Connective Tissue: Publication is Public Space

07.09.2010

Viewing her role as an engineer of frameworks for the production, presentation, and dissemination of contemporary ideas, Alissa Firth-Eagland is a Canadian curator, writer and editor who will unpack and present some tools of a nomadic culture worker while discussing her recent and upcoming projects. Her work fastens communities — local, national, and international. First professionally trained and tested as an artist (Ontario College of Art and Design), and later as a curator (École du Magasin, Grenoble, FR), she has been shaped by Canada’s unique history of producing networked culture through video and mail art projects, as well as the globalized context through which this network is further extended. Her projects have, therefore, explored the connective tissue of creative exchanges over long distances such as “Western Front: London Bureau”, No Soul for Sale, Tate Modern, London, UK; “Between Us: A Toronto/Vancouver Exchange”, YYZ Artist’s Outlet/Western Front, Canada and “How to act in the public sphere/Comment agir dans la sphère publique”, Le Magasin Centre Nationale D’Art Contemporain, Grenoble, France.

With the objective of creating connective tissue, writing and publishing are the cornerstones of her practice which takes the form of publications or interdisciplinary projects between text, language, printed matter, and contemporary art. She read a fictive text within which the protagonists are the collectives The Bruce High Quality Foundation (New York) and Claire Fontaine (Paris). This text is the public sphere within which these artists first met, and was the entry point into an open group discussion about what possibilities for artistic action exist within the public sphere.

Presentation in English