‘Cannons & Muses is a project aimed at enabling artists around the world to collaborate and create art in context of realtime crisis. It is based on thought and dialogue, resulting in artistic multidisciplinary creation. (from the organisation’s mission statement) [http://cannonsandmuses.org]
How it started
Cannons & Muses was an unexpected side effect to an emergency conference organised by my good friend and occasional collaborator Premshay Hermon, and one of his classmates (whose name I can’t remember, I believe her first name is Danielle). At the end of 2008 there was a ware in Gaza, and the two students were unhappy with the imbalance between what seemed to be the opinion of those around them, and that commonly found in Israeli media. They organised a day event to encourage a contextualised discussion about the role of art in time of war. The title of the day was the well known saying “When The Cannons Roar, The Muses Remain Silent”. This choice was due to the widely spread thought in Israel that while the administration and the military are busy defending the citizen in whatever way they see and claim to be right, the only appropriate role culture has is to support this effort.
The video documentation of the event is available here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7364E5010D6D8021
I was not involved with the organisation of this conference, as at the time I was already living in Dublin, but as in one of my other hats, I am occasionally a graphic designer, Premshay asked for my help with creating posters/materials to advertise the conference in the short time we had before it (I think the entire thing was organised in a week, most impressively). This led to several conversation about this project while it was still in the works, mostly between Premshay and myself. After the fact, I helped edit and upload (and subtitle in English) the video documentation of the conference. The next step was an in-person work meeting in January 2009 between Premshay and myself, held in Berlin. We decided that the topics discussed in the conference (the role of art in real-time crisis) is important enough to create a project that will follow up through creative investigation, and will potentially expand beyond the Israeli arts community. Thus the project was born.
The work in the team
The team starting out was essentially Premshay and myself, joined early on by one of his colleagues, Roi Winsteen (http://cannonsandmuses.org/indexhibit/index.php?/people/admins/). The three of us collaborated in the summer of 2008 on one of Roi’s pieces and worked well together. The goal of working as a team was to create a project that would appeal to a wide range of creative individuals. Later on, as we were looking for collaborations from other locations, we were joined by Sakiko Yamaoka who took upon herself to organise a group of young artists who were interested in this sort of collaboration and work locally in Tokyo as well as internationally (mostly in an online collaborative manner), primarily with the Israeli group.
We wanted each person in the team of organisers to have a responsibility, as well as a lead contact at every location. My roles were to create and take care of the online identity and lead the activities in Dublin.
The online identity
One of my first duties at C&M was to design a logo and take care of an online identity, primarily a website.
First, credits that are due: The website and the hosting were graciously donated byMinimal Iternity, a company run my a good friends Levent Cetiner (his name will come up in future posts) and Paloma Campo.
The C&M logo was designed by my friend Corinne Savin and myself. It was never meant to be the permanent logo as we had very little time to work on it. Somehow the work on further design just didn’t happen.
So I set out to design the website. The idea was to create something very simple that will hold the mission statement, updates on current and upcoming activities, and ways to contact (with thoughts of expanding to new locations with time) and at the same time could eventually act as an archive of finished projects. I chose to use an Indexhibit template, useful for portfolios and projects presentation websites since, unlike using HTML, it allowed for others to edit the content if necessary.
Once the basic website was set up and filled with the initial content, the next step was to find a platform that would make it easier to create a conversation in this unique context, for interested individuals. This was an attempt to create a community of people from a variety of locations who were interested in the subject matter and activities of this project. Premshay (I think) brought an example of a voluntary arts organisation that was using the ning platform, which was free at the time, and so we set up a ning web environment for C&M. This particular aspect was very short lived as an active online community needs to be regularly monitored, and I could only allow C&M to take up a certain percent of my time. Fast enough it got contaminated by trolling messages and not enough relevant activities were initiated by the members or the monitors (me, me, I ran out of time!) About a year later, I think, ning stopped being a free platform, and so the C&M online community stopped existing.
The website is still online, and when activities happen, the new page get updated. I would like to redo some of the aspects of this website, but at the moment, I just don’t have the time.
The attempts (and some successes) of expansion
Given that we were already in Germany when C&M was born, we (ok, Premshay mostly, but also a little bit me) tried to establish some contacts in Berlin during that visit. Unfortunately somehow all the contacts we made in Berlin dissipated and no follow up was made, so we never successfully had any projects take place in Germany.
In terms of expansion beyond Israel/Ireland, Premshay made one significant contact which produced a collaborative project between Tel Aviv and Tokyo. Sakiko Yamaoka, an artist and lecturer in Tama university in Tokyo, found an interest in the project and built a group of young artists and students who were interested in working with artists from Israel and discuss the topic of art in times of crisis. More about the Tokyo group can be found here: C&M Tokyo
Evolutions
In Ireland it was all up to me to get things started, going, and active. During 2009 I organised three events, but they will be a separate post (either each one, or the three of them) following this one. I basically failed to develop a group that would be consistently active as a C&M Dublin group. The rhythm and style of work in the arts in Ireland were fundamentally different from the way I work, I think in 2009 I was too foreign to succeed. Eventually, in May 2010, after I few more failed attempts to promote this project in Dublin, I decided to find someone who is local, a recent graduate, and part of the community within which the project seeks to act. The artist Paul Gallagher, who participated in one of the C&M exhibits, graciously agreed to take the reigns and is since the main figure of C&M Dublin. I hope to rejoin the efforts at some points, when this degree is behind me.
Premshay was (and still is) the leader and organiser of the most productive branch of C&M, the Tel Aviv group. He initiated a few events, a launch presenting the group, and two Tokyo-Tel Aviv collaborations, as well as establish a C&M mailing list which he sends around whenever there is news, events, calls for participation, or any other items of interest to those registered with him. He is also partly responsible for the C&M Dublin’s publication that Paul is developing (one issue came out so far, the second is in the works). Hopefully, once we all live through these few years where we are making our personal and professional lives a little less demanding and filled with instability, we’ll be able to regroup and conjure some more activities for this project, as it still have tons of unfulfilled potential.
Intersecting Interests 