OCTOBER - 2008 - Melbourne
Darren O'Donnell and Natalie De Vito from Mammalian Diving Reflex visits Melbourne
Melbourne International Arts Festival, ArtPlay, YPAA and Express Media are pleased to be offering a unique workshop opportunity to Victorian community arts practitioners with Darren O’Donnell and Natalie De Vito from Canadian research-art atelier Mammalian Diving Reflex (MDR).
Mammalian Diving Reflex are a company dedicated to investigating the social sphere, always on the lookout for contradictions to whip into aesthetically scintillating experiences, producing one-off events, theatre-based performance, theoretical texts and community happenings.
MDR are currently in Melbourne working on the Australian Premiere of Children’s Choice Awards for the Melbourne Festival. Working with Footscray Community Arts Centre, MDR will conduct a series of workshops with 41 grade 5/6 Footscray City Primary children and chauffeur them from Festival event to event and offer the children’s critical opinions. The project culminates in an awards ceremony on the last day of the Festival, when the junior judging panel will present their handmade awards in categories they have created themselves.
DETAILS OF THE WORKSHOP ARE AS FOLLOWS
Workshop title: Gluing the Grease: Introducing The Social Impresario
Content: Culture, creativity and artists are being mobilised to deal with everything from youth gun violence to the health of the economy. There’s the move by the state to put culture in service of the community – thereby forcing artists to fix social problems as well as the need for artists to provide content and activities to keep the information-age rolling in events such as the Melbourne Festival. So we have the artist as cheap glue for the social fabric and cheap grease for economic wheels. Mammalian Diving Reflex introduces the Social Impresario, whose aesthetic of civic engagement conflates the grease with the glue, hauling socially ameliorative projects into the glare of the spectacular spotlight.
Gluing the Grease: Introducing The Social Impresario will present the work of Mammalian Diving Reflex, supply a framework for analyzing work that conflates the grease and the glue and facilitate a discussion with parishioners with an eye toward developing strategies for penetrating the large scale art spectacle with socially ameliorative works.
Mammalian Diving Reflex is a research-art atelier dedicated to investigating the social sphere, always on the lookout for contradictions to whip into aesthetically scintillating experiences, producing one-off events, theatre-based performance, theoretical texts and community happenings.
Date: Mon 20 October
Time: 10am - 2pm
Venue: ArtPlay, follow theYarra river past Federation Square and you will find it in Birrarung Marr, Melbourne's new park by the river.