Pil and Galia Kollectiv: Introduction

Introducing the central themes for EuroNoize, project co-ordinators Pil and Galia Kollectiv will address questions around migration, translation and appropriation. DiY music is caught between the ethos of art and the market of the music industry, between Anglo-Saxon cultural markers and local European identities and between a sense of spectacle and a poverty of means of production. It is these tensions and contradictions that define it as a unique cultural activity that, because of these structural fissures at its base, rarely receives due recognition and institutional support.

This conference was the first iteration of EuroNoize, a collaborative project held between the University of Reading, Kunsthall Oslo and A.R.E. Prague and funded by the European Commission. The project aims to explore the history and existing practices of the DiY music scene in Europe and beyond, to evaluate this particular form of artistic production alongside other contemporary aesthetic modes, to consider its historical and current relationship to art education (the art band emerging from art school) and to consider the social, economic and cultural structures that shape it in the present. In this context, we will be exploring the relationship between a global (predominantly Anglo-Saxon) culture industry and localised and independent nodes of production. This one-day conference serves as a starting point in generating a theoretical discussion around an artistic and musical genre that is rarely given enough attention in art criticism.

EuroNoize was a project researching the relationship between art and DiY music scenes in Europe across several platforms. At the heart of the EuroNoize project was an alternative music showcase modeled on the Eurovision Song Context, in which musicians will be invited to consider the interplay of local and global identities in representing their country with a specially commissioned song and video. The live event in London was streamed online and broadcast at partner venues. Viewers were be able to vote digitally for the winning entry. This was accompanied by a conference at the University of Reading, exploring the histories connecting DiY music and the visual arts and investigating the challenges inherent in formalising the informal networks upon which this cultural activity is built. The music produced for this live event was released as a record and disseminated internationally alongside an exhibition at Kunsthall Oslo. The project’s explicit aim was to think of and implement strategies and modes of cooperation between art institutions, DiY musicians and internally between various bands across the continent to facilitate the continuation of these often short-lived practices. In doing so, the project investigated the way European co-operation transcends borders and raises questions about the meaning (and sound) of cultural identity in an age of transnational mobility.

• http://www.kollectiv.co.uk/