Lessons of a Virus #3: Daniel Blanga Gubbay

Five radio programs on artistic and arts' institutional practices under the cloud of the pandemic.

The pandemic highlighted all the current social and ecological emergencies once again. How much more urgent can these urgencies become, one might ask?

And yet the pandemic offers a different context in which to face them, also for artists and art institutions. In Lessons of a Virus we invite people to talk about their practices in the arts world, how they have been affected by the pandemic and how they envisage the future.

Lessons of a virus #3: Daniel Blanga Gubbay in conversation with Guy Gypens.

Can a festival transform into a temporary school? And if we were to invent a school today, what would its curriculum be, and to whom would it be addressed? Since 2019 the Free School of Kunstenfestivaldesarts is a project dedicated to the sharing of practices and artistic experiments for forms of knowledge. It didn’t simply investigate how knowledge is produced, but also how learning processes and shared experiences can become empowering tools. The Free School used the term School in line with the tradition of spaces of collective learning. The notion of Free refers not only to the gratuity of the projects, but also to the freedom of practices and experiments allowed by the temporary nature of the project. The health crisis generated by the pandemic has forced many, in pedagogical, work or artistic contexts, to exchange information remotely. More than being a novelty however, remote transmission has always existed for diasporic communities, where archipelagos of identities have been historically – and are still today – kept alive by sharing from a distance. From one letter a month, to one audio-cassette a year; from one phone call a week, to a video-message a day. With The Diasporic Schools, Kunstenfestivaldesarts commissioned and presented six new artistic projects, from artists reflecting on the heritage and the present they relate to.

Daniel Blanga Gubbay is a Brussels-based curator and researcher. He is currently the artistic co-director of the Kunstenfestivaldesarts. He has worked as an educator and an independent curator for public programs, among which: Can Nature Revolt? for Manifesta, Palermo 2018; Black Market, Brussels 2016; The School of Exceptions, Santarcangelo, 2016. He has worked as co-curator for LiveWorks, and was head of the Department of Arts and Choreography (ISAC) of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Brussels. He graduated with Giorgio Agamben at Università Iuav di Venezia and he holds a phD in Cultural Studies from Palermo and Berlin. Recent articles appeared in South as a State of Mind (Athens), Mada Masr مدى مصر (Cairo) and Performance Journal (New York). Recent presentations include: Politics of Co-Imagination (2019, Tangier); Dance Under Cover of a Fictional Rhythm (2018, Sharjah, UAE); The Movement as Living Non-Body (2018, New York); Knowing the Unknown (2017, Museum of Impossible Forms, Helsinki) and Prophecies Without Content (American University of Beirut).

Photo: José Huedo