Who is papa

PAPA (Participating Artists Press Agency) is an internationally curated network of artist-correspondents. PAPA is nomadic, it doesn’t have a fixed office but works from temporary offices in cities all over the world. Projects can be self-initiated or commisioned by third parties. PAPA is an instrument for worldmapping gently fixing even the most stubborn pieces into a meaningful pattern. PAPA inspires a broad audience and informs specialist arenas as art, citydevelopment, politics and the news industry.

Lino Hellings is the artistic director of PAPA. She developed PAPA in a residency at Photo Press Agency Drik in Dhaka (Bangladesh) and in working with local photographers (with an international status) in PAPA-Labs in Lagos (Nigeria), Sao Paulo (Brazil), Rotterdam (the Netherlands) and Bishkek (Kyrgystan). 


MISSION STATEMENT

PAPA participating artists press agency will manufacture news by taking action. A lot of questions. 

AN ARTISTS PRESS AGENCY? 

WHY NOW? 
Alarmbells are ringing. 
What we need is step back and see the world as the astronauts saw it and ask ourselves how are we managing that?
Big cities are the new centres to be connected into a global society that works together. (Jeffrey Sachs Economics for a crowded planet)

WHY ARTISTS?
Artists can take the lead here. They can make the trail by starting to walk. PAPA is developed in a Lab situation with artists and photojournalists on the spot in the four continents.

WHAT IS NEWS?
“News is what someone, somewhere decides that it is. It comes down to a judgment as to what is important or interesting to a particular audience”. (BBC) So we will start to define what the particular audience is. We will go out on the street to uncover the news. For this moment what we need to do is delete all dualities like poor versus rich, the underdeveloped versus the overdeveloped. Forget about hierarchies. We will make precise descriptions of details we find, without judging. As details with a story are the points of attachment for actions. We will define fresh categories for the news, bottom up. In the first place we will give the news back to the people involved.

WHY A PRESS AGENCY?
To be honest this initiative could be called an artists collective or an advertisement company just as well. We like to combine the freedom within art with the honest curiosity within journalism and the acuteness of advertisement.

Art+Journalism+Advertisement=Juicy activism

Lets start making an image of the world together.


SPONSORS / PARTNERS


funder



funder



partner Bangladesh



partner Kyrgyzstan



partner Nigeria