Contemporary Photography

CityArts Roundtable 2 – City Collaborations

By February 25, 2006No Comments

Tuesday 7th March 2006

5.00pm – 7.00pm

Following our roundtable with Jay Koh and Chuyuan in December we are hosting a roundtable discussion with London based artist Loraine Leeson. This discussion is intended for arts, community and youth practitioners dedicated to developing participatory practice in the context of regeneration.

Loraine’s input will cover her early work exploring the role of arts and culture within the changing architectural, social and cultural landscape of London’s Docklands. She will reflect upon the changing production and political conditions that are fundamental to her current work with young people. The discussion will focus on how new ideas / practices emerge from research processes about the potential of participatory arts practice to address and infiltrate the city.

The discussion may focus on three questions.

(1) How can cross disciplinary (artists, youth workers, community development projects, academic practitioners) establish shared understandings and a potential consensus on ways forward for collaborative practice in community contexts?

(2) What new ideas / practices are emerging from research processes about the potential of participatory arts practice to address and infiltrate the city?

(3) How can these evolving processes link to an active archiving process?

Biographical Note:

Loraine Leeson has worked with communities through the visual arts for thirty years, creating artworks in the public domain. During the late seventies her work centred on the politics of health, including posters and exhibitions for the East London Health Project and Bethnal Green Hospital Campaign. In the early eighties she co-founded and directed the Docklands Community Poster Project, spending the following decade working with the communities of London Docklands on re-development issues. In the early nineties she co-founded and directed The Art of Change, which during the nineties developed participatory projects exploring creativity in relation to issues of social change. During this time she became increasingly interested in the opportunities for collective creativity offered by the new communications technology, which led to the founding of cSPACE in 2002. Loraine has lectured and taught part-time over this period at colleges and universities throughout the country. Her work has been widely exhibited and published in this country and abroad, most recently in a major retrospective of her work in the NGBK in Berlin in Nov 2005. She is currently a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of East London.

See also – www.cspace.org.uk

Places are restricted and must be booked in advance. For further details contact Elita Costello at 01-6394608 or email admin@cityarts.ie