In Brazil, the covid-19 pandemic has enhanced several issues experienced by the artistic working class in Latin America. If before the pandemic period the question of the value of an ephemeral artwork (such as dance, theater, performance and music concerts) was under discussion, not only because of the lack of funding, but also because of the lack of working conditions when funded; during the pandemic this became an urgent and enlarged matter.
How are the roles of accountability, care and partnership when it comes to working sustainability in the art context? Which and how are the dominant relationships between artists, public, art institutions, and the economy, especially in the independent performing arts field? How to avoid the idea of surviving and responding, and how to value the idea of living and co-creating? After all, what makes something valuable? How is value established and, by consequence, assured and preserved? What are the relationships between cultural value and economic value? What if what is valued is not a product, but a production? How and why do people value the performing arts? How can the performing arts architect other valuable ecologies than the dominant ones? How can reflections on value in art support and sustain an ecology of cultural value that matters not only to artists, but to cultural institutions and, above all, to society?
value project started from these concerns in August 2020 as a project conceived and coordinated by the Brazilian artists Laura Salerno and Clarissa Sacchelli. It is an ongoing and public research project developed along TEMPORARY ZONES that are spaces in which different groups of art workers and researchers are gathered to discuss these issues collectively. The project takes a different form with each context-group, always seeking to open room to study, discuss and articulate collectively how questions about value are explored in the context of the arts, especially in the performing arts, investigating how theater, performance and dance operate as labor, capital and exchange currency. It interests to search how to provoke movements in which all the participants share questions, knowledges, experiences, modes of doing and reflections.
Each Temporary Zone starts from a collection of REFERENCES (texts, works, experiences…) assembled by the two coordinators as well as from SEEDS developed and left by the previous Zone-Group. As the project was initiated during the pandemic in Brazil, all encounters, until this moment, have been realized through online platforms taking in consideration, however, that the digital is
only the technique used to trigger the discussions, but not the experience proposed.
how to desire economic transformation ?