of artist-consultant, as well as his/her function in a knowledge economy. He also presented a list of artistic competences that supports the idea that artists possess their won fundamental competences in many of the processes that we are taken up with in DISONANCIAS, although he also argues that incompetences are as crucial as are competences.

The first day, under the heading What do you practice?, developed around the presentations of each of the participants. A question bank made it possible to simultaneously collect whatever contributions were made by those present, and to organise these questions so as to work with them later on. You can download the questions proyected within the seminar and the contributions made by participants.

The second day, entitled What methods?, began with the game Take on the improbable, designed to activate methodological reflection. Afterwards, this game, renewed by participants’ contributions, was connected up with the questions from the day before. Finally, the paired artists and companies once again formulated, for themselves, the concept for each project, before presenting them to the others. You can download the card game and the contributions made by the participants.

A second session, headed Take on the improbable II, took place on 21 February 2008 in Arrasate at the Polo Garaia. On this occasion the call went out to representatives from the companies participating in the 2007/08 edition (without “their” artists) and also to representatives from two of the companies involved in the previous edition (DAISALUX and FUNDACIÓN LEIA). Once more following the protocol established by François Deck, the different processes were problematised using questions, which in turn made it possible to share doubts, successes and failures, and to debate them.

The next session, called My neighbour’s good ideas, took place on 2 April 2008 in TECNALIA (Labein), in the Zamudio Technology Park. Representatives from all the host bodies and all the artists involved will be brought together again. Each of the teams will describe how their project is proceeding, and work groups will be organised later in order to encourage interpenetration between the projects.

With the collaboration of...

... François Deck. His approach solicits various epistemic, aesthetic and political problematics. The role of consultant evokes reciprocity: consulting and being consulted; his interventions are geared to accompany cooperative projects; the concept of reciprocal knowledge is a critical operator of the boundaries between competence and incompetence; some aesthetic questions address, in a variety of places, the articulation between contents and the mediums that display them. His present work is concerned with the development of “Board games”.

Some of the projects developed by François Deck are: Au bout du plongeoir (At the end of the spring-board) [board game], Rennes, Paris, Lyon, Hamburg, ongoing; Can art learn from the economy and from companies? [protocols for debate], L’école d’art de Rueil-Malmaison, 2007; Urban interstices, art, architecture, landscape [investigation-action], Paris, ongoing; XVª Paris Biennial, consultant, 2007-2008; Reciprocal expertise [paper], Tate Modern, London, 2003; Impertinent territories [participative process] City Planning Agency, Grenoble, 2001-2002.