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 …
Invisible archives
The Education and Mediation programme of Manifesta derives from the research of existent knowledges and practices of civic initiatives and various city’s ecosystems.
The urban development of Marseille bred fragmentation, consequently generating diverse subcultures, and self-organised initiatives, that the urbanistic project itself paradoxically often excluded.
The histories of these initiatives provided us with a genealogy, that is alternative and challenging to the city’s “mainstream” discourses. It helped understanding current societal and urban dynamics and conflicts of the city.
Archive#7. No Past = No Future exhibition by V. Jourdain and Hugues Jourdain in collaboration with “Mémoire des sexualités” association.
Invisible Archives is a sequence of eight exhibitions and public programmes which explored genealogies and non-institutional memories of civil initiatives, histories of resilience and community synergies originated and located in particular areas of Marseille. The project took place in 2019 – 2020 as part of Tiers Programme of Manifesta 13 Marseille.
Proposed by the Education team of Manifesta 13, Tiers Programme (Third Programme) is a mediation initiative between the curatorial programme and the citizens of Marseille. One of its projects, Invisible Archives, used the framework of the biennial to introduce a third perspective in order to nourish discussions on the building of symbolic and imaginary representations of the city and the actions that create its multiple realities.
Archive#6 B.Vice Sound Musical School: Performance of Eva Doumbia.
Selected archives were used as starting points for artistic reflection, in the form of a dialogue, claiming the recognition of these extraordinary examples of citizen initiatives as a common heritage which is often invisible and ignored by institutions. A sequence of eight exhibitions and public programmes took place over a year 2019 - 2020 at the headquarters of Tiers Programme – Tiers QG, a former snack adjoining student lodgings in Belsunce neighbourhood.