Time: Saturday October 22, 19.30 – 21.00 hrs
Location: Piet Zwart Institute, Karel Doormanhof 45 Rotterdam
Admission: Free

The Master Education in Arts cordially invites you to the lecture series: “Making Things Public”.

As our second speaker we welcome Anna Santomouro, independent curator and researcher based
in Birmingham (UK), who will be lecturing about “Micropolitics and Soutern European Socially Engaged Art Practics”. Looking at artistic and curatorial processes that incorporate some of the methods and languages that the American art historian Claire Bishop identified as a “social turn” in contemporary art practice, Santomouro seeks to redefine such collective processes through the lens of the theories of micropolitics. Drawing a genealogy of micropolitics since the 1960s in Europe, her lecture looks specifically at Italian theorists like Antonio Negri, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi and Maurizio Lazzarato (who have incorporated the notion of micropolitics as a conceptual and operative tool in their work). Herewith she tries to generate a productive framework to conceptualize the artistic and curatorial strategies of intervention in the Southern European and Mediterranean context and the austerity climate in which they emerged.

Anna Santomauro is an independent curator and researcher currently based in Birmingham (UK). She is the Co-Founder and Chief Curator of Vessel in Bari, Italy, a non-profit arts organization devoted to developing critical discourse around pertinent contemporary social, political, and economic issues. In 2015 Santomauro was ESP and Public Programmer at Eastside Projects (Birmingham). She has developed several projects and curated multiple exhibitions such as: The Pacifist Library – Sarajevo (2013); Giant Step, a collaboration between Vessel and the Van Abbemuseum, Mostyn Gallery, and Galeria Labirynt (2012); For an Ecology of the Museum at the Museum of Villa Croce in Genoa, Italy (2012). In 2013 Santomauro and her colleague Viviana Checchia were the recipients of ICI/Dedalus Research Award. She is PhD candidate at the University of Wolverhampton (UK).

Save the date: November 4, Making Things Public – Talk # 3 with Marijke Steedman:
“What Happens When Art Exits the Gallery?”. Marijke Steedman is a curator working in the field of art in the public sphere with an interest in the political and social conditions for producing and receiving art. She worked at Tate Britain and then Whitechapel Gallery in the frame of gallery education where she developed projects such as The Street, Reclaim the Mural and edited the book Gallery as Community: Art, Education and Politics.