CMP will host the Spring CMP Critique with guest critic Wu Tsang on February 7. CMP students will gather for a critique to which CMP students, faculty, guest artists, filmmakers, and curators are invited.
Critique Schedule and more information to be announced soon.
CMP student Pauline Shongov and her collaborator Maya Shopova are bringing their Off-site Lab project to the ArtLab this spring, culminating in class workshops and Pauline’s CMP capstone defense.
Off-site Lab is a practice-based research initiative that investigates what critical heritage practices are made possible—and how attitudes towards waste and ecology shift—when we re-imagine the role of care in collection, exhibition, and archive strategies. Taking Bulgaria as a case study to contour new modes of curatorial thought, artistic practice, and material urgency, Off-site rethinks local and global, human and nonhuman, relationships to landscape, environment, and placemaking. As a lab, Off-site exists as a mobile and dispersed space for artists, architects, and scholars to collaborate with one another and local communities through exhibitions, workshops, performances, and publications that materialize in physical sites, which they occupy for temporary periods of time. The project will land and observe some of these practices at the ArtLab from March 19 – April 1, 2025.
The ArtLab will act as both a studio and lab space for Pauline Shongov and Maya Shopova to experiment with the multiple aspects and dimensions of Off-site’s expanded archive on oral history, mythology, folklore, and ethnographic work that they have gathered over the past five years. This archive emerged from the making of the docufiction film Borá when initial encounters with interlocutors and unofficial heritage sites in ruin directly informed—and eventually grew into material, vegetal, mineral, aural, and visual prompt material for—the Off-site Lab. Through multimodal experimentation with elements of fiction, non-fiction, fieldwork, and collaboration, Borá sets the groundwork for re-engaging Off-site’s extensive archive of sound and moving image in new ways.
Landing in the ArtLab this Spring, the Off-site Lab will enter the next phase of its research at the intersection of the environmental humanities, critical heritage studies, and critical media practice. With the support of the Provostial Fund for the Arts and Humanities, Off-site will also lead “Experiments Afield: Sensing Environment” workshops for Katarina Burin’s Advanced CMP course and Laura Frahm and Bruno Carvalho’s Design and Ecology course.
Off-site is co-founded by Pauline Shongov, Maya Shopov, and Borislav Angelov and has been supported by the Critical Media Practice program, Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative, and the Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard University.
