The Public Space? Lost & Found symposium and exhibition investigate the definitions of public space across disciplines and the tools, tactics, and consequences of reclaiming — or to use a term coined by Antoni Muntadas, creating interventions in — public space through art and architecture. Public Art, that is art in public space, is a concept that has been in discussion and revision throughout the evolution of the terms “art” and “city” themselves. Recent movements — including those in Egypt, Madrid, New York and around the world in Occupy communities — have exposed the distance between “public” and “space” and reflect citizens’ interests in recovering and re-appropriating the city or town square. The themes of the symposium draw from Muntadas’s career at MIT and his artistic practice, a legacy that directly affects the work and philosophies of many of the invited speakers.
Muntadas came to MIT in 1977 to join the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) as a research fellow. In this experimental setting, he explored topics such as the media landscape and the dichotomies between subjectivity and objectivity and private and public. It was at CAVS that he coined the term “media landscape” to define the ever-expanding presence of mass media, audiovisual material, and advertisements in public space. While the institutional structure changed two times over his career and he later became Professor of the Practice, his seminars became a fixture in the curriculum as they focused on understanding spatial cultural identity through art and architecture.
A forthcoming publication will expand the symposium discussions and bring together divergent voices in theory and practice through texts and projects that challenge or support ideas of cultural identity by documenting and analyzing public spaces across several geographies and cultures in recent history.
The Public Space? Lost & Found symposium and exhibition is chaired by Gediminas Urbonas, Mitsui Career Development Associate Professor in ACT at MIT’s Department of Architecture. Urbonas is a co-founder of the Transaction Archive and co-director of the Pro-test Lab Archive. Co-founded with Nomeda Urbonas, the Urbonas Studio is an interdisciplinary research practice that advocates for the reclamation of public space and cultural and political imagination as tools for social change. Urbonas Studio has exhibited internationally including in Venice, San Paulo, Berlin, Moscow, Lyon, and Gwangju Biennales, as well as at the Manifesta and Documenta exhibitions. Their writings on artistic research as a form of intervention in social and political crises have been published in books such as Devices for Action by MACBA Barcelona and Villa Lituania by Sternberg Press.
For full program, click here.
