AMP: Artists' Meeting Place and Resource Collective

REBRANDING ACTS is an investigation into cultural identity in an age of global migration. The project asks artists to look closely at the ongoing production of "nationality" in their home countries and to examine the ways in which this public narrative includes certain individuals and groups - while excluding others.

The REBRANDING ACTS project encourage artists to perform and document “rebranding acts” that directly intervenes with the hegemony of this excluding narrative and presents a radical re-thinking of it. In other words, acts that aims to “rebrand” the national identity in question.

The specific context and method of the rebranding act can take any possible form but the act must be documented and submitted via WOOLOO.ORG in VIDEO FORMAT.

From all the rebranding videos submitted, the REBRANDING ACTS project will select the most intelligent, powerful and humorous documentations and present them as official part of TINA B. - The Prague Contemporary Art Festival taking place in Prague, Czech Republic from 25th of September to 15 October, 2008.

Adopting the leitmotif FORMS OF ENGAGEMENT, TINA B. 2008 is focused on the relationships between art and society, exploring the role of contemporary art, artists and artistic practice as socio-cultural agents that not only provide a critique of social order, but also serve a direct, positive and symbiotic social function on both a local and global level.

REBRANDING ACTS explore questions of cultural identity in a time where national belonging is becoming an increasingly debated topic in political debates throughout the world. Facing the challenges of an increasingly globalized economy, combined with internal demographic questions such as the issue of aging populations, and a growing number of immigrants and refugees, a large number of nation states are currently undergoing vast transformations. Often, these transformations include a strong rise in new forms of xenophobia, fueled by the media and capitalized upon by populist political parties.

In 2006, Wooloo Productions (the artists collective behind WOOLOO.ORG) performed our first rebranding act with outset in the case of contemporary Denmark. We did this exactly one year after the infamous publishing of Muhammad caricatures by the Danish nationwide newspaper Jyllands Posten and we launched the campaign Defending denmark as "an international campaign to rebrand the country of Denmark". The Defending denmark project included 18 months membership of the ultra-right Danish Peoples Party, several video interventions, as well as a worldwide media frenzy with national identity at its center. Please go to www.wooloo.org/defendingdenmark to read more.

Wooloo Productions will personally be traveling to Prague to intervene live with the Czech public as part of the TINA B. Contemporary Art Festival. Simultaneously, the selected REBRANDING ACTS videos will be presented throughout the festival at the prominent Italian Cultural Institute located in Prague’s famous Malá Strana. Through these individual, transnational responses to the widespread nationalistic upheaval taking place throughout the world, RERBANDING ACTS aim to offer alternative ways of thinking about who we are and how we can live together today.

DEADLINE for submission is Sunday, August 31st 2008.

(this was posted on the Franklin Furnace mailing list)