In Prague on 22 and 23 September, there will be a lecture on the aesthetic notion of atmosphere, a presentation of the art project, and an online workshop dealing with public art. The event is part of the 4EU+ project “Public Art in Poland, Italy, and the Czech Republic,” supervised by researchers from Charles University, the University of Warsaw, and the University of Milan.
The project aims to establish a research group of aestheticians from universities that are part of the 4EU+ alliance and so create a base for future cooperation in teaching. “In the next year, we would like to organize a summer school on the same topic about which we talk during our gatherings, which is public art,” Tereza Hadravová says. “We hope that we will cooperate on the summer school with GAMPA gallery in Pardubice, which has, in the Czech Republic, a unique interest in public art and realization of public art projects.” The results of the research group are to be published in the academic journal Aisthetis (Firenze University Press) in March 2022.
On Wednesday, 22 September 2021, at Scout Institute in Prague, a lecture “Atmospheres, Urban Sites, and Metaphysics” is to be delivered by Adam Andrzejewski from the University of Warsaw. It focuses on the conception of atmosphere, which is according to philosopher Gernot Böhme “the fundamental concept of the new aesthetics,” and demonstrates that we may acquire a fitting term to reason the aesthetics of a town by a better understanding of the atmosphere’s metaphysics.
A presentation dealing with the public art project “Malleable Memory,” which took place in Pardubice in Fall 2020, will follow the lecture. The event is to be introduced by the curator of the project, Šárka Zahálková, the programme director at GAMPA gallery in Pardubice who supplements Adam Andrzejewski’s lecture by exploring the concept of city atmosphere in practice.
On Thursday, 23 September, there will be an online workshop “Public Art in Poland, Italy, and the Czech Republic” where the research group will present and discuss the present results of its work. Adam Andrzejewski and Marta Maliszewska from the University of Warsaw are to deliver a paper on “Rural Public Art” analysing the role of rural art in Poland.
Andrea Borghini and Nicola Piras from the University of Milano are to deliver a paper on “Eating Local as Public Art?” defending a thesis that dining and cooking may be a form of public art. “In our paper, we are especially interested in how the functions traditionally ascribed to the public art could be fulfilled by our understanding and realization of local cooking and dining; the cuisine being, no doubt, a significant phenomenon of the contemporary culture,” Borghini says. “We explore several concrete case studies of providers of local foods in Italy and consider them as examples of memory art, which is all based on the previous study I have done together with Prof Andrea Baldini from Nanjing University.”
Tereza Hadravová and Sabrina Muchová from the Faculty of Arts, Charles University, want to draw attention in their paper “Speed up of Slow down. On Temporality of Public Art” to temporal aspects of some public artworks. The authors assume that the relationship between temporal works and places, where there are exhibited, could be better understood by assessing when public artworks are considered valuable and when they fail.
Both events – the lecture, presentation, and online workshop – in Scout Institute, are open to the general public. You may find more information on the department’s website.
