Rewilding Practice – a workshop with Mark Fell and Robin Mackay
Published
As part of the symposium “The Only Lasting Truth is Change”, BEK invites creative practitioners to the workshop series “Rewilding Practice”.
Led by multidisciplinary artist Mark Fell, with philosopher Robin Mackay, this workshop series aims to critically examine beliefs about creative practice — for example, relationships between creativity and technology, approaches to collaboration, concerns with authorship and agency; as well as ideas about inspiration, expression and communication of meaning as the fundamental principles of creative production. How do such beliefs not only structure creative practices, but also the spaces and systems intended to facilitate and contain those practices? With group-based activities, exercises and discussions, we hope to identify and confront foundational beliefs about what it is to create new work, and explore alternatives.
The workshop takes up major themes from Fell’s new book Structure and Synthesis: The Anatomy of Practice, with a particular focus on the relationship between ‘theory’ and ‘practice’. From the unspoken theoretical underpinnings of ‘practice’ to the logistics, economic and material constraints on ‘doing theory’, and at a time when technology intervenes in our thinking as well as our actions, is the distinction between the theory and practice now obsolete? How do our physical and technical environments become a part of our thought processes? What models can we turn to in order to redraw or reject the tension between the cognitive and the productive?
The series is aimed at creative practitioners — artists, musicians, curators, educators — and encourages participants to diagram, discuss, and examine the disparities between shared beliefs and actual practices.
The series will consist of three sessions taking place in BEK on 9, 13, and 16 November 2021. It is free and will be held in English. To register for the workshop series, please send an email to bek@bek.no by 24 October. The places are limited.
«Rewilding Practice» is organised in cooperation with STUDIO, part of Public Art Norway’s art project for the new KMD building in Møllendalsveien 61 in Bergen.
Mark Fell
Mark Fell is a multidisciplinary artist based in Rotherham (UK). His practice draws upon electronic music subcultures, experimental film, contemporary philosophy and radical politics. Over the past 30 years Fell’s output has grown into a significant body of work – from early electronic sound works and recorded pieces, to installation, critical texts, curatorial projects, educational systems and choreographic performances. His recent works, drawing from sacred geometries to programming structures, underline Fell’s particular interest in non-linear systems and structures, and our complex inter-relationships with them. http://www.markfell.com/
Robin Mackay
Robin Mackay is director of Urbanomic, has written widely on philosophy and contemporary art, and has instigated collaborative projects with numerous artists. He has also translated a number of important works of French philosophy, including Alain Badiou’s Number and Numbers, Quentin Meillassoux’s The Number and the Siren, François Laruelle’s The Concept of Non-Photography and Éric Alliez’s The Brain-Eye and Undoing the Image. Robin Mackay at Urbanomic.com
STUDIO
What is a studio? How might a workspace provide both concentration and inspiration from the outside world? And what might an interdisciplinary studio for fine art, music and design look like? Between 2021 and 2023, the project STUDIO project at the Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design at UiB will explore these questions in practice and theory. STUDIO is initiated and supported by KORO / Public Art Norway.