Why reunite?
Why do we always want to know more? Why do we always want to go somewhere we’ve never been before? I have worked on projects and exhibitions that touch on different issues (migration, architecture, craft, business…) but there is something that links them all: a fascination with difference, contradiction and change in art. Does the potential of art lie in its ability to be both futile and functional? Reunion is a journey to find out what makes art critical by looking at projects and theories that seem to me to challenge and throw into question arts relation to society.
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This website reflects the diversity of interests I and other contributors have and the way in which I am trying to understand and develop a wider understanding of what makes my practice critical rather than just assume it is. After a period of research, meetings and talking it has been difficult to set up an informal community of practitioners who live in different parts of Europe and are doing their own thing. Why would they want to come together? What’s in it for them? I feel the need to start again, from scratch, from me, my subjective position in all of this – why am I interested in trying to find out about other ways of working, why am I so keen to get people together all the time? Is it because I’m trying to find out more about where I’m coming from? Maybe I go in search of other people’s experiences in order to consolidate my own? What is at the heart of my interest in a socialism of art? It is partly that which has drawn me to find out more about art in south east and eastern Europe – places and people with more experience of socialism than I have ever had. How does a Socialist government affect ones practice? How does this change when there is a change in government and capitalism kicks in? In this website I want to investigate where resistance to the use of art by other agencies comes from and to search with a magnifying glass where the ‘politics’ in art now lies and how this differs across Europe.