Response to Hanna's lecture from Rania and Rui Rui, Tampere

We found Hanna's lecture very interesting and engaging on a number of levels. Like Jess, we found great pleasure in her address of disciplinarity. How convinient that Finnish has such an all encompassing term :) !

For the purposes of this entry, we've chosen to focus on two points. Both relate to Hanna's reference to the wording of the Prospero project's proposal, and her problematizing of the 'political rhetoric' therein.

The first concerns the sentence, "To encourage the work and circulation of artists" and Hanna's question: "Who are these artists and who gets this possibility?"

Rania commented about how she wonders how much grant writing and the current art economy (based on grants) informs art works themselves these days. In her work as a art critic, she saw a good deal of projects for example using the concepts of Michel Foucault or those which included a social service aspect as part of a (forced) "community interest" agenda. This, she added, works in both positive and negative ways.

She wondered however, how common it is for artists to feel constrained, i.e. not free to pursue their own aesthetic interests because everything has to be so officially justified. How is "art" itself, and more specificallly funded art, compromised under current socio-economic conditions?

We then moved on to the section of the lecture where Hanna refers to a second written agenda of the project. "To contribute to the emergence of European citizenship". Hanna at this point had questioned, 'Why? What kind of citizenship? Who is European?'

Rui Rui commented that while Europeans are currently crossing their own national boundaries to create a centralized power, she believes that the selection of the artist for this sort of funding depends on the sort of state (in this case 'Europe') that those in power would like to build. Where, in these cases does the artist change their interests to fit the taste of the authority?