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Constitution Meeting I

...some Constitutional Thoughts

There is a well know gap between theory and practice. A gap that may not matter
for critics but that is very intriguing for critically thinking curators (who are
practitioners in micropolitics). It is a classical paradox for a political philosopher to
become a politician – as it is for a critical thinker to become a curator. Maybe this is
one of the reasons why biennales and art shows based on elaborate theoretical
concepts often suffer from a certain incoherency – an impossibility to translate
criticality into the form of an exhibition. The challenge is to reconsider the physical
and mental space of the exhibition in order to bridge the gap between critical
imagination and making.

This challenge kept us busy after we had accepted the invitation to co-curate
Manifesta 8. An immediate reference we had was to the social imaginaries which
projections of an ideal polis have created in history. Could we apply this on the
temporary construction of an ideal exhibition? An exhibition where all the preconditions,
rules and modalities, where site, space, and time are re-thought and, as
we hoped, would from a (zero) critical point for an ideal settlement? Or should not
any universal be understood as born out of what is truly temporal and what is
exchanged in actuality, in a community?

Now we see the exhibition that we invite you to work on together as a multiauthorial
space; as a temporary space of its own rules in relation to the people that
conceive and make it and the people that produce it by visiting and receiving; as an
exhibition on actuality and the present that yet contains and reflects the histories of
its making and therefore not as an image of the ideal polis, but as built structure
reflects the temporality of human togetherness.

Our proposal to you is to work together on such a structure and to develop a Constitution for the exhibition in a process which is accompanying it's production and setting up. This Constitution or Charter should freely define the different functionalities of the spaces and the internal rules of the exhibition.

tranzit.org

(Vít Havránek, team representative, work council: Zbyněk Baladrán, Dóra Hegyi, Boris Ondreička, Georg Schöllhammer).

The idea of the meeting is to submit subjective/collective theoretical thoughts, ideas, dreams hopes about an exhibition to a common consideration and on the other hand to do the same with the practical and everyday mechanisms of a biennale exhibition, and curators hope that such a process could lead towards a manifesto or a similar text that would stipulate specific principles of the exhibition. This text would have not only a proclamative dimension but first of all would serve as a legal interface in between the artist / the artists / curatorial collective / manifesta managment/public ... or it could create an unattended social-symbolic bodies, or ...

Artists will prepare or contribute with any kind of presentation or material and also in the attachment you will find for your information a short description of all projects that may serve you for a better orientation,

Contrarily to what has been said at the meeting curators stay completely open (curators dont feel a necessity of fulfill any of here mentioned “goals”) because they trust that they will be able to find the real goals and necessities in a common discussion that will take place in Murcia.