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Gigi Argyropoulou is a researcher, theorist, director and curator working in the fields of performance and cultural practice. Gigi has initiated and organised research events, public programmes, interventions, festivals, conferences, performances, actions and cultural projects both inside and outside institutions. She is a founding member of EIGHT/Το Οχτώ, Green Park, Mavili Collective, Institute for Live Arts Research and F2/Mkultra. She has taught at Universities in postgraduate and undergraduate programmes in UK and Europe. Gigi received the Routledge Prize for PSi 18 and and Dwight Conquergood Award in 2017. She is co-editor of the special issue of Performance Research Journal “On Institutions”(September 2015) and publishes regularly in journals, books and magazines. Currently, Gigi is member of the curatorial and editorial board of HKW’s New Alphabet School.
Marco Baravalle is a member of S.a.L.E. Docks, a collective and an independent space for visual arts, activism, and experimental theater located in what had been an abandoned salt-storage facility in Dorsoduro, Venice, Italy. Founded in 2007, its programming includes activist-group meetings, formal exhibitions, and screenings. Baravalle is a research fellow at INCOMMON. In praise of community. Shared creativity in arts and politics in Italy (1959-1979), a project hosted by IUAV, University of Venice. He teaches Phenomenology of Contemporary Art at the MA in Visual Arts and Curatorial Studies of NABA (Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti, Milan). He is a member of IRI (Institute Of Radical Imagination), a collective inviting political scientists, economists, lawyers, architects, hackers, activists, artists and cultural producers to share knowledge on a continuous base with the aim of defining and implementing zones of post-capitalism in Europe’s South and the Mediterranean.
Alessandra Saviotti is a curator, educator and cultural activist who lives in Amsterdam. She is a PhD researcher at the Liverpool John Moores University - School of Art and Design. Her focus is on socially engaged art, collaborative practices and Arte Útil. Her work aims to realize projects where the public becomes a co-producer in the spirit of usership. Her reflection is taking into consideration collaborative processes according to the motto ‘cooperation is better than competition’. Since 2014 she has been working with the Asociación de Arte Útil especially aiming at emancipating the usership around the Arte Útil Archive. She is currently researching and writing about how alternative education models framed as Arte Útil could be successfully implemented within the institution of education fostering sustainability, hacking the institution itself. She is a member of Art Workers Italia and her recent project is Decentralising Political Economies, realised in collaboration with The Whitworth (Manchester), LJMU's The City Lab and the Asociación de Arte Útil. She is a regular guest lecturer at the international Master Artist Educator and Master Education in Arts at the University of the Arts - ArtEZ, Arnhem (NL). Her website is https://www.alessandrasaviotti.com.
Gemma Medina Estupiñan is an art historian, independent researcher, curator and educator, based in Eindhoven (NL). She focuses on the relationship between art and society, particularly the uses of art, researching Arte Útil, socially engaged art and artivism. She participates in curatorial and pedagogical projects that fall outside standard artistic discourse to bring art closer to non-specialized audiences, fostering connections and collaborative processes between artists, designers, and different collectives. She has worked in diverse experimental projects with the Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven, NL), like Be(com)ing Dutch (2007-2008), the residency program Artistic strategies in Psychiatry (2018) and Agents of Change (2015-2020), among others. After 2012 she collaborated with the artist Tania Bruguera and the Van Abbemuseum to gather the Arte Útil archive, which was the core of the exhibition “The Museum of Arte Útil” (2013-2014), where she co-curated the public program with Alessandra Saviotti. Together they co-curated “Broadcasting the archive” (2016-2018). She works with the Asociación de Arte Útil to facilitate and promote the use of the archive as a tool to open up our imagination and recover the meaning of possibility. She is a founder member of Axioma, Laboratorio de mediacion artistica (Canary Islands, ES). Her recent and current projects are In/Out: a possible map (Centro Atlantico de Arte Moderno CAAM, Las Palmas, SP), and the toolkit/publication <<_ it shapes the hollow spaces_>> TAC (Eindhoven, NL). Both reflect on the role of art, art institutions, the very construction of History, and his modern narrative, encouraging the uses of art and communal sources of knowledge to generate counternarratives. She holds a PhD in Contemporary Art and Humanities (Universidad de La Laguna, SP), and she is a regular guest lecturer at iMAE, ArtEZ hogeschool voor de kunsten (Arnhem, NL).
John Byrne is a Reader in The Uses of Art at Liverpool John Moores University where he is also the Lab Leader of The City Lab which forms part of Liverpool School of Art and Design’s Institute of Art and Technology). Byrne is also currently Researcher and Writer in Residence at the Whitworth Art Gallery where he is Lead Researcher and Research editor for the Decentralising Political Economies Project/Platform which he developed on behalf of The Whitworth Art Gallery in collaboration with the Association of Arte Útil and the City Lab. From 2008 Byrne worked closely with the Van Abbemuseum on the development of ‘The Autonomy Project’ and, in 2013, Byrne managed and co-ordinated Liverpool John Moores University’s participation in the L’Internationale project ‘The Uses of Art: The Legacy of 1848 and 1989’. In In September 2015 Byrne took on the role of Co-ordinator for the L’Internationale ‘Constituencies’ Research Strand was lead editorial on the resulting L’Internationale publication ‘The Constituent Museum: Constellations of Knowledge, Politics and Mediation’ in 2018. In 2015 Byrne also became a Narrator/Curator of the L’Internationale ‘Glossary of Common Knowledge’ and, together with Zdenka Badovinca (Director of Moderna Galerija), co-curated a ‘Constituencies’ Glossary of Common Knowledge Seminar that was held in Liverpool at Liverpool John Moores University’s School of Art and Design in 2016. As well as this, Byrne has been an active member of The Association of Arte Útil (AAU) since 2013 when he collaborated with The AAU, Grizedale Arts and Tate Liverpool to install and run a temporary ‘Office of Useful Art’ during Tate Liverpool’s ‘Art Turning Left’ show in 2013/2014. Since then Byrne has also coordinated a series of pop up Offices of Useful Art at Liverpool School of Art and Design, The Granby 4 Streets area of Toxteth in Liverpool, and at the Florrie Institute in Liverpool. Via The City Lab, Byrne is committed to helping to growing and develop the Association of Arte Útil network as a worldwide constituency if artists, designers, activists, and makers who wish to explore ways in which we can use as art as a ground-up tool for imagining and making ourselves otherwise.
Neil Cummings was born in Wales and live in London. He's a professor at Chelsea College of Arts, a member of Critical Practice and on the editorial board of Documents of Contemporary Art. Neil has worked with museums, banks, galleries, archives, auction houses, enthusiasts, places of education and department stores in London, New York, Geneva, Cairo and Warsaw. Neil has explored the entanglements of art and capital in 19th century Manchester, linked the Tate and Bank of England through gifts and their subsequent debt, constructed possible futures for museums and impersonated a famous art dealer. These projects, although diverse, have consistently engaged with the cultural forces that designate and exhibit art, and the increasingly devolved experience of art, to its publics. www.neilcummings.com
Marsha Bradfield rides the hyphen as an archivist-artist-curator-educator-researcher-writer-and, and, and. Her practice variously considers the subject of interdependence. Recent work in dialogic art explores authorship, value systems, organisational structures and the economies/ecologies of collaborative cultural production. Marsha is part of RadBots, REBEL, Critical Practice, Precarious Workers Brigade, and the Incidental Unit (formerly the Artist Placement Group and O+I). These collaborations often result in understanding that Marsha re-presents in publications, exhibitions, performative lectures and other mongrel outputs. Marsha is the Course Leader of MA Intercultural Practices at the University of the Arts London. She was born in South Africa, grew up in Canada and has lived and worked in the UK since 2015.
Amy McDonnell is a Director and Campaign Coordinator for Zero Hour, the campaign for the Climate and Ecological Emergency Bill, which calls for new legislation to make sure the UK is doing its real fair share to tackle the nature-climate crisis. She has a PhD from Chelsea College of Art and Design in self-organising curatorial practices and previously taught at Chelsea, Central Saint Martins and Goldsmiths in London. Just before Brexit, she spent a year working in the European Parliament for Julie Ward MEP and has worked with Tate Communities and Tate Exchange curating exhibitions such as All Rise for the Planet (2019).
Aria Spinelli is an independent curator and a PostDoc Researcher at the University of Amsterdam. Her PhD has analysed relations of curatorial practice to social imagination and performativity. Her main area of research is the investigation of the relationship between art, activism and political theory. She holds a bachelor’s and master’s degree in art history, visual arts and curatorial studies. Founding member of the artistic and curatorial collective Radical Intention, from 2018 top 2020 she was associate researcher and member of the curatorial team of the project The Independent at the MAXXI – Museum of the XXI century for art (Rome). Between 2015 and 2020 she collaborated as external curator at the Pistoletto Foundation (Biella) and BOZAR, Center for Fine Arts (Brussels). She has published many articles and she is the editor of the publication Shaping Desired Futures(NERO, 2018). Between 2009 and 2012 she was curator at the Isola Art Center (Milan).
Kuba Szreder is a researcher, lecturer and interdependent curator, based in Warsaw, working as an associate professor at the department for art theory of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. In 2015 he was awarded PhD by the Loughborough University School of the Arts for the thesis about social and economic underpinnings of independent curating. He co-curated many interdisciplinary projects that hybridize art with critical reflection and social experiments, such as exhibition Making Use. Life in Postartistic Times (together with Sebastian Cichocki, Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw 2016). He actively cooperates with artistic unions, consortia of post-artistic practitioners, clusters of art-researchers, art collectives and artistic institutions in Poland, UK, and other European countries. In 2009 he initiated Free / Slow University of Warsaw, with which he completed several inquiries into the current conditions of artistic labor, publishing readers (Readings for Artworkers vol 1-2 [2009-2010], Joy Forever. Political Economy of Social Creativity [2014]) and research reports (Art Factory [2014]). Since 2012 he has actively cooperated with OFSW, an artistic trade union in Poland, co-running campaigns that targeted dismal labor conditions in contemporary art. In 2018, together with Kathrin Böhm, he established the Centre for Plausible Economies in London, a research cluster investigating artistic economies, with which he conducted research projects (Re:drawing the Economies [2018], The Art of Cooperativism [2019-2020]), and published articles and visual essays (Icebergian Economies of Contemporary Art [2020]). In 2018-2020 he was a member of the core team of Anti-fascist Year, a coalition of over 150 art institutions and informal collectives that protested rising authoritarianism. In 2020 he co-initiated the Office for Postartistic Services, the aim of which is to make use of artistic competences in support of progressive social movements. Editor and author of books, catalogues, chapters and articles tackling such issues as the political economy of global artistic circulation, art strikes, modes of artistic self-organization, instituting art beyond the art market and the use value of art. His most recent book The ABC of the projectariat. Living and working in a precarious art world, will be published by the Whitworth Museum and Manchester University Press in the Fall of 2021.