Today CAN brings you a new story by Arlene Goldbard, introducing Artibarri, a network in the Spanish autonomous community of Catalonia. Artibarri (the word is an amalgam of Catalan words for “art” and “neighborhood”) is a community cultural-development network advocating “art for social change based on citizen participation and community work.” Goldbard was in Barcelona speaking at a conference on public art and public space when she met the Artibarri artists. It wasn't long before Xavi Pérez, Aida Sánchez and Javi Rodrigo were translating for her, showing some of the relevant community arts sites, and joining her in a "marathon conversation about what arts activists thousands of miles apart may have to share." Says Goldbard: "The thing I found most interesting about Artibarri is the way the group is animated by ideas rather than practical structures or programmatic aims. ... To them, ideas matter!" [LINK]

Coming up in Puebla, Mexico: "a festival, a conference, a workshop, a community builder, an exchange project and a creative vision." The second annual Performática: Foro Internacional de Danza Contemporánea y Artes de Movemiento was designed by co-directors, Mayra Morales and Ray Eliot Schwartz of Fundación Universidad de las Américas, to encourage exchange across national and cultural boundaries through the arts and "re-connect to the essential common humanness that is at the base of all societies." Workshops, roundtable discussions and performances will convene with the goal of facilitating international and intercultural exchange of practices, knowledge, theory and contemporary discourse. In the first Performática, March 2007, over 300 students participated free of charge and thousands of audience members had free access to over 100 international artists represented on stages and other sites in Cholula and Puebla. [LINK]

Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) has announced a national convening & research project to advance the field of community arts. The gathering will be held at MICA's campus in Baltimore, Md., March 16-18, 2008, with funding from the Nathan Cummings Foundation. It will provide a platform for college and university faculty and students and community-based practitioners to meet and generate new ideas; share resources and models for best practices in the field; define and solve problems; identify and conduct new research; develop leadership in the field; and cultivate new partnerships. Research and other writing deriving from the completed editorial process generated through the community arts convening project will be published online in spring 2008 on the Community Arts Network and the Community Arts Convening project Web sites. Review of abstracts: October 1-November 15, 2007. For details, consult the project Web site, debuting first week in October. [LINK]

Liz Lerman Dance Exchange has launched "Offsite & Insight," its first online video performance, showcasing elder company members, Martha Wittman, Thomas Dwyer and Shula Strassfeld, with music by Penguin Cafe Orchestra, choreography by Cassie Meador. LLDE was invited to perform in the 13th Annual DC Improvisation Festival, September 27-30, 2007, but the company was out of town, so Meador turned to the Web. Online she says, "Offsite & Insight has allowed us to ... find new ways of building our local presence in the midst of a heavy touring schedule and to hopefully make the festival accessible to those who may not have the opportunity or ability make it. ... As choreographer you learn to adapt what you bring to a place and how to build from the unexpected encounters a particular place or group people have to offer." [LINK]

This fall, the Staten Island Ferry in New York Harbor has been transformed into a floating radio station, continually traveling between Lower Manhattan and Staten Island. The producer, neuroTransmitter (Angel Nevarez & Valerie Tevere), fuses conceptual practices with transmission, sound production and mobile broadcast design. They've broadcast live on local bandwidths and in public spaces and galleries internationally since 2001. This year they're collaborating with the N.Y.C. Department of Transportation and the FM signal of WSIA-FM, broadcasting from the ferry live sound performances, experimental sound works, interviews and lectures to N.Y.C listeners. The final segments (9/27, 28 & 29) include Alex Matthiessen of River Keeper on activism around the Hudson River cleanup, and a 40th anniversary discussion of the New York Avant-Garde Festival (which was held 24 hours, 9/29/67, on the ferry). Check the Web for MP3s, Podcasts, photographs. [LINK]

Dancers and hospice specialists will perform together in Minneapolis during "Dance in the Dark, The First Annual Linda Francis Cartee Memorial Event," October 25, 2007. "Dance in the Dark" is the first of a planned series of annual events named after the late Linda Francis Cartee, a participant, service provider and board member of Pathways Home Health, Hospice & Private Duty. Stuart Pimsler Dance & Theater will perform a new work commissioned by Pathways, "Undercovers," which explores "the fine line between beginnings and endings through a montage of movement, music and fragments of dreams" with members of SPDT and participants from Pathways. SPDT has a number of community programs, including Caring for the Caregiver; The Family Matters Project; WASH: Working with Artists, Sharing the Healing; Beauty in Difference; and Meaning in Movement, for stroke survivors. [LINK]

The groundbreaking work and methodology of the "Evoking Spirit, Embracing Memory Exhibition" will be discussed by the curators this evening, September 26, 2007. The exhibition ("visually stunning" -- Philadelphia Enquirer) by the Village of Arts and Humanities (through October 22) honors a North Philadelphia neighborhood "rich in memory, paying tribute to its icons and sacred places, the unsung heroes of a community tightly woven with a vibrant and lasting history." Curators Joyce Scott, Homer Jackson and Linda Goss and the Village's Artistic and Executive Director Kumani Gantt will talk about how they chose and gathered information about the neighborhood's heroes and expressed it in bottle trees and neighborhood markers. The discussion is at 6 p.m. at Temple University's College of Engineering and Architecture Building, Room 126. The exhibition is at Baobab Park, 11th and York. See the Enquirer review. [LINK]

New teaching artists can learn to transform their creative skills into innovative educational tools through an internship program with the Community~Word Project in New York. The 25-week Training & Internship Program, October-May, includes a five-day insitute, seminars and hands-on experience in classroom residencies. The training is open to practicing professional creative writers, visual artists, theater artists, dancers and musicians and prepares teachers for a variety of settings," whether the learning environment is a public school classroom or a community center, a prison or a halfway house." The Project holds an annual Teaching Artist Information Job Fair Panel each May. The catch? The application deadline is tomorrow, September 14! [LINK]

Human Rights Film Series participants will discuss Rory Kennedy's "The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib" against the backdrop of Colombian Fernando Botero’s "Abu Ghraib" paintings in October in D.C. American University's Center for Social Media presents the 8th Annual Human Rights Film Series, October 3-November 8, 2007, showcasing "films that show how film and video can make a difference for human rights." Screenings include films by Ronit Avni; Kief Davidson and Richard Ladkani; and Zach Niles and Banker White. "Human Rights in a Time of War: An Evening with Ghosts of Abu Ghraib Award-Winning Producer Liz Garbus" is a screening and discussion of the HBO documentary about the psychological and political contexts of torture at Iraq’s infamous prison. It's November 8 at AU's Katzen Arts Center, which is exhibiting "Botero: Abu Ghraib" through December 30. [LINK]

Today CAN brings you an essay, essentially a eulogy, written in 2006 by Bruce Lindsey about legendary architect Samuel “Sambo” Mockbee, co-founder of the Rural Studio at Auburn University, who died on December 30, 2001, of leukemia. Lindsey was then co-director of Rural Studio and head of Auburn's School of Architecture. Rural Studio is an experiential, community-based architecture program in rural Alabama, in which student teams plan, design and build community projects “to allow students to put their educational values to work as citizens of a community … within the community's own context, not from outside it.” The essay was commissioned by Haystack Mountain School of Crafts for "Craft and Community: Sustaining Place," a 2006 symposium on Haystack’s beautiful campus on Deer Isle, Maine. Lindsey’s essay, along with other presentations from the symposium, appears in Monograph #20 of Haystack's Monograph Series, available for purchase online. [LINK]

"CreativeChange: An Arts-infused Approach within Youth Entrepreneurship, MDGs Advocacy and Development" is part of the Global Youth Microenterprise Conference, today and tomorrow in D.C. The "CreativeChange" roundtable discussion will be led by Nil Sismanyazici-Navaie, a communications strategist and founding director of Arts for Global Development. The D.C. conference, September 10-11, 2007, is described by its sponsor, ImagineNations Group, as "The First-ever Gathering of World's Leading Experts in Youth Microenterprise, Entrepreneurship and Livelihood Development." They include: Rick Little of Quest, The International Youth Foundation and Imaginenations; Stephen Krempl, v.p. of Global Learning, Starbucks; Patricia Mongoma of the Campaign for Female Education (Camfed) of Zimbabwe; Martin Burt of Fundación Paraguaya; Kyle Taylor of Youth Venture/Ashoka; and Fiona Macaulay of Making Cents International. They expect 270 participants and 80 presenters from 30 countries. [LINK]

The audience will discuss the processes by which we are positioned as certain kinds of individuals in relation to war at an arts event at The New School, September 17, 2007. Thomas Keenan, director of the Human Rights Project, will join a discussion focusing on "9 Scripts from a Nation at War," an artwork now being exhibited at Documenta 12 in Kassel, Germany. "9 Scripts" is a collaborative work by David Thorne, Katya Sander, Ashley Hunt, Sharon Hayes and Andrea Geyer. It's a ten-channel video installation structured around a central question: How does war construct specific positions for individuals to fill, enact, speak from or resist? How are we positioned as artists, soldiers, students, prisoners, detainees, citizens, Iraqis, Europeans, Americans, and so on? "9 Scripts" was developed during a fellowship supported by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School. [LINK]

Santa Monica, California's 18th Street Arts Center has among its current resident artists some leading lights in community arts: John Malpede and Suzanne Lacy. Malpede founded the Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD), a performance company of homeless and formerly homeless people. He shares his studio with his wife, artist Henriette Brouwers, LAPD's associate director. Lacy is widely recognized as an artist who works in community settings and has written seminal texts for the field. She shares her studio with artist Leslie Labowitz, with whom she created early works in L.A.'s feminist art community. Otis College of Art and Design, where Lacy is chair of fine arts, has an 18th St. space for its MFA program in Public Practices. 18th St. was once the publisher of High Performance magazine, the precursor to CAN. [LINK]

Slum TV is a grassroots film project documenting life in Mathare, the biggest slum in Kenya, with some 700,000 inhabitants and no electricity, running water or sewage system. The project grew out of a collaboration among Austrian and Kenyan artists. It helps distribute newsreels about Mathare made by "our partners from the slum," Fred Otieno, Julius Mwelu and Sam Hopkins. The small movies are then shown in "self-established cinemas" in Mathare and on the Web, on Slum TV. Mwelu and Otieno are active in MYSA (Mathare Youth Sport Association), which includes art, dance, theater and music activities. Slum TV newsreels document MYSA, slum businesses, local festivals, a feeding program that evolved into a school for 1,000 children, and more. They're raising money to buy equipment for community digital-video workshops and setting up projects in Botswana and Tanzania. (Thanks, art4development.net.) [LINK]

"The Arts in Prevention: Is it Art? Is It Prevention?" is the question up for discussion during a conference at Rutgers University, October 10-11, 2007. "Breaking Down the Walls: Reaching Youth, Families and Communities through the Arts in a Comprehensive Prevention Strategy" is the seventh annual conference on art as therapeutic intervention, presented by New Jersey's Center for the Arts. The conference features examples of programs, research, networking, arts mentoring, evaluation and role-playing. Melissa Kaban, clinical coordinator at the Junction Point Psychiatric Community Residence, will present an experiential workshop, “Using Dance/Movement Therapy Concepts and Non-Verbal Communication in Crisis Intervention,” reviewing the stage of a child's crisis and how nonverbal skills can work to handle it before it becomes physical. Other workshops will explore prevention strategies like video production and songwriting. [LINK]

The Creative Economy concept continues to make headlines in England, with an all-star conference at the 2007 London Design Festival: "Building Cultures: Can Artists Make Great Places?" The September 20 conference will explore the past, present and future of public art strategies for Central London's biggest redevelopment in 100 years, the mega-development at Kings Cross. The event includes presentations from Artists for Places, a collaborations "funding scheme" by the Commission on Artists and the Built Environment (CABE), Arts & Business and Arts Council England. The cultural-policy research organization Comedia will present an evaluation on PROJECT, a 2004-6 scheme to support public art strategies embedded within the planning system. There's also an open forum with key speakers on art, architecture, landscape and planning debating the role of art and cultural activity within the design of the built environment. [LINK]

Today CAN brings you the first of a series of articles by New York theater artist Kevin M. Bott about his collaboration with 100 inmates in a Northern Ugandan prison. Today's story takes Bott -- fresh from devising and directing an original play in a New York state correctional facility -- to Africa as a volunteer for a human-rights organization. Arriving in Uganda, he discovers that the regional prison, housing nearly 500 men and women, is located a half mile from his residence. "Having volunteered since December 2005 for a New York state nonprofit, Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA)," writes Bott, "I had become quite invested in learning more about prison culture and the conditions under which prisoners live. To get a glimpse inside a Ugandan prison would be incredible. I had to at least try to gain entry." These were the first steps on what would become a long journey culminating in a theater collaboration with 100 Ugandan prisoners. [LINK]

As part of an extensive project on the arts and democracy, the Center for Civic Participation has begun posting on its Web site some profiles of exemplary work in the field. So far, the center's Arts & Democracy Project, directed by cultural organizer (and CAN writer) Caron Atlas, has profiled Detroit's ACCESS and the Arab American National Museum; San Francisco's All-ages Movement Project; L.A.'s John Malpede and Los Angeles Poverty Department; the national League of Young Voters; New Yorker Marty Pottenger (now working in Maine); New York's Urban Bush Women; Portland, Oregon's Sojourn Theatre; and Wilmington, North Carolina's Working Films. This fall, CAN will be publishing a set of essays and interviews from the Arts & Democracy Project, edited by Atlas. Meanwhile, to learn more, visit the project's Web site. [LINK]

Newly made family albums portray the experiences of Katrina survivors now living in North Carolina in a project at Duke University's Center for Documentary Studies in Durham. Those who moved north after the August 2005 hurricane lost loved ones, family homes, livelihoods, cherished possessions, photographs--­documents of memory. The artists of CDS came together with Katrina neighbors and volunteers at a book-making workshop with local artist Bryant Holsenbeck and made albums that people could take away, fill and keep. Teams of photographers and interviewers went to visit new homes to record stories in images and sound. Pieces of those stories are exhibited in "Re-collecting Family Albums," on display at CDS through January 7, 2008. A reception is set for September 6. "Remembering Katrina: A Selection of Short Documentaries" will be screened at CDS on September 13. [LINK]