Potluck chat: Elsewhere - May 19 2009

Hi everyone,

This week we’ll be talking with George Scheer from Elsewhere Artist Collaborative in Greensboro, North Carolina:
http://www.elsewhereelsewhere.org

For more info, read the personal message from George, below…

Hello Basekampers!

I’m excited to have an opportunity to speak with everyone during the weekly skype potluck. I am collaborative director of Elsewhere Artist Collaborative, a living museum, experimental residency, and collaborative laboratory. Since 2003, Elsewhere has been utilizing the contents and architectures of a three-story former thrift store to create site-specific works across media. The collection stems from one woman’s 58-year history as a propriatress of several busieness at our location in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina. The project of organizing and re-organizing the massive collection has unfolded like a puzzel taking form through the multiple and layered expressions of artists participating and functioning within an intentional and changing community. Artist spend 3-6 week creating works that become part of the environment and all works are availalbe for continued transformation by subsiquent artists.

There are a few broad topics i’d like to open to everyone: What happens to value in a store where nothing is for sale and how does that make a living museum? What challenges does Elsewhere present to artists in terms of positioning themselves in a world where markets are failing and resources are becoming increasingly scarce? What role does the artist run organization play in the instrumentality of artists with the rise of collaboration and the dissolution of the centralality of authorship. What is elsewhere’s model of collaboration anyway? What role do artist run alternative spaces play outside major urban centers, in developing cities, and within the multiple levels of art-institution. We can also talk about memory, perception, tactlity, place-making and repuruposing–or, if you are the contrarian sorts, the artist as unwitting stooge of capitalist specticals by offering cheap labor to re-position people’s senses of place to drive renewed desires for escapism and othernesses in the form of “meaning production”–!

These are just some of the directions we may go, as i hope to introduce all of you to Elsewhere, our community, and programming philosophies. If you want a heads up, check us out online at www.elsewhereelsewhere.org, and cruise through the artist blogs created by our residents. I hope that i will be able to do a skype video and give you all a walking tour as we talk–

looking forward to becoming friends,
george
Elsewhere Artist Collaborative

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See you all Then!

Join us every Tuesday night – in person, or on Skype, skypename: ‘basekamp’
If you come to the potluck in person, be sure to bring a dish :)
(basekamp space: 723 Chestnut St, 2nd floor, Philadelphia usa)