Osor, Cres Island, Croatia

What is the Creative Act (The Sea)?

when 1 July 2018 - 15 July 2018
language English
duration 2 weeks
fee EUR 2000

What is the creative act, in both art and nature? Is it beyond good and evil, or does it have secret ethics?

We dive into the main theme which holds it all together, just as it at the same time puts all in flux. The Sea: taciturn, surging, immanent, open, smooth, with different degrees of depth. (Should we not be like this too?) Water, salt minerals, rocks that surround it, all affect our skin and the layers of our thought in turn. The sea is physical (a space of swimming, diving, sailing), metaphysical (a source of inspiration from fairytales to the bible), biochemical (the origin of earthly life), and political (a site of travel, immigration, colonization).

Cres island is a place where both nature and politics are tangible: surrounded by the crystal blue Sea, populated with rare plant and animal species, each bears traces of its Communist past (being part of ex-Yugoslavia), Habsburg history (being part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire), and even of the earlier cultures of the Venetian Republic and ancient Roman Empire. Hence, the creative configuration of art-ecology-politics will be theoretically investigated and experientially engaged as soon as we leave the classroom. In fact, the classroom itself will become the outside and vice versa.

We will follow a syllabus, an outline of works by artists, anthropologists, philosophers, writers, evolutionary biologists, and composers, all of which have been intensified by the Sea - a natural and thinking force. Some of the authors we will engage are Reinaldo Arenas, Clarice Lispector, Vilem Flusser, Diderot, Tomasi di Lampedusa, Yukio Mishima, Theophrastus, Curzio Malaparte, Ladislav Klima, Rudolf Steiner, Gyorgy Ligeti, Alejandra Pizarnik, Paul Scheerbart, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Lygia Clark... You don't have to be familiar with any of them; the retreat will be your introduction. The important aspect of these "obscure" authors, outside of the mainstream, is that they redefine our relations to the world by introducing unpredictable variables into our life-worlds.

Course leader

Dejan Lukic: faculty member at the School of Visual Arts and Parsons School of Design in New York; Phd. from Columbia University.

Target group

Art students, art professionals, curators, artists, architects, philosophers, cooks, art teachers, writers, general public.

Course aim

You will produce a series of multiples - as reactions to discussed themes and experiences of the week - that may include texts (as writers), sounds (as composers), drawings, images, videos (as artists), dishes (as chefs), performances (as dancers), design proposals (as architects), or concepts (as philosophers). If none of these suits you, you can learn how to swim butterfly or how to do a high-dive with somersault (but you have to learn it well). Furthermore, you can continue your work after you return from the island and keep up a correspondence with the instructor and classmates.

Fee info

EUR 2000: The fee includes:

1. Course fee
2. Accommodation in a shared room (double occupancy) in Stanzia Castellani for two weeks
3. All meals
4. Excursions

Scholarships

N/A