This is the sixth consecutive Agendas to take place at the Venice Biennale. Venice Agendas is now regarded as a crucial forum for the exchange of ideas generated by the Biennale. For Venice Agendas 2009, postgraduate students from the newly formed Graduate School at Camberwell, Chelsea and Wimbledon Colleges of Art and UK and international academic partners including Edinburgh College of Art, Sheffield Hallam University, RMIT University Melbourne and University of the West of England, will participate in a collaborative city-wide audio project that will listen for responses to Daniel Birnbaum’s ‘Making Worlds’ exhibition.

The Venice Agendas symposium has featured at every Venice Biennale since 1999, and has been developed out of Professor Bill Furlong’s ‘Audio Arts’ cassette magazine of interviews with artists, first published in 1973. Furlong has made recordings at the Biennale since 1984, which has included the British representative on each occasion. The ‘Audio Arts’ archive has been acquired by Tate Britain, and was the subject of an exhibition ‘Audio Arts: Bill Furlong’ in 2007. On this tenth anniversary of Venice Agendas, we are returning to the origins of the project in ‘on the hoof’ recordings at the Biennale, but using a greater critical mass of participants than ever before. We have worked with Tate Audio Arts archive to develop a training programme for participants in Venice Agendas 2009 around the archive, interview ethics and the Venice Agendas ethos. An extract from our Venice Agendas 2009 training day at Tate Audio Arts Archive on Thurday 26 March 2009 is shown below:

Our collaborative project will be focusing particularly on the themes of listening and re-description, and will be combined with individual postgraduate student audio projects that have been developed in response to the history of Venice Agendas and the archive. From our first discussions of Venice Agendas 2009, we highlighted the importance of the themes of ‘Listening and Re-description’. We also have a tradition of addressing the themes that the Biennale curator has chosen. Accordingly, our citywide ‘Audio Arts’ project seeks to produce an echo of Daniel Birnbaum’s theme for 2009 across Venice, developing it into a question that invites a response. Daniel Birnbaum has said that the title of the exhibition, ‘Making Worlds’, expresses his wish to emphasize the process of creation. For Venice Agendas 2009, we will be asking visitors to the Biennale to describe the process of creation. The focus of the project lies in the terms in which the process of creation is accounted for and evidenced in speech in a specific cultural situation where creative process is being valorized over and above the ‘end product’.

Venice Agendas 2009 will be podcast from the Biennale in the afternoons of 4, 5 and 6 June, and will include material from the city-wide project, archive material from previous Venice Agendas and Audio Arts recordings, and individual audio-based projects developed by postgraduate students for Venice Agendas 2009.