Participatory performance-choir as Process Institute at the Haus of World Cultures, Berlin.
We were commissioned to design and offer 4 collective tasks for all the members of the 4 Über Lebenskunst Klubs.
Making Noise happened on the #4 Klub, on May 31st. Participants were divided in 4 groups and each of the artists of the collective directed one section. Noises, words, sentences and questions overlap creating a sound piece narrative about social change, sustainability and media panic.
12.05.2011, 16:00 – 20:00 hours, Über Lebenskunst.Klub
Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin 2011
Collective task #2 by Process Institute at Über Lebenskunst Klub, HKW, Berlin 07.04.11:
Stay together and discover the potential of your environment!
Collective task #1 at Über Lebenskunst Klub , HKW, Berlin 10.03.11:
How can we celebrate the reciprocal dependency of being?
ÜBER LEBENSKUNST created its Klub at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt. It is a platform that brings together numerous people who actively work for a sustainable world. The latest positions and strategies for the art of sustainable living (ÜBER LEBENSKUNST) are brought together there at the interface between art and cultural production, fashion, day-to-day research, civic involvement, architecture, sustainable design, urban gardening, environmental sciences, political activism and urban planning.
In this framework, Process Institute developed the 4 “Gemeinschaftsaufgaben” (collective tasks). These participatory tasks dealt with the motto of each Klub and offer challenges or unconventional goals to be done by the Klub participants. By this they experience physically and emotionally some of the discussed issues.
For Klub 1 Process Institute developed the Lebensmonument/Monument to living together with the Klub members. How can something as a monument, static, dead and imposing in its definition be celebrating life? The participants became the structure of a living choreographed organism in which everybody was involved, interconnected and interdependent to make things happen.
As part of the Euro-Latin Performance Project, Process Institute organized a lottery of services. To participate each person took a numbered photocopied bill and wrote a service he or she could provide to another person in between 3 sec and 3 min. This service had to take place inside of the first floor of the Freies Museum and according to his or her value system, it should be worth 10 €.
The total jackpot was 210 € in services and the winner was the photographer of the project: Jule Frommelt.
Web of the Euro-Latin Performance Project. Documentation.
As part of the Euro-Latin Performance Project, curated by Harm Lux, Process Institute organized a collective 1h performance in 1 wagon of the circular line city train, number S 42. Each participant was given an individual task, some more spectacular, some totally subtle: Reading a financial magazine out loud, checking the advertisement of different supermarkets, doing accounting, trying to sell different objects contained in a tin-box, holding a “how-to value” flag, observe and write notes about the actions, distribute and play with photocopied money… After 1 hour performing (1h is the time the train needs to close the circle) the participants discussed in a cafe about their actions / feelings /peoples’ reactions. We decided to do this in order to keep the process of our improvisational experiments as flexible and open as possible.
Process Institute produced “money” during the Actualitas Kunst vor Ort Festival, Braunschweig, Germany 10-2010, and distributed it around the city from a mobile station made with cardboard and a shopping cart that simulated the aesthetics of a bank.
The issues we tried to discuss with passers-by were for example unpaid work, how money and value systems function and influence our relationships and think of alternative ways of giving value to actions that are not considered work.
Actualitas – process institute: how to value – documentation.
Freie Klasse Weimar took place in May 2010. It was a self-organized learning platform composed of people on the common quest to exchange, experiment, share, experience and question together. Its primary infrastructures were respect and curiosity. It was open to anyone and everyone and built on the belief that every person has valuable knowledge and questions and that we can all benefit from sharing them publicly.
Documentation of the whole project here: Freie Klasse Weimar
Process Institute: How to Exist? (founding residency, March, April 2010)
As part of the group exhibition curated by Lisa Glauer Pushing the Elastic Cube, at Arttransponder, Berlin.
Web:Arttransponder- Process Institute:How to exist.
Process Institute, who are we?
The Artist Collective Process Institute was founded in April 2010 during a 4-week residency at the project space Art Transponder in Berlin. Since completing the MFA in Public Art at the Bauhaus University Weimar, Germany, the 4 members (Zoe Kreye, Canada; Irene Izquierdo, Spain; Carlos Leon-Xjimenez, Peru; Catherine Grau, Germany) came together with the common wish to work collaboratively and the common need of developing their own contexts to situate their artistic research and process-based, participatory public art. Having worked together in various project-based constellations for over 2 years, the first task at hand became to dedicate the one-month residency to a conscious approach of exploring and applying the questions of how and why to collaborate as an artist collective. Process Institute was born:
Process = art as an open, experimental and bottom-up approach to developing and embodying new modes of daily living, social relations and an active engagement within society
Institute = the need to produce new languages, methodologies, contexts and structures to position such approaches and projects
Approach / Philosophy
We have come together as an art collective because we believe in the potentials of collaborative models of societies and we want to actively explore, develop and test these models. We believe in an open exchange and sharing of knowledge to the benefit of a greater creativity. We believe in community and inclusion as a support system to our common struggles. As public artists we engage in contexts and act from and within the public. We create by fostering human engagement. Our process is based in social interaction and can turn out to be radical, subtle, playful, provocative, conversational, occupational, interventional, empowering. We want to demystify the artist and reintroduce art as a creative and political gesture related to everyday life, as a practice integrated into society, and as an accessible act. We consciously choose to work without a fixed space, instead developing work from within given situations, contexts and publics. We like to work with the recyclable resources of a given site/city or view the city itself as a resource.
