Manifesta originated in the early 1990’s in response to the political, economic and social changes following the end of the Cold War and the subsequent steps towards European integration. Since that time, Manifesta has developed into a traveling platform focusing on the dialogue between art and society in Europe.
Education
The Nomadic nature of Manifesta enables a unique encounter between home-based and international citizens. They come from diverse cultures, professional backgrounds, and life experiences.
The Education and Mediation programme aims to establish a space where all these diversities are valued and shared. A space where we all learn, and not teach. Its goal is to engage with and learning from the existing (self-organised) initiatives in order to create a biennial programme where more people can recognise themselves.
School Projects
Formal education is an important social institute, that forms our society, its values, social behaviour, and cultural norms. In each Manifesta edition we investigate in what way artistic and/or critical pedagogical practices can contribute to the curricular of primary, secondary, or high schools. Projects are focused on exploring subjective gaps in the curricular and/or teaching methods and offer proposals for tackling them. These proposals are results of collaboration between students, teachers and schools’ management, guest artists/educators and Manifesta’s Education team.
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Manifesta 14 Prishtina: Uncover your Story: a manual to local cultureAs the pre-biennial Urban Vision of CRA showed, Prishtina is often perceived as a spatially fragmented city with little to no social contact between the neighbourhoods.
Manifesta Mediators
Mediation programme of Manifesta offers different ways to welcome and to engage with our diverse public. It is a collective encounter that involves treating each other as owners of authentic experiences and cultures. This opposes the common idea of transferring “objective” knowledge or opinion from a more informed guide to a less informed audience.
Community projects
The Community programme of Manifesta follows the mediation approach. Following the findings of the pre-biennial urban research and citizens’ consultations, it aims at engaging with the existing practices and knowledges of communities and offering space and support for their development in dialogue with the project of Manifesta.
Community-driven programmes requires time, safe environment, creative independency and openness to unexpected outcomes. In recent editions we put significant resources in community programmes, setting up physical spaces and facilitating collective projects with shared agency. The outcome of community programmes cannot be pre-defined, it goes beyond institutional categories and disciplinary divisions and can be described as educational, curatorial, research or artistic, but always developed in a collective process.
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Manifesta 12 Palermo: Un Grande GiardinoThe most ambitious and challenging persuits of Manifesta lie in the realm of urban commons of the host city. The path to commons consciousness in Palermo is very twisted, but no cultural initiative can develop successfully and meaningfully there without …
Education and Community spaces
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Manifesta 13 Marseille: Tiers QGTiers QG, the headquarters of Le Tiers Programme (Third Programme), was the first space Manifesta 13 opened to public almost a year before the official opening of the biennial in Marseille.
Publications
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Manifesta 14 Prishtina: Mapping Subculture MovementsTo understand Prishtina’s pre-existing cultural ecosystem, especially outside of that which is supported and endorsed by institutions, Manifesta 14’s Education and Mediation Department in collaboration with the community centre Termokiss, initiated a research project which attempted to map and trace …
Group-Think publication
Danish artist Stine Marie Jacobsen has been invited to develop a long-term project with schools in Marseille. The project titled Group-Think evolved after meeting with teachers, students and professionals of formal and non-formal education.
These conversations inspired her to explore the potential of citizenship education in a moment of multiple students’ mobilisations in Marseille and the world. Group-Think seeks to expand the current formal education programme at schools by implementing training techniques in nonviolent civil protest, first aid, and collective intelligence skills.
This educational programme, which could be implemented as part of a sports, art, or other class involving physical activity, consists of a series of exercises that stimulate collective intelligence, patience, preparedness, good reflexes, violence prevention, urban resilience, verbal negotiation, responsibility, resistance, coping strategies, first aid, and group safety in protest gatherings.
As an addition to current sports programmes in schools, Group-Think seeks to introduce a creative sports programme with exercises that connect individual and group minds in order to heighten solidarity, improvisation, and thinking skills. Group-Think aims at preparing young people to take care of themselves and others through collective actions. By training students in collective intelligence, solidarity, resilience, self-care and community-care, they’ll be able to better protect each other in mass gatherings.
These exercises were cowritten and tested together with eighty Marseille school students and circus artists from the project’s partner Archaos.
The project resulted in a film that was screened in a cabin on the rooftop of Coco Velten and in a handbook that has been distributed among 102 local schools and is available online for free, or as a publication for sale.
Find out more on the website of Stine Marie Jacobsen.