Kurziv, with partners Krytyka Polityzna from Poland and Maska from Slovenia, will have the opportunity to develop a project Testing Ground: Reparative Practices for New Cultural Ecosystem, co-financed by European Union. Through the project, we will develop ‘reparative methods’ – creative research modalities that, through a combination of research/theoretical and cultural/artistic tools, examine and build the potential of culture and art for social repair.
Reparative methods will be tested and developed in response to various areas marked by friction: growing gender inequality, ecological crisis in urban environment, and structural obstacles that stand in the way of artistic and cultural creation.
Through the project, we will initiate interdisciplinary processes that include artists, curators/producers and other organizers, scientists, writers, researchers and theorists, blurring the boundaries between artistic and discursively introducing artistic methods into the research process (and vice versa).
During the following two years, the partners will organize and produce a series of public talks and seminars, lectures, performances and lecture-performances, experimental media formats, exhibitions and artistic research retreats that will serve as a testing ground for development of reparative methods.
‘Repair’, which we also choose as a shorter name for our project, is framed following the notion of ‘reparative critique’, which is a term coined by theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and used in humanities for modes of thinking and reacting that are manifested through rejecting predetermined methods and already existing frameworks. The reparative approach engages an empathetic view, thinking together with their object or topic instead of analyzing it from a distance – enabling different nurturing and supportive responses, susceptible to the unexpected. The project will build on this understanding of ‘reparative’, expanding it by developing more radical possibilities of reparative cultural practices and methodologies, bridging divides inside the cultural field, as well as researching and testing new forms of creating and mediating. We believe that reparative approaches are essential for rethinking what cultural and artistic tools are and what they can do in a crisis situation marked by erosion of public trust and growing social divisions.