Brave New Alps

Posted by Paul on Feb 14, 2012 in Art, Arts Policy, Culture and Environmental Sustainability, Culture and Social Justice
, Human Rights | Comments Off

Brave New Alps

An interview with Bianca Elzenbaumer and Fabio Franz

Visual Arts Network

is a blog hosted by CSI about collectives, community based organizations and networks working at the intersections of art, politics and social change.

Curated and written by Yulia Tikhonova

- founder of Brooklyn House of Kulture - a grass-roots non-profit organization

Q. What was your starting point, how did the idea to form your project come about?

A. We began to work together in 2005 while doing our BA degree.  The wish to work together came from our many discussions questioning the role of designers in society.  At that time we felt like we had studied the wrong thing, but then we realised that we actually had learned quite a few useful skills to engage with the environmental and social issues that concerned us and to reach people with a message. So we both did a thesis project on environmental issues connected to mass tourism in the Alps and it was really the discussion we had that pushed us in our creative work.

After graduation we realized that the world was not quite ready to embrace two designers who did not want to submit their creativity to the market, but who wanted to engage in an activist practice. In this rather difficult initial phase it was important for us to stick together, to keep up the discussion and to support each other financially. Since then, every project we have done we have worked on environmental, political and social issues that we felt strongly about, always with the aim in mind to get others involved as well and to prove that designers can have more free space practice than what is often assumed.

Q. Who is involved in the project/organization?

A. The two of us are the core of Brave New Alps, but in every project we get others involved. These people can be experts sharing their knowledge, friends engaged in similar issues, family members supporting us with logistics, building as well as cooking skills, students who are interested in trying out a different approach or simply people who care about the issues we work on. We don’t like the idea of being an island and many of our projects have strong discursive elements to them — also because much of what we do is based on a humble approach in which we try to avoid hierarchies and where we almost never come in as the “experts,” but always learn from and with others.

Q. Who outside this core group have you been collaborating with? (ie other sectors, other organizations, etc) Where do you position yourself, i.e. as: artists / social workers / activists etc,. relative to other groups?

Each of our projects develops through some form of collaboration. The projects in the Alps see mostly local residents and environmental organisations involved;  the projects in Palestine mostly involved local creatives when we worked with Decolonizing Architecture (now DAAR) and human-rights organisations for the development of the alternative travel guide Decode Jerusalem; while the project Laboratorio Campano, which looks at illegal toxic waste dumping in Southern Italy saw local activists involved.
Whenever we set up experimental educational environments like the student-led Department 21 at the Royal College of Art in London, the people involved are mostly our peers with whom we love to explore issues in an interdisciplinary, open-ended way.  We are designers and we are activists.

Q. What is your relationship to the art market? Do you have a relationship to commercial art and the gallery system?

A. We don’t relate to the commercial art and gallery system and never had to bother about this, because most of the things we do seem not to be collectable/sellable anyway. We strongly relate to what could be called the “public art market” as we often get funding from public and non-profit institutions. We would in fact not be able to do most of our projects without this kind of support.

Q. How do you engage with the political system?

A. We engage with the political system in an indirect way, by structuring the content of our projects in a critical way, by employing a non-hierarchical approach, by being inspired by and applying direct action. The direct action approach is something that often comes up in the way we respond to situations that we find difficult or unacceptable. It mostly happens quite naturally that we start to build a project around something we would like to see changed and we then employ the means available to us to interfere with that situation. Here an obvious example is Hotel Oush Grab in Palestine, where we started a “battle of signs” with a group of illegal Zionist settlers. Another example is surely again Department 21 where we simply wanted to get more out of college than what the official structures could offer. But also our current research project Designing Economic Cultures has a strong direct action component, as it looks for ways in which critically engaged designers can set up systems of support in order to be less subjected to the pressures of the market. The theoretical research and our engagement with practices within and outside the field of design that we find inspiring go hand in hand with projects on the ground in which we try to put our thoughts in practice.

Q. What is your position regarding your institutional status? Do you have decentralizing institutions as a goal?

A. As Brave New Alps we don’t have an institutional status — which in a way is great because it gives us a lot of freedom, but it is also tricky at times as without this status funding is way more difficult to obtain. This is something we will need to carefully consider for the future as it would be wonderful to find ways to be less precarious.

Q. What would you do if you finally received all that you wished for?

A. If we finally got what we wish for — a more democratic, just, heterogenous and unalienated society — we would certainly find it exciting to figure out where to go from there!

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