Annual theme 2022/23

WAAAW

World Artists Agency Against War

Amid these troubled times, we ask ourselves, what contribution can art and design make to prevent or stop war? Can it do more than awaken conciousness? Warum Krieg? Why War? How can we stop waging war? 22_23 we devote to strategies, tactics, tools and structures to stop war. We seek exploratory and self-reflective action that tends to elaborate and bring forth an artistic institution capable of countering war — WAAAW, World Artists Agency Against War. As part of this agency, each of us researches and follows/contacts single artists or movements that are challenging war to curate and display their work. We will build together a Situation Room as a common place to connect artworks and researches concerning the study of the phenomenon of war in relation to art, the desire for peace and the human being's responsiveness to violence and conflict. The Situation Room will be a common action led by the ambition to visualize and relate individual and collective practices interconnected by the principle of the unacceptability of war and a propulsive thrust for change.

Warum Krieg? Why War? How can we stop waging war? What can people do that states cannot or will not do? How do we stop war? How can we "fight" war? These questions, exactly 70 years ago, were the focus of the Congress of Peoples for Peace, in Vienna, December 12–19th, 1952, after promoting the Stockholm Appeal to request nuclear disarmament that was signed by 273,470,566 people. This is not a rhetorical exercise. There are so many people who are or would like to try: those who are affected by violence, those who perceive its horror, those who, seemingly indifferent, keep it at the fringes of their consciousness and yet unconsciously are deeply marked by it. Each in his or her own way has to face conflicts and trauma and is compelled to design a personal strategy against war, as do households, communities, states. Even the world community would like to have as a whole a strategy against war if only it could give itself the minimum governance that already pandemic and climate crisis have evoked as necessary and urgent.