Period
2011
Proposed by
Alfredo Cramerotti (CPS)
Location
Copenhagen
About the project
SiteSpecificHosting.org (SSH) was a proposal from Wooloo for an online collaboration tool between site-specific artistic practitioners and local participants. SSH aimed to generate a user-driven website of best practices for artists working in the social sphere – to develop a resource to improve and empower how artists work in and with local environments and their inhabitants.
In our artistic work, Wooloo acts as an intermediary: we operate on the infrastructure level to supply the conditions for social experimentation. Fundamentally, Wooloo regards “hospitality” as the medium we work. Our vision for SSH is to use local living experiments to expand the impact of art on interpersonal and institutional levels.
Responding to what Wooloo regarded as problematic isolation of contemporary art, both from other professional fields and from the general public, their proposal was to build a tool that would initiate and achieve more purposeful collaborations between artists and non-artists in society. SSH would have begun as an open call for site-specific art projects needing local knowledge and participation. In collaboration with the initiator or institution behind each selected project, Wooloo would have then determined the particular local needs of the work and, from this premise, conducted a research-based recruitment campaign to involve appropriate local hosts.
External links
About the artist
Wooloo.org was developed and launched in 2002 by Wooloo, a Danish artist group founded by Sixten Kai Nielsen, Martin Rosengaard, and Russell Ratshin. Today, Wooloo.org — the group's first project — connects the resources of more than 30,000 cultural producers internationally, and is growing daily. Wooloo creates social experiments in collaborative participation: like the online community, Wooloo's other works explore strategies in which several people take a role in the art-making process. In recent years, Wooloo has hosted 3,000 activists with private families in Copenhagen (for the UN climate conference in 2009), worked with blind locals to create the world's first non-visual artist residency program in Murcia, Spain (Manifesta 8, 2010-11), and changed the law regarding the cutting of public lawns in Moss, Norway (6th Momentum biennial, 2011).
