The artist is present – contemporary art residencies in schools
Latvian Center for Contemporary Art ·Latvia
About this project
<p style="text-align: justify"><span style="font-size: 12pt"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif"><span style="color: #222222">In order to incorporate contemporary art in the daily life of schools,the LLCA has approached 6actively working Latvian artists who are interested and motivated to work with the audience of children/young people and to develop an inclusive product of contemporary culture to spend 1-3 months in residencies in 6 different Latvian schools.The themes of the works of art, their social problematics will be chosen in close collaboration with children/young people and will relate to the history of the school/locality and local studies,and the artists' working methods will involve artistic research,in-depth communication with the target audience and the creation of the works with the participation of the students.The result of the art residencies–6 separate interdisciplinary contemporary art projects will be included in the 2023 programme of the International Contemporary Art Festival SURVIVAL KIT as a contemporary art exhibition/project presentation made by the children and young people themselves.These works will be documented and posted on the project's online platform and will serve a source of inspiration for artists and art institutions abroad.The project foresees a support and mentoring programme for the project's artists as well as a cycle of lectures for pedagogues to get to know contemporary art,the publication of a practical teachers' guide on the use of contemporary art and methods of informal education in school curricula,and these resources will be created in close collaboration with schools, students, artists and partner contemporary art organisations from Norway.While art residencies in schools are an innovative practice for Latvia,they are being realised in some places internationally.The aim of the residency programme is to turn this into a format that is sustainable in Latvia in the future and to organise such residencies in Latvia each year,inviting artists to put forward their candidacies as well as schools to apply to take advantage of this opportunity.</span></span></span></p>
Bilateral cooperation results
Project has been realised in very close collaboration. The main collaboration included support system from Tenthaus artists to Latvian artists – each Norwegian artist chose 1 Latvian artist and were mentoring him/her 1:1 all the period of time when Latvian artist worked in schools. There were 6 mentoring sessions held online that each consisted of 2 parts – the first part was case study from Norway experience – how to make long-term art projects in schools. The second part was tasks, Q&A session, and support for our Latvian artists in their challenges in art residencies with children. All the mentoring sessions was recorded and are available in our projects vimeo account. Norwegian artists was present as workshop leaders in our activity – Contemporary art school. They worked in pairs with the Latvian artists and created art workshops together. Also, they were mentoring the result of the residencies – how the exhibition of newly created artworks to be built and organized. Latvian Center for Contemporary Art also visited Norway to see practically how project partners - Tenthaus work in Oslo. It was unique experience because it related also to our working method – to create art exhibition, and work horizontally as artist collective, not as art project or classical art institution. There are many possibilities to continue our institutional collaboration with Tenthaus – the collaboration was overall very inspiring not only to our artists, but also to them. Tenthaus shared their years-long experience and expanded their knowledge as geographical scope as well as experimenting with a new role in the project. The webpage of the project artistispresent.lv continues to be available as inspirational source for artists, teachers and culture practitioners.
Project partners
- TENTHAUS Donor project partner· Norway