Art Talk – Every human being an artist?

Location: Art Talk Area, Luxembourg Art Week

Language: French

Guest speakers:

Marc Godinho, Artist

Cristina Nuñez, Artist

Moderated by: Paul di Felice, Curator an Co-founder of EMOP Luxembourg & Art as Experience asbl.

Art for art’s sake or useful art?

This talk challenges Gautier’s notion of ‘art for art’s sake’ by contrasting it with participatory art as a contemporary artistic tool. The participating artists, Cristina Nuñez and Marco Godinho, engage the audience in their creative processes, thereby re-establishing aesthetics as a system of social transformation.

Biographies

Marco Godinho was born in 1978 in Salvaterra de Magos (Portugal). He lives and works between Luxembourg and Paris. For the past fifteen years he has been unfolding a singular universe, reflecting on our subjective experience of time and space. He shows a sensitive approach to post-conceptual practice, questions of exile, memory, and geography inspired by his own experience of nomadic life, suspended between different languages and cultures and nourished by literature and poetry. From installations and videos to his writings and collaborative pieces, his work forms a map of a world shaped by personal experiences and multiculturalism.

Born in 1962 in Spain, Cristina Nuñez. started taking photo self-portraits in 1988 as a form of self-therapy, to overcome low self-esteem and a heroin addiction in her teenage. Up to the early 2000s, she produced photography books in which she addressed social questions through the portrait. On the margins of this public body of work, she continued taking self-portraits, which became Someone to Love; since 2004 this has been the focus of her work, as well as of The Self-Portrait Experience (SPEX) workshops that she has been conducting around the world in prisons, mental health centers, universities, museums, galleries, schools and companies with over 4500 people. Her works have been presented around the world, published in monographic and collective books and are part of private and public collections. Nuñez holds a PhD about her practice at the College of Arts of the University of Derby.

Paul di Felice lives between Luxembourg and Venice. He holds a PhD in the arts and has taught art history at the University of Luxembourg. Since the 1970s, he has been active as an artist, art critic and exhibition curator. He is co-founder and co-director of Café Crème asbl, co-founder of MAI photographie & art contemporain, and a founding member of the editorial board of lacritique.org. He is curator of the Arendt art collection and a member of the board of directors of the IACCCA. He served as vice-chair of the board of directors of MUDAM. Deeply involved in the development of European cultural networks, he is president of the European Month of Photography network and co-director of EMOP Luxembourg. He is also co-founder and president of the ‘Art as Experience’ associations in Luxembourg. Furthermore, he is Co-founder and Vice-President of the Lët’z’Arles association (LUPA – Luxembourg Photography Prize) and a member of AICA Luxembourg.