August 2022
In August 2022, we return to our investigation of site-responsive art practice in rural settings by hosting the Master level KUNO course, Rural Contextual Practice: Everything you want was already here offered jointly by the the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki, Konstfack University College of Arts Crafts and Design in Stockholm and the Vilnius Academy of Fine Arts.
For more information: https://www.kunonetwork.org/ongoing-past-intensive-courses/2022/8/9/everything-you-want-was-already-here-a-kuno-intensive-course-focused-on-rural-contextual-practice
Everything you want was already here is a two-week intensive, site-responsive course that takes place in Rejmyre. Participants explore issues central to making site-responsive art in rural contexts and create an artwork in response to the site of the course. Group exercises, collective meals, study visits in the area, shared and individual work time as well as evening presentations of participants’ past work are core components of the course. The workshop is funded under the Nordplus/KUNO framework.
The selected group of 15 participants are from: The Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki Vilnius Academy of Arts Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design Trondheim Academy of Fine Art
Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts
Represented departments include: Site & Situation/Time and Space Arts Photography & Media Art Printmaking Painting Fine Arts Craft Spatial Design
Nationalities represented include: Finnish, Lithuanian, Swedish, Russian, Norwegian, Danish, U.S., Portuguese, Turkish, South African, South Korean
FACILITATORS
Daniel Peltz
Professor of Site and Situation Specific Practice, Department of Time and Space Arts
Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki, Finland
https://www.uniarts.fi/en/units/academy-of-fine-arts/
Dr. assoc. prof. Vytautas Michelkevičius
Head of Photography, Animation and Media Art Department and Head of Doctoral Programme in Fine Art, Vilnius Academy of Arts, Lithuania
https://www.vda.lt/en/
Vitalij Cerviakov, PhD, artist
Doctoral Programme in Fine Art, Vilnius Academy of Arts, Lithuania
Sissi Westerberg
Senior Lecturer, Smycke & Corpus: Ädellab, Department of Craft
Konstfack University College of Arts Crafts and Design, Stockholm, Sweden
https://www.konstfack.se/en/
David Larsson, visual artist
Stockholm, Sweden
Excerpt from the course description: This transdisciplinary course explores contextually responsive art practice with a specific focus on the rural. The dominance of the urban in artistic discourses and the marginalization of the rural, as an often invisible space of industrial production and resource extraction, combine to form a strong argument for focusing our attention, within the space of master-level art and craft education, on developing our conceptions of the rural and rural publics and our capacity to make complex works within and about rural contexts.
Our chosen theme, Everything you want was already here, is an opportunity to explore conceptions of abundance and lack in our respective approaches to art, craft and making. Rural spaces have historically attracted artists seeking a respite, or a near total escape, from the implicitly urban art worlds. All of the participants in this space are currently enrolled in art academies in different large cities of Europe. These urban areas, and the academies themselves, are places of abundance in many ways, in terms of the resources and opportunities they present. Those of us who inhabit these urban institutional art spaces also come to recognize that, in all this seeming abundance, there is also a great deal of lack (over regulated time and space, disconnection from the natural world/the source of the materials we consume and the people who produce them). Rural areas in turn present different forms of abundance and lack, real and imagined (‘open’ space, decreased regulation, different conceptions of time, social disconnection etc.).
The course is an opportunity for students pursuing master’s degrees in fine and craft arts as well as media art, to meet and engage in a site-responsive exploration around these issues, through their own existing practices.
