Co-Lab: Curatorial Design and Media Practices: Guatemala Después
NMDS 5296
Instructor: Nitin Sawhney (School of Media Studies)
Wednesdays 4pm – 6:45 pm (offered in Spring 2015)
This exploratory co-lab seeks to bring together students with interests in artistic practices, exhibition design, digital media archives and civic engagement to work collectively on a new exhibition project currently being developed at The New School in partnership with artists and curators in Guatemala. Guatemala Después is a collaborative project that seeks to support site-specific artistic investigations that may reveal, activate, provoke or transform the ways in which we understand historic memory, repression, healing and forms of utopia or dystopia emerging in Guatemala in the past 30 years, and what is happening today. It also critically examines the political, economic and cultural influences (including foreign policy, migration and creative exchange) between the United States and Guatemala.
The project uses an experimental, inclusive and participatory approach towards engaging creative practitioners and the general public using multi-disciplinary forms of investigation and expression (including visual, sound, film, performance, poetry and narrative). The course involves a process of co-investigation and design with artists, curators, filmmakers, students and community-based creative practitioners in Guatemala and New York City from 2014-2015. It will culminate into works represented in an online digital platform, exhibitions and public programming hosted at Ciudad de la Imaginación in Guatemala and The New School in April-June 2015.
The course follows from a seminar held in Fall 2014, “Art, Media and Conflict: Guatemala Post-Genocide“ (http://artmediaconflict.wordpress.com), however students are not required to take this seminar to participate in the co-lab.