Details
Lecture Title: “Land, Ownership and Art Practice”
The lecture will begin with a presentation by Jaime Stapleton examining the history of land in the United Kingdom. The presentation will cover the development of the now dominant ‘Anglo-American’ view of ‘property’, and contemporary views on economic ‘incentives’ and ‘investment’, and critical concepts of ‘enclosure’ and the ‘tragedy of the commons’ that have come to dominate contemporary discourses of knowledge production, distribution and access. The presentation will relate these concepts to the social and political history of land use in the United Kingdom.
Stapleton’s presentation will provide a critical context for the second part of the lecture, presented by Rikke Luther. Luther’s presentation will examine her own past, recent and on-going art projects. The projects focus on and interrogate the social and economic relations that arise in relation to the different localations in which different projects are actualised. A key focus in this presentation will be the access, use, and ownership of land, economy and knowledge.
Examples covered will include will range from the new LAND project, to projects on occupied land in Mexico, to underground land projects in Singapore, to alternative cityplanning in Tokyo, to floating dwellings in Denmark - projects which have been done in relation to schools, a mushroom scientist, kindergardens, architects, occupants, land-owners, garbage specialists, and many others.
Rikke Luther Biography
Rikke Luther is an artist and works as part of the group Learning Site. Rikke Luther has been working from building up own projects with different groups of people to international exhibitions.
The Learning Site focuses on the local conditions in which its art practice is located. This entails a critical examination of the material resources and economies available within specific situations. Each situation may entail examination of economic and environmental factors, but also labor rights, property rights and the production and distribution of knowledge, which are investigated in tandem to produce a variety of different critical perspectives. For more information about Learning Site projects go to: www.learningsite.info
Jaime Stapleton Biography
Dr Jaime Stapleton is currently an Associate Research Fellow of the School of Law, Birkbeck, University of London. He has worked as an external consultant to the World Intellectual Property Organisation and serves on the Editorial Board of Cambridge University’s Primary Sources on Copyright (1459-1900) project. He is also a member of the CRIR group of Researchers in Residence in Christiania, Copenhagen. Until 2005, he was the Research Coordinator of the Adelphi Charter on Creative, Innovation and Intellectual Property, a law reform project based at the Royal Society of Arts in London. Between 2003 and 2006, he also worked at the National Office of the Arts Council of England. From 1994 to 2003 he taught critical theory and cultural history to undergraduate and postgraduate students of art and art history at Goldsmiths College. His doctoral research examined the relations between creative theory, intellectual property and political economy and was awarded in 2003.