Perifèries 11-12

26.3.12

Last Wednesday, March 21st, the 2012 edition of the
PERIFÈRIES
meeting began, which is being held in the city of Valencia until March 31st. The event’s subtitle is
Can we turn a collective practice into a common experience?
and it is structured around a series of conferences and open work spaces. We have been invited to act as facilitators of one of these spaces, under the leitmotif With what expectations? From what potential?, which aims to be a pretext for reflecting on cultural practices or forms of cultural production that are open to participation or that directly emerge from agents who are not “traditionally” recognized as cultural agents.

Oh, wait! Are we talking about a group of artists, curators, cultural managers, architects, university professors… locked in a university space, debating and generating diagrams and mind maps about the potential of community cultural practices? Given this perspective, we thought it would be interesting to invite Professor Jordi Orts, head of the educational-audiovisual project
400colps
, and a group of his students to help us take a step back from what we will be doing and focus on it from other points of view.

Part of the PERIFÈRIES organization’s proposal consists of “occupying” the space of the Sala Thesaurus of the Centre Cultural La Nau of the Universitat de València and encouraging the emergence of a kind of temporary autonomous zone in the form of a cultural laboratory. On the other hand, we are usually interested in creating transits between institutional and non-institutional spaces, which is why we will propose that the group organize a trip to
Solar Corona
where, precisely on Saturday, March 31st, an assembly is being organized with the participation of artistic collectives, cultural associations, and local residents to define and approve the future development of this self-managed space.

In addition to Jordi Orts and the students from Escola Gavina and members of the collective that promotes the Solar Corona project, linked to the cultural association
LAminúscula
, we have invited Teresa Marín from
la colectiva lab
, Sonia Martínez, and Malena Sessano to collaborate in the group. Even so, the group is open to the participation and contributions of anyone who wants to join at any time!

Our participation in PERIFÈRIES was scheduled for March 29th, 30th, and 31st, but by chance, the general strike was called for the 29th. As cultural workers and precarious workers, we believe it is necessary to support this strike, which we also understand as a social strike, which is why we will almost certainly move the opening of the workspace to 10:00 AM on Friday, March 30th.