Theme for the Sommerakademie im Zentrum Paul Klee 2013
by Sue Williamson
Guest Curator 2013


Some years ago, I received a request from Italian curator Iolanda Pensa for a drawing on the subject of ‘Here’ and on what that word might mean to me as one of the artists around the world to whom she was sending this invitation. At the time, I was working in a residency in Montalvo, California, and Pensa’s request led me to reflect on the ever increasingly nomadic existence of the contemporary artist today, constantly moving between residencies, workshops, art projects and exhibitions around the globe.

How does the artist hold on to ‘here’, the place, the family, the community, the education, the experiences, the political and social climate that have been formative in one’s early cultural production while working on the other side of the world? Is it necessary to do so, or should one constantly be starting afresh, opening up to the new environment? Artist Mark Dion has said that when his students insist that context is vital to an understanding of their work, he tells them to forget about the context and examine the methodology which led them to that solution, and apply that methodology to the new situation.

The Sommerakademie im Zentrum Paul Klee 2013, then, will look at the meeting point between local and global. Between the ‘here’ and the ‘there’. We will consider how each artist and curator develops the tools, the methodology, the unique and authentic voice which stem from an individual life experience. We will investigate how that voice can be used to formulate approaches to new artistic problems both by studying the work of artists who have successfully managed this synthesis and by looking at the previous production of this year’s Fellows.

There will also be a practical component to the workshop, allowing the Fellows to view their immediate surroundings as a source for artistic opportunity.

The discussions at the Sommerakademie im Zentrum Paul Klee 2013 will also reflect upon whether the artist has a social responsibility to the community, as evidenced in so much of the work exhibited on the profound and poetic dOCUMENTA (13) in 2012. Does the artist have any responsibility to engage at some level, however subtle, with social issues? Or not? In Southern Africa, there is a term which is often brought into discussions of the role of the individual in society, and that word is ‘ubuntu’. It means that a person is only a person through other people. Each of us is formed by our community, and in turn, can never deny our role as a member of that community, and the humanity that that entails.

Whatever the subject of our work may be, whatever outcome we desire from the making of it, we need to proceed with respect towards our Fellows, our society and to the world at large. With today’s technology, new work can flash across the globe in seconds, granting to the producers of culture an extraordinary power. This power must be exercised with consideration and restraint.

A popular Zulu expression is "Ingane Yondlwa Umphakathi"! ‘It takes a village to raise a child’. It is a truism to say that we are all a part of the global village. Welcome to the Sommerakademie im Zentrum Paul Klee 2013.