Saturday — Thinking through Doing with Beta-Local
Comments Off on Saturday — Thinking through Doing with Beta-LocalSaturday — 07.12.14 — Thinking through Doing with Beta-Local
CONTENTS:
0. About Saturday
1. About Beta-Local
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0. About Saturday
What: Meeting / Conversation
When: Saturday July 12, 5pm
Where: 16 Beaver St., 4th Floor
Who: Free and Open to all
This Saturday, we will have a conversation with Sofia Gallisa Muriente
from Beta-Local. Located in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Beta-Local has, since
2009, been attempting to act as a meeting place for different
practitioners to come together, engage in critical questions, and to think
and rethink place through different collectivized processes.
We hope this meeting can be a way to learn more about their organization
and to link to prior conversations at 16 beaver on urban common(s) and
local collectivized networks that respond to broader attempts towards
autonomy and self-sufficiency.
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1. About Beta-Local
Beta-Local is a project created by artists Tony Cruz, Beatriz Santiago and
curator Michy Marxuach in 2009. It is a non-profit organization in San
Juan, Puerto Rico devoted to art, public engagement, and critical
thinking.
Beta-Local is actively involved in “thinking through doing”, believing in
cross-pollination as a way to trigger hidden and profound experiences that
can contribute to the shaping of a place. They are committed to creating a
specific collaborative platform with every individual participant through
our programs in order to promote and support the production of aesthetic
inquiry, creative thinking and real life practice. Beta-Local believes in
experimenting with, sharing and creating collective knowledge.
They have created a combination of interconnected programs for
project-based, interdisciplinary art and pedagogical platforms: La
Práctica, The Ivan Illich Public School, and The Harbor. This system
integrates three basic dynamics:
– It serves as supportive space for local artists, architects, designers,
cultural producers and other creative thinkers to realize projects from
conceptualization to production through the post-academic
interdisciplinary program (La Práctica);
– It creates an open school through which anyone can propose or offer to
teach a class or share a knowledge and articulate its own format. (The
Ivan Illich Public School);
– Its harbors an exchange of knowledge with international thinkers and
cultural practitioners (with or without institutional affiliation) to work
on specific projects, create public workshops/lectures, and advise and
establish liaisons with local artists (The Harbor).
Beta Local’s initiatives mutually support and challenge each other through
non-hierarchical interactions; all participants—members of the general
public, artists, and intellectuals—collaborate as peers and equals.