About the Project and its partners

OuUnPo is a research group composed of artists, curators and researchers who together look at the boundaries of performance by appropriating and stretching the language of workshops, seminars and meetings. Ouunpo has met regularly in different European locations since 2009. OuUnPo is an international exercise in democracy and self-organisation. It has no rules, no hierarchy, no permanent members or written program. These are negotiated and renegotiated by the members for each session.



OuUnPo has worked with cultural institutions like Tate Britain in London; MACRO, Rome; Serralves and Casa de Musica in Porto; ZKM in Karlsruhe; Mori Art Museum and Spiral in Tokyo; Bankart 1929 in Yokohama; MAM and Pinacoteca in Sao Paulo and Deste Foundation in Athens. We have collaborated with academic Institutions like Karolinska institutet and Kungliga Konsthögskolan in Stockholm; Donders Institute in Nijmegen; HfG in Karlsruhe, Federal University of São Paulo (UNIFESP) and Musashino Art University in Tokyo and received Financial support from European Cultural Foundation and Mondriaan Stichting in Amsterdam; Kulturbryggan, SLL and Statens Kulturråd in Stockholm; the Goethe institut in Sao Paulo; The Swedish Institute in Stockholm and Paris; the embassies and consulates of France in Tokyo and Yokohama; The Swedish embassies and consulates in Tokyo and Brasilia.

The nomadic profile of the project is an asset that stimulates new ways of creating, sharing, and dispersing knowledge in new venues. The members come from all over the wider European region and change at each session, as every event is structured upon the specific location, address a contextual problematic and involves local artists or practitioners in different fields. For this purpose we interact extensively with local institutions, such as art spaces, cultural initiatives, universities and concert halls in order to create a creative context that collapses the global with the local - in order to make it as meaningful as possible both for the hosts and the guests.



Sessions have been held in Sao Paulo, Gibellina, Tokyo/Yokohama, Beirut, Porto, Athens, Belgrade, Amsterdam/Nijmegen, Rome (I), Paris, Skopje, Rome (II), London and Stockholm.

 OuUnPO does not limit its interventions in Europe's traditional financial and cultural centres but rather travels across the so-called peripheries and contributes to establish a cross-border debate on local issues and problematics by mirroring them in the global. It often does so in places of crises (Athens, Porto) or where historical conflicts (Belgrade, Skopje) mark the political and human landscape. This strategy is devised to instigate and retain a meaningful discussion about democratic processes and new trans-European frameworks and narratives for art and culture.



The characteristic of OuUnPo is to invent original and playful situations that call local artists, cultural agents and the general public to participate and collaborate by bringing their own knowledge and creativity for the production of new artworks, research and the spreading of alternative forms of knowledge. Being an external organism that penetrates the city's body through its veins and with particular attention to vital organs like spots of collective gatherings or symbolic and historical architectures, OuUnPo seeks first of all a vivid interaction with the inhabitants of the cities it travels to and to provoke a different outlook on the city’s history and patrimony. Proposing a series of interventions in cultural institutions such as museums, music venues, archaeological sites, universities and public space, OuUnPo will contribute to activating new perspectives on those spaces. By subtle and ephemeral performances and actions by the group's members and by invited local guests, OuUnPo will start a dialogue with local cultural agents on new forms of cultural management which address OuUnPo's basic principles of direct democracy and self-organization horizontality. Being a transnational and cross-generational network mainly active in the art field, OuUnPo lives of and on relations and therefore functions as a connectivity engine. For each session, OuUnPo involves the local artists community for the creation of collective events. By doing so OuUnPo's web will expand at every session and thus facilitate communication, solidarity and exchange by artists of different generations and from different regions of the world.