For the fifth Studio Social, we are delighted to welcome Dana Olarescu, a socially engaged artist with a focus on challenging minority exclusion and environmental injustice.
Dana works with co-operation and place, and will be walking the audience through two recent projects.
The Most Inclusive Place, an Open City Project commission, interrogates how inclusivity is felt on Hilgrove Estate in Swiss Cottage, London. Following conversations and workshops with residents, Dana mounted 22 hand-painted flags on the public green and used ‘What if’ questions to interrogate the inclusivity of public space. These slogans aim to encourage everyone from residents to stakeholders to reimagine the area and become agents of change.
For the Food Resilience workshops facilitated in collaboration with Noemi Gunea, and commissioned by Polish Migrants Organise for Change, the artists debated food politics with Londoners of Eastern European heritage. Hosted by Calthorpe Community Garden in King’s Cross, London, the project explored food, plant, and cultivation knowledge-sharing as a tactic to withstand and organise during the cost of living crisis. How do economics and food politics intersect, and how can we act on the insights acquired on our migrant journeys?
Dana Olarescu
Through participatory methodologies that democratise access to art and knowledge, she aims to give agency to underserved migrant groups and people habitually excluded from decision-making processes, so they can become active co-producers of culture.
Most recently, she has engaged Gainsborough residents affected by the closure of West Burton A power station, as part of the ‘Decommissioning the Twentieth Century’ investigation run by Keele University, and co-designed and built a low-impact straw bale classroom with young asylum seekers at May Project Gardens, London.
Latest publications include ‘Practising Migration’ in Art, Migration, and the Production of Radical Democratic Citizenship; ‘Socially Plagued’ in Social Works? Open journal, ‘When Grief and Joy Collide’ in Assets of Community Value magazine, and the self-published Towards Resilience: A Manual in Support of the Immune System.
Her projects have been supported by, among others, the Arts Council, Counterpoints Arts, UCL Culture, and Urban Wilderness, and presented at institutions in the UK and abroad, including Tate Modern, the London Short Film Festival, the Low Carbon Design Institute, Art Gene, x-church, ArtHouse Jersey, Art Walk Projects, Incheon Art Platform (South Korea), La Virgule (France), Foodculture Days (Switzerland), and Tanzhaus NRW (Germany).
Studio Social: a series of online artist talks programmed and hosted by Pier Projects Art Agency. In each session, an artist will share a recent work or project with time for Q&A. This series profiles artists for whom both people and place are at the centre of their practice.