<font color="#663300">Dear Colleague, </font><div><p><font color="#663300">Greetings! I read about your projects with interest in collaborations. Herein, to your attention, is some information that includes a pre-symposium session of The Kumasi Symposium we are doing in Ghana this 2009. We anticipate a stimulating Ghana experience. Please come and post/distribute to others in your circle of contacts you think might be interested in</font><font color="#663300"> the arts-based social project. </font>
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<div>And do accept my best wishes for a productive 2009.<div> <div>Barthosa Nkurumeh, AfriCOAE General Secretary<div>(Artist and Educator, ILAC- College of Education, University of Oklahoma)<div>Project Web sites: <a href="http://afropoets.tripod.com/eta" target="_blank">http://afropoets.tripod.com/eta</a>, <a href="http://www.focusonthearts.org" target="_blank">http://www.focusonthearts.org</a><div>
<div> </div></div></div></div></div></div><div><div><div><div><div><div><div> <p><font size="6"><b><font color="#ff9966">CALL FOR ARTISTS</font></b></font><div> <div> One means of Tapping Local Resources for Sustainable Education through Art is by bringing together specialists form diverse parts of the world in a trans-national platform for inter-trading of cultural and knowledge capital in evidence-based society. In the Kumasi Curio Kiosks Project, the trade of intellectual capital from the specialist to the generalist requires both the sharing of existing and onward replication of the modules of knowledge that may accrue. Interestingly, the specialist participant will create a Curio Kiosk of 6 x 6ft for a temporary exhibition/stock of works by the specialist, and relevant other national cultural/intellectual capital for trading with the locals. The 6 x 6ft kiosk can be conceived as a mental space or a constructed physical space with any material, constructed on site or pre-fabricated, and as an individual enterprise or a collaborative one. <div>
<div>In the Kumasi case, we refer to the cluster of curio kiosks as a Trade Commune; a historical allusion be made subtly but we use the term "curio kiosks" in anticipation that the outward design will invoke curiosity or content will bear special attraction to the locals. The setting for a Trade Commune may be a Kumasi city street, university campus, or a village within the Kumasi metro, as appropriate to the design of the arts participant. The mode of exchange is open in manners of traditional lectures, demonstrations, workshops, dialogical methods, and direct exchanges of material culture; or the post-modernist modalities in the way of performances, slide/new media/film screenings, and a hundred others. A trade may be by barter, cash, gift to the local or what ever is simpler and mutual. The trade is not just an inventory of arts data, cross-cultural process of negotiation and sharing of evidence creation; it is an engagement in a particular kind of commercial enterprise through use of the arts. Relying on collaboration, and free exercise of the arts, we therefore seek to stimulate for intellectual freedom and renewed vision of the arts as economic-cultural capital in the city. Because the process and structure encourages integration/assertion of the participant's institutional knowledge and national cultural capital, the supposition is that the individual or group would attract sponsorship for own costs from home institution or country. <div>
<div>The Kumasi Curio Kiosks Project is a project session of "The Kumasi Symposium: Tapping Local Resources for Sustainable Education through Art". The arts-based social experiment is designed to provide a context that will stimulate the artist, scholar and activist participants to place themselves and their practice into question and possibly resolutions through collaboration and cultural/artistic interchange. The pre-symposium session will run from July 31-August 8 2009 and the symposium from July 11-14 2009. About 30 local artists will be selected to work alongside some invited international colleagues. <div>
<div>If interested in participating in the project, send an introductory material on you, and a statement of interest with sketches/description of your proposed 6 x 6 ft Curio Kiosk that should be set up at Kumasi between July 31-August 7 2009 to <a href="mailto:africoae@gmail.com" target="_blank">africoae@gmail.com</a>, <div>
-indicate if any local needs will be required (max. one page). Space is limited; all submissions will be reviewed until space is filled. We are also accepting nominations for the Project Co-Curator, Convener, Provocateur and Roundtable Discussants.<div>
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