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 …
If you dig, you always find the sea
A contribution to the archeology of Palermo coastline
This artistic and pedagogical project was initiated as a collaboration between architect Valentina Mandalari and artist and anthropologist Lorenzo Bordonaro as part of the education research programme of Manifesta 12.
The project proposed to explore the transformation of the Palermo coast using the format of an archaeological-ethnographic investigation. Two primary school classes conducted simultaneous campaigns of "archaeology of the contemporary territory" in two parts of the city – the southern beach of Romagnolo and a northern one of Vergine Maria. Despite being geographically afar, both neighbourhoods share a similar urban evolution in the years following the Second World War. Both have been changed from traditional fishermen neighborhoods into a sort of dysfunctional periphery. The hectic and unregulated growth of the city started in 1950s deprived Palermo of a recreation public space at the cost of the sea. An enormous amount of debris has been brought to the cost and pushed back the coastline to 150-200 meters.
The pupils interviewing a fisherman from the neighbourhood.
In spring 2018 the students of both schools excavated around 400 kilos of cement tiles, Venetian floors, grits, marble, majolica, terracotta and calcarenite bricks that belonged to demolished liberty villas and other constructions. These fragments of contemporary urban archeology, carefully sorted and analysed, formed an exhibition in the crypt of the church of SS. Euno and Giuliano.
Beyond the excavation work carried out by the participants, archeology in this project intended to uncover the stories and the trace of how the urban transformation led to the social change. The students conducted interviews with the inhabitants of the surrounding areas, collecting family memories of the neighbourhood transformations.
The project further developed into a Manifesta 12 Mediation Kit “Un sacco di Palermo”, and continued in the following years at the Urban Ecomuseum Mare Memoria Viva.
Exhibition of the archaeological findings at the cripta of Santi Euno e Giuliano Chirch.