WORKSHOP PERIOD I
Meeting the Street Workshop Dambruggestraat – Antwerp 26 April – 8 May 2016
On their morning walks, students grew to understand the street, what happens here, and how they might want to intervene in public space in the form of an artwork.
Students asked: why see the street as a whole? What is a street if not a series of street blocks and intersections? Various psychogeographic maps were produced.
Coming from an outside perspective, Gareth Kennedy, guest artist mentor from NCAD, conducted a series of interviews sensitive to some of the challenges faced by individual student artists working in this street.
Sketching is considered an important skill in the InSitu Department, a way to record existing places and interactions, but also to alter and adapt them. This architectural drawing of a street corner on the Dambrugge Straat, practices the technical skill of linear perspective.
Different boards inspired new groupings and re-groupings as the days passed, allowing for collective gathering and re-contextualisation of data in the research process.
Resulting from a student’s question on feelings experienced by people in the street, a growing notice board invites participation and comments on the topic.
Carlos Wu, a student from China, shares some of his ideas with artist mentor Celia De Villiers.
Visiting artist mentor Eero Merimaa from TUAS interprets an experience facilitated by Kai Lossgott (AP) on aural navigation, or urban spatial awareness through sound.
Two invitations for the community feast organised by students to invite visitors from the Dambrugge Straat into their studio for discussions. The one colourful and informal, the other within a fine art context and aesthetic. Avoiding the traps of mass communication will be an experiment for the next feast.
Meeting the Street Workshop
Process-based and largely student-directed, the aim of our research and experimentation was to personally get to know people working and living in the street and their concerns, gathering notes and sketches for potential work rather than imposed ideas and artworks. Day 1 facilitated personal exploration and responses to the street. On Day 2, students were encouraged to start conversations with members of the street’s extremely diverse immigrant community. Ethical concerns were discussed by the group, as well as social and conversational skills to initiate and sustain community dialogue. Day 3 asked students to re-examine the street, their findings and ideas in discussion with their informants. Thereafter, on Day 4 the intention was to develop and test ideas. Day 5 was dedicated to finalising this research and documentation for presentations. Students invited the community to their studio for a feast on Day 6, with locally bought culturally specific food that represented some of the traditions and tastes in the neighborhood. The only partial success of this points to the large gap between educated cultural settings and less privileged communities, and the potential for art to play a role in social cohesion.
Workshop objectives
- Self-directed learning of social art practices
- Multiprofessional approach, learning collaborative art practices and the challenges when working in city spaces
- Learning to use situation specific and time bound art methods.
- Making participatory situation specific art and finding/reaching new audiences
- Learning to collaborate (working in teams and collaboration with street actors)
- Learning to negotiate: How can the process and end result please you as an artist as well as the the street actors (SMEs, passers-by)
- Target groups: individual business owners, small enterprises, art students
Developing Effective Practices
On the whole, collaborative practice was less favoured by this group than individual projects. While there was a wish to engage with the diverse street communities, the real community building happened where it was needed: within the group. Through trial and error, shared practices for meaningful and effective student participation and co-learning were evolved. One of these was the motivating factor of a shared breakfast, after following simple suggestions during early morning walks to re-experience the Dambruggestraat. Personal consultation between individual students and visiting mentors was encouraged wherever possible. Peer group reporting, feedback and discussion at key points in the process also proved useful as a means towards shared accountability and self-motivation.
Project memory
A collective set of noticeboards evolved as a record or archive of collective learning gained about the street, for the next generation of IPIP student participants the following year. The practice of collecting data on notice boards resonated with the practice of research boxes, used successfully at NCAD, where this was separated into pre-determined themes.
Christos, a student from Greece, is collecting ambiguous words like ‘lift’ as private poetic fragments that may describe the public desires for both sameness and change operating in the Dambruggestraat.
A collection of keywords, including those captured by Christos on his mobile phone.
Bara, a student from Iceland, was inspired by the discovery of a bitter melon in a Pakistani supermarket. Three sculptural interpretations of this unfamiliar vegetable followed, including moulds for potential mass-production. Permission was negotiated with the shopkeeper to install these sculptural objects alongside the originals in the shop for a day.
A found-object assemblage by student Gregor Anselm inspired questions around how these objects could be used both to understand but also to misinterpret the people who left them on the Dambrugge Straat.
Kris Vandormael spent a few days on the square listening to the life stories of street people and addicts. This resulted in sketches for an unrealised solo performance about the absurdity of the social outcasts’ position.
Exploring the feeling of being a stranger in a community or street, Irish visiting student Anna McCarthy (NCAD) realised a text-based intervention on found windows.
Selected work-in-progress
A range of projects were initiated during the workshop period. It has been left up to students to decide whether they wish to continue these for their final exams or not.
Dambruggestraat
Artists and art students
Artworks
Collaborators
