Protoacademy / Scotland

The objectives of proto academy are to develop ways in which an art institutional structure can take advantage of the wealth and knowledge in a particular city and serve as a meeting-point for artists and various academic specialists, cultural producers, politicians, business leaders, and citizens. Further than this the ambition is to provide an interface between art research and the wider public through exhibitions and other forms of representation. -Charles Esche

Ask the question ¡®What is proto academy?' and you'll receive as many varied opinions as there are current participants. It exists as much in the evolving dialogue of those participants as in any particular project, collaboration or event. The one thing that unites everyone involved is the belief in conversation, rigorous debate and an emphasis on the creative potential of collaborative activity.

Incorporating a voluntary membership proto academy aims to create a meeting point somewhere between the academic institution and the public realm which will enable a fluctuating group of artists and others to come together and experiment. Participants include current students and artists in the first years of their career. They are drawn from art academies across Europe and centred around a base in Edinburgh.

Perhaps the simplest way to describe the proto academy is to imagine a table around which any and all interested individuals can gather and talk. The discussions and ideas raised for activity or collective projects born there are then taken forward.

The proto academy is chiefly funded by Edinburgh Projects at Edinburgh College of Art as well as other private and public sources.

Forum A Workshop Presentation Outline
The workshop presentation of protoacademy will be a Free and Easy conversation. We hope that it will illicit responses both during and after the event. Inasmuch we hope our talk will produce a kind of environment for dialogue that we try hard to cultivate within our group, within the institutions of art, and within the still broader context of the urban situation in Edinburgh, Scotland. Ideally we want to animate a space that answers the needs of many listeners, but which does not turn a deaf ear to the difficulties of entering into our conversational circle -- or indeed any circle of conversation, hermeneutic, bound by compagnonnage, or otherwise.

The presentation itself will be organised around the question of conversation: conversations we have, conversational spheres we travel in, and conversations we respond to, sometimes intentionally and at other times unintentionally. These conversations include questions revolving around the role of art, the institution of art, its supposed undoing by the historical avant-garde, the reinvention of this project by the neo-avant-garde (or not just yet). We speak face-to-face, spin tall tales, talk of tropes, interpretation and the problems of translation. And of course we have questions about language plain and simple -- about photography, sculpture, furniture, video, film, exhibitions, installations, provisional materials, text. We will bring our conversation with us and those that orbit around us, in Malm , Frankfurt, Cork and Biella. Lately we have been circling around the question of Gwang Ju, and the possibilities still untapped in previous projects: questions of urban space at Nomadsland in Malm ; questions of hospitality and gift giving in Greetings from Liverpool, Bluecoat Gallery, Liverpool; and questions around the responsibility of art making, curating, and criticism in Alternative Strategies, Cork.

Our conversations are both real and imaginary: we talk fondly of Wier"s Land, our former home and of our apartment on George IV Bridge. We speak of high theory, we watch films, bounce about a new arcades project, in hushed tones we talk of gentle revolution. On Wednesdays we have a theoretical reading group. On Sundays we have practical sessions. We have a coffee room, plenty of pubs around, an office, an entrance way, a phone, a fax, an egroup, a web site , an upstairs gallery, some architects about, we have Bryan, Chas, Lesley, two Steve"s, Shep, Malena, Lyn, Ross, Ola, Laura, Benjamin, David, Heidegger, Mattias, Anna, Luca, Linnea, Christian, Nina and Alexander. We are a kind of vocal utopia and we always have an open table.

Of course protoacademy is many things, our formalisation for the Biennale, as a conversational community, is only one of these. We wanted to try it on for size. We wanted to be hospitable to the contingencies imposed upon us. But then again, in some essential way perhaps protoacademy is merely a platform for conversation, a kind of place, or a string of provisional places, to gather with one"s community, expand one"s community, rest comfortably, think, read, look, talk, argue, play with, and speculate about language and the languages which might make for better dialogue.

How languages constrain and limit conversation is something we continually come up against. This said, we do not consider the conversations we have, and
the languages we use to have them in any way deadening. On the contrary, we
believe that working within the limitations of structure -- whether institutional, bound by the relational dynamics of a group, or framed within the spatial and temporal structures of the city -- are all avenues where the possibility of a free and easy conversation can be found.

And so we go on happy and care free, but mostly melancholic, a conspiratorial circle of sorts that waits, wonders, plots and talks of another day, and another set of possibilities yet to come.

We will need a comfortable space, video projection equipment, a slide projector, and tumblers for whisky to keep us warm and loosen tongues. Today is January 25th and Burns Night is upon us.

www.protoacademy.org