PROJECTS
Sessions:
SESSION1 SESSION2 SESSION3 SESSION4 Day 1.
Design, City and Branding. Of how a city can be turned into a brand. 29/04/2006-4.30pm.
This session will address how the city of Barcelona has gone form being an industrial city socially de-structured after suffering years under Franco’s fascist regime, to be one of Europe’s leading brands. We will try to understand the urban transformations that have physically transformed the city but also try to understand the mental and subjective processes which have helped these transformations to occur. How the social memory has been erased and how the idea of modernization of the city (introduced by massive cultural or social events) has helped to reshape the idea of the city. We will also talk about how a city can be branded, and what social and political implications this can have on the people who inhabit a city. For this we will try to fully understand what a branding process implies and how this is been carried out.
Mari Paz Balibrea.
Dr Balibrea teaches Spanish and Latin American Cultural studies at Birkbeck College (University of London). Dr Balibrea has also taught at Illinois State University and the University of California. She has published a book named: En la tierra baldía: Manuel Vázquez Montalbán y la izquierda española en la postmodernidad. Barcelona: El Viejo Topo, 1999. Other recent publications include: 'Urbanism, culture and the post-industrial city: challenging the "Barcelona Model" (2001) in The Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies. She is currently working on a book centred on 'post-national' Spanish culture in the 1990's.
Celia Lury
Celia Lury is a lecturer in Sociology at Goldsmiths College. She is currently involved in two ESRC-funded team projects, 'The global biography of cultural products' and 'Silicon alleys and virtual objects'. In both she is especially interested in the changing relationship between the image and the object as part of her ongoing interests in visual culture and the commodity character of contemporary culture. She has recently published the book “Brands: The Logos of the Global Economy”. Routledge:2004.
Viviana Narotzky
Viviana Narotzky is Course Tutor on the History of Design MA and Senior
Research Fellow at the AHRB Centre for the Study of the Domestic Interior,
based at the Royal College of Art. She has completed her PhD at the RCA on
the consumption and retailing of contemporary design in 1980s Barcelona. Her
main interests are the consumption of goods and environments, design and national/local
identities and the study of design and material culture in contexts of political
transition and globalisation. In particular, she has studied local shifts
in collective taste, the evolution in consumption practices, and their relationship
to broader socio-political, geographical and economic contexts.
Day 2.
Barcelona as a cultural production company: strategic plans and the management
of symbolic capital. 06/05/2006-4.30pm.
During this session we will try to understand how and why the so called
cultural industries have gone from having a small and hardly relevant role
in the city’s economy to being deployed and chanted as the way forward
in the city’s progress. We have seen how during the last years the promise
of a modern city has gone hand by hand with the promotion of these cultural
industries. But are they really so desirable?
We are keen to see how Barcelona has introduced a great number of cultural
activities into a political agenda and how these have been instrumentalized
in order to define the city. These have provided an amount of symbolic capital
to a city which has maximised its benefits but not returned them to its cultural
producers in the shape of income or structural assistance. So we think it
is interesting to see how this unequal distribution can be modified and how
the management of this capital can be a key instrument for the cultural producers
empowerment.
Jordi Bonet i Martí
Currently collaborates in a research Project on social and urban exclusion
in the IGOP (Institut de Govern i Pólítiques públiques)
for the Universidad
Autónoma of Barcelona and researched on the different strategic culture
plans currently being developed in the city. He has written for several magazines
such as Contrapoder, Archipiélago, Manía, Economía Política
and been invited to write in several books as Col•lectiu Investigacció
(2004) Recerca Activista i Moviments Socials. Ediciones El Viejo Topo; UTE
(2004) Barcelona marca registrada: un model a desarmar. Virus
Ivan Orellana
Orellana has studied history, biology and has an MA in digital arts by the Pompeu Fabra Univerisity. He is one of the founding members of Urbmedia Barcelona and has been an advisor for Fundación Interarts, the Forum Barcelona 2004, or Solo Consulting Group. During 2004 and 2005 he has directed the research “The economic dimension of the visual arts Spain”, a research commissioned by Associació d'Artistes Visuals de Catalunya and the fundación Arte y Derecho. He currently runs the Centre d'Innovació i Desenvolupament Económic de les Arts.
Xavier Marcé
Xavier Marcé Carol has a BA in economics and has been the director
of the
“Fundació de Cultura de L’Hospitalet (1985-1991)”,and
also directed the MA course in art management for the “Universidad de
Barcelona (1993-1996)”.Marcé currently runs the “Institut
Català de les Indústries Culturals”, a body enchasrged
of promoting the cultural industries in catalonia.
Day 3.
Money and Knowledge: City, Brains and Economy. 13/05/2006-4.30pm.
We think that it is extremely interesting to see how knowledge is going to be utilized and valued in this new economy that menaces to take over the city. We think this is the moment to try to see how the atavistic and in cases de-articulated public university is going to face these new demands. How the transformations imposed by the European education cohesion plans are going to affect the functioning of the university, the first visible moves have been to try to link some of its resources to the private sector, but, are we facing a complete privatization of education? What kind of knowledge workers are the universities expected to provide for this new productive mode? How will Barcelona provide with workers to the new range of It based companies when it has not managed to invest in research or development and there are no sings of this to happen? Is Latin America destined to become Europe’s supplier of brain-workers? We think that it is extremely important to understand the management of knowledge if we are to fully grasp the new mode of production that threatens to take over the city.
Lluís Bonet I Agustí
Bonet currently directs the postgraduate courses in culture management for
the
“Universitat de Barcelona” and lectures in the tours of Applied
Economy at the
“ Universidad de Barcelona”. He has worked and written extensively
on economy and culture policy. He has co-authored the “Llibre blanc
de les Industries Culturals a Cataluña”.
Motserrat Galcerán
Montserrat Galcerán is a senior lecturer in Philosophy for the “Universidad Complutense de Madrid”, and has worked, researched and critiqued the new education plans and policies promoted by the government and implemented by the new EU education cohesion policies. She collaborates on a regular basis with the “Universidad Nómada” in Madrid.
Emmanuel Rodríguez
Rodriguez is a Sociologist and Phd in the “Universidad Complutense
de Madrid”. Rodríguez has also written the book “El gobierno
imposible; trabajo y fronteras en las metrópolis de la abundancia,
edited by Traficantes de Sueños, publisher where he Works and is parto
of the editorial board. He has written and published on “cognitive capitalism”
in a number of magazines.
Day 4.
Views from Abroad, we can learn from previous mistakes. 20/05/2006-4.30pm.
This date will provide a framework to discuss how similar processes have taken place in other contexts around Europe. How some of these plans have been developed and deployed and what consequences they have had on the cultural production. Have the cultural institutions become open and transparent entities as promised or have they submitted their will to the private sector? What role have self-organized movements developed in the contestation of these new institutions? Is it true that the cultural industries have empowered the sector? Has the privatization of the institutions helped to open them up? What cultural implications has this process of privatization had? These are some of the questions we are interested in formulating as we review some of the points discussed in the previous events.
Anthony Davies
Independent researcher, Davies wrote a series of articles with Simon Ford about the Lonon art world during the nineties which have been widely acknowledge and highly inspirational .He has also lectured at several art schools and published in a number of art and culture magazines as Frieze, Mute or Art Monthly. He currently co-runs the independent culture and debate space “Flaxman Lodge”.
Jacob Jakobsen
Visual artist and independent researcher founded with Henrietta Heisse the Copenhangen Free University. He has also written and published a big number of texts of self-organized collectives and movements and set up the website www. infopool.org.uk, in which one can find an interesting selection of critical texts on art and contemporary culture.
Stephen Dillemuth
Visual artists and professor at the Kunstakademie Munchen, Dillemuth has worked in a number of projects analizing cultural politics and alternative and self-organized operative models. He has also edited several books as “The Academy and the Corporate Public (2002)” or “Corporate Rokoko (2003)” and has exhibited in art spaces and galleries form all around the world. He currently runs www.societyofcontrol.com website.
