Arts and Culture Association MEDEA
The arts & culture association MEDEA sees itself as a junction inside a network, formed by artists and cultural workers, by insiders and outsiders, by jobbers and workers, by activists and thinkers, by residents and migrants. All together MEDEA is a very hybrid, heterogenous mixture of various cultures and philosophies. A mixture of different artistic methods, attending to research and experiment with cultural and artificial codes.
We understand art as treatment of the surface of society, which is built by actual people. On this note, art applies to everyday issues and is fed by them.
MEDEA doesn`t draw lines between art, culture, politics, social life and education. The practical work denies a static division of “initiative work in singular fields of society”. The MEDEA-team pursues transgressing and varying artificial and social borders. The fields of the artistic and cultural activities are widen steadily.
The ambivalence which arises for instance in the selection of methods and tools in the particular projects, enables the audience to get a differentiated view. The tools may be situated in new and elder media, may derive from public art and performance, or also from artistically travels – or in the combination of some/all.
The mixture of social engagement, artistical ambition, cultural work and empowerment guarantees a continual swinging between different approaches and leaves space for new impulses. The process lives from steady influences and on the instable stability in development and form.
During the (de)construction of different cultural codes, these pieces of culture are again connected and rewritten with new contents. Apart from music, dance and performance, intermedial forms define the center. The overlap of the generic borders means at the same time an excess of the contexts, conventions and institutions connected with these kinds. The actions place themselves in the area, run off process-oriented and dynamically. The confrontation of the public with an unexpected topic in everyday life, at an unusual place, is the basis of the artistic process. Following aspects of language in the performance, are included into the projects resuming with: Poetry Sonore, Sound Poetry and Expanded performance. An important aspect here, lies in consulting the body as artistic material. The relation body/self becomes conceptual means of the artistic demonstration.
An important source of MEDEA is the diversity of culture - it does not aim on perfection, not the creation of migrant-culture in an aesthetically pleasing way.
Intercultural work bases on cultural translation- a spezific reality is beeing visualised on the background of cultural conditions, standards and expectations. This reality, which is getting different relevance according to cultural contexts, is the starting point of several projects.
It´s not only a special attention for migrationspecific life-circumstances, but also the configuration of living and learning in an intercultural society. Out of this reason, MEDEA found the intercultural media-labour PANGEA, where even now, after it gets self governing by former users , different workshops, abased on the needs of actual users are offered.
Medea acts inside a network of cultural organisations and free media (e.g. Radio Fro, different alternative magazines), is member of several cultural platforms ( IG Kultur, Kupf, Initiative Minderheiten, Fiftitu%,…)
There are also contacts to similar organisations in Hungary, Denmark, Italy, Poland and Mongolia., where different projects were realised.
http://www.servus.at/medea