Green light–An artistic workshop
May 13–November 26, 2017
Following the summer break, Green light is resuming its curriculum on September 5, 2017, with a diverse program of artistic and discursive workshops at the Venice Biennale 2017.
Green light–An artistic workshop aims to provide a platform for unconventional encounters and new types of togetherness through collaboration with refugees, asylum seekers, student volunteers, artists, scholars, and visitors in response to the increase in recent years of populist politics and the wide-spread climate of fear and suspicion geared at individuals forced into migration.
During the second semester of the workshop, which lasts until October 29, the group of participants includes new and former participants who are eager to continue their collaboration. In addition to the language courses and legal and psychological counseling featured in the first semester (May 13–June 27, 2017), the new semester incorporates an extensive series of job preparation sessions. In addition, fashion designer Tillmann Lauterbach will engage in exchange of knowledge and ideas with the participants on fashion and its idiosyncratic relation to identity-making; Aikaterini Gegisian proposes to create a communal archive of the sea—an intuitive assemblage of images, experiences, family stories, folk legacies and popular cultural references from diverse geographies, cultures and histories; Paolo Rosso is deepening his relationship with the participants in a series of itinerant ecology workshops; and Charl Landvreugd invites them to collectively examine preconceived conceptions of “Europeanness” through the lens of the black body and the way in which the Green light project unfolds in this respect. The collaboration between the participants and the Italian film collective ZaLab is continuing as well. The participants will produce their own video works, similarly to last semester’s documentary Turn on My Light, which featured five individual reactions to the Venice Biennale’s multiple artistic contributions on the themes of memory, music, civil rights, religion and work, reflected through the lense of their experiences with the Green light project. Turn on My Light remains on view in the space until November 26. For more information about the program and to read the workshop blog visit www.greenlightworkshop.org.
Participants in the workshop will continue to work together to produce Green light lamps, thereby generating a sustainable circle of support for refugees and asylum seekers and creating complexly configured environments in the Green light space. For a contribution, donors receive a Green light lamp built during the workshop. All donations go to the project’s partner NGO Emergency.
A reader (Olafur Eliasson. Green light–An artistic workshop, 2017) with selected essays and interviews has been published by Sternberg Press, Berlin.