protokoll.ro home about resources links contact search RO / HU / EN
«PROTOKOLL» is the institutional signature of a group of artists and philosophers. Its basic practical and theoretical principles are embodied in the activity of the Protokoll Studio (created in 1999) and in the writings and public activities of its founders. In its new institutional form, the Protokoll Project aims to clarify these ideas and practices by creating three platforms revolving around a common core: a people’s school of contemporary art, an on-line magazine, and actions and interventions in the public space. The activities of the project are designed to create an alternative to (at least) three problematic states of affairs: the dependence of artistic creation and cultural production on the logic of market; the alleged neutrality of academic debates regarding social reality; and the education that seeks to impart vocational and professional qualifications without productive freedom or emancipation. The Protokoll Project is not intended as a project of cultural busy-work, as a private club of social dialog and civil society, or as a center for the selection, cultivation, or initiation of an intellectual elite.

school

The People's School of Contemporary Art (PSCA) has as its core the idea that how one can draw matters less than what and why one draws. Artistic reflection and practice must be interested especially in realities that are, by their very nature, theoretical. Since drawing does not only display elements in the fetishism of their isolation, but is rather a means of delineating the entire structure of contemporary society, one can develop the practice of this delineation through theoretical thinking concentrated in specific artistic activity. Our school's curriculum is being developed as a counter-movement to contemporary educational policies, attempting to complete, compensate for, and correct as much as possible the present deficiencies of institutionalized theoretical education, wherein few of those educated acquire access to theory and the ability to use it. Therefore, those interested in the classes of the People’s School of Contemporary Art, whether they are secondary school students, no longer attending educational institutions, or university students, will think and work in a structure which primarily emphasizes the reality of social relationships instead of providing knowledge of a specific discipline. In order to reach this goal, the School aims to develop not only the intellectual ability to turn the abstract into something concrete and significant, but also the ability to plasticize ideas and imagination so as to finally realize their ultimate possibility: transposition into reality.

text

An on-line magazine is simultaneously devised as both a theoretical complement of the People’s School of Contemporary Art and as a platform to regularly express cultural and political positions. The reader will find not only speculative approaches to the problems of society, but also theoretical positions created in the work of the school's teachers with the students. With columns covering a varied range of journalistic areas, the magazine aims, even when critical, to contribute to the initiation and development of affirmative discourse within an open Romanian journalistic context, through the affirmation of attitudes as reactions to particular events or aesthetic retorts.

street

Interventions in the public space have the role of completing the other elements of the project and formulating conclusions based upon them, taking these structures out into the street. Based on the idea that the final goal is not to interpret the world, but to contribute to its changing and socialization, these interventions and actions, usually in the form of posters, attempt to be at the very least an effective criticism of separation from and a renewed connection to the public space. Whether palpable results of some of the School's activities or manifestations within campaigns organized around topics explicitly stated in the magazine, posters will be conceived and executed through the People’s School of Contemporary Art’s collaboration of invited artists, students of the School, and associates of the Protokoll Project.