Month: May 2021

Flying paper gliders, 2020

I commenced my period as a Flying Artist at the Limes School Idstein with a performance act which structured the entire school year in the formal setting I had chosen. For this purpose, I asked everyone belonging to the school to write something they wished for the school year on a paper glider and let it sail down into the playground. Afterwards, a pick of three gliders was taken by me and my performance colleagues in a dance performance, and one date each was determined randomly on which I would be fulfilling this wish with further art activities in the course of the year. The paper gliders were gathered and evaluated, categorised, shredded and recreated with the pupils. Then a book was bound containing the wishes which became part of the school library’s non-lending collection.

What have you taken home from this project for your artistic activities?

What was inspiring for artistic activities was that, as a guest of the school, I was also the host of the artists’ room. Seeing the Flying Artist’s room not only being the “third pedagogue” but also being able to turn it into an act of art was a great experience. The flying paper gliders activity showed me that, as an artist, I have the possibility to combine the voices of many, highlight the school as a social field with artistic means and, by setting certain frameworks, realise small as well as large sub-projects. Not only does this create structures, it can also change everyday ones which we are used to. With the book, I can give something back to the school community – very much in accord with the sustainability of projects in cultural education.

Which topic turns up again and again in your artistic activities?

One topic I have dealt with over the last few years has been linking up places to live, dancing and performing. In my project “An der Kreuzung” (at the crossroads) in Brunswick in 2016, together with people living and working at a crossroads, I turned the crossroads into a performance venue, realising, for example, artistic interventions, video products and dancing in an organic food shop, in residential houses and in church towers. During my scholarship in Meinersen, I even asked the entire village community to join in. Realising performances with people in a previously arranged social field in which I interact as an artist is also a central element of my current work in the Flying Classroom at the Limes School in Idstein.

What do you seek to achieve with your arts education activities?

I am interested in developing openness among people from different social areas towards dancing, bodywork and artistic work. I am convinced that dancing brings people together as a language they have in common, that it opens them up for each other, helping them to eliminate prejudice and become more sensitive in handling themselves and others. There is something very peaceful about dancing, and it creates free spaces in people’s heads and in their togetherness. In my work, I experience again and again that there are immense potentials for personality development which are hidden in dancing practice. I want to make these free spaces accessible for people by encouraging them to engage in their own artistic activities.

What, in your view, is the essence of an artistic intervention in arts education?

An intervention triggers change processes, enables participation, adoption, self-reflexion. It may have been planned long beforehand or can be spontaneously improvised. It inspires and encourages dialogue, creates enthusiasm and insights. It demands trusting in an inwardly and outwardly focused dialogue. It can be a surprising dance in the playground or a major performance project planned longer beforehand and involving many participants who bring along their own topics or are confronted with new topics. The intervention allows people to think and do something different from what the daily routine, for example in an institution, would otherwise demand – while simultaneously showing the latter respect and appreciation.

Change of location – scenes from the life of a city

The production “Ortswechsel. Szenen aus dem Leben einer Stadt” by the “Theater der Migranten” takes the audience on a trip around the streets and the hauses of the “Reuterkiez” district in Berlin-Neukölln. The spectators walk in groups and experience drama as a parcours around familiar and unfamiliar places. There, young actors of the multicultural ensemble have developed exciting, very musical and sometimes also bizarre scenes. Whether it be a Turkish barber, a Polish bookstore, a German bicycle shop or a Brazilian cafe – each of these places is a stage which is perfomed on in a wide range of ways by the artists. Here, the boundaries between fiction and reality are fluid. Drama thus becomes a form of expressing multi-layered everyday culture.

What have you taken home from this project for your artistic activities?

This project was an encouraging experiment which taught me how social art can work. Art as a participatory, low-threshold intervention in a public space. It was an experience full of insights to perform with a multicultural team in different locations of an urban district. With their historical and social backgrounds, with their authentic everday backdrops, these locations are a source of inspiration for a collaborative inventing of stories in which all players can participate, contribute their wide range of skills and have great fun.

Which topic turns up again and again in your artistic activities?

Following Joseph Beuys’ motto that “everyone is an artist”, I again and again concentrate on promoting the creative potential of children and youths. I apply Devising Theatre methods in developing performances. The central aspects are collective, collaborative and improvisational work and research addressing reality in society as well as respect for different life experiences and concepts. I use unconventional formats such as theatre parcours, which enable a wider audience in various social spaces to gain more direct access to art. To me, the focal aspect is to recognise visible and invisible boundaries, to question them, for theatre art is dialogue.

What do you seek to achieve with your arts education activities?

I want to see to it that participation is strengthened, new, unconventional ways of gaining access to art beyond privileges based on origin or education are created and personal development as well as the self-responsibility of creative self-definition are enhanced. A democratic society is always a changing society. By applying theatre-pedagogical and performative methods, the development of creativeness and aesthetic education is promoted as a basis of cultural and political participation.

What, in your view, is the essence of an artistic intervention in arts education?

It supports aesthetic sensitisation and the breaking open of everyday perception through discovering, researching and a manifestation of new perspectives. Furthermore, it contributes to consciously and actively designing changes in social spaces. It promotes recognising and questioning structures which impede necessary process of change, as well as temporary and spontaneous activities in public spaces and long-term strategies drawing attention to deficits, inequalities and discrimination while simultaneously aiming at positive changes and enabling participation with comprehensive inclusion.

Gong project, 2017

In 2017, Wang Shiwen and I founded the collective “Gong Project”, which produces interdisciplinary music works and brings together musicians representing different music styles. In this project, we aim to provide the opportunity to look at Chinese folklore and philosophy and transform it into music and performance in order to use it to comment on and criticise contemporary society.

What have you taken home from this project for your artistic activities?

I have learnt to perceive music not only as an acoustic result but also as an approach to a context and a means of exploring its historical background. This experience has in turn inspired my compositions. Especially when I create performative works of art, they give the music a new dimension. While collaborating with musicians from various regions, I learn how they understand and express culture. I then explain some Chinese cultural phenomena. This sharing of experiences is not meant to be an exotic exhibition but is intended as a platform for mutual understanding and discussing current topics in society. Experience gained can also be transferred to the curating of concerts.

Which topic turns up again and again in your artistic activities?

Various topics turn up again and again in my work as an artist: the sound environment and its message, particularly in industrialised urban life, furthermore individuals within a powerful system, misunderstandings and discrimination on the basis of gender and ethnicity as well as Internet culture. These topics frequently overlap since they constitute different sides of contemporary culture.

What do you seek to achieve with your arts education activities?

While I seek to support people of different origin in expressing themselves and thus becoming visible with my cultural education work, I also want it to help people to achieve mutual understanding and self-reflection.

What, in your view, is the essence of an artistic intervention in arts education?

Artistic intervention in arts education finds a topic and seeks to address it with an artistic solution. Sometimes the problem is not immediately solved, although the intervention can integrate the topic in artistic practice and gradually improve the situation.

PLAY, 2015

PLAY was a creation for the Tbilisi Triennial 2015. For several months, I worked for the inhabitants of the Georgian village of Machkhaani in order to perform at the disused theatre there and reintegrate it in village life. The project set out from memories of the inhabitants. Together, we gathered stories about the village, the theatre and the inhabitants and translated them into installations. The theatre was redesigned with the villagers according to their ideas and then reopened. In addition, together with school pupils, I developed an immersive stage play about their lives in Machkhaani, freely adapted from “Romeo and Julia”, which led spectators around the whole village and ended in the theatre.

What have you taken home from this project for your artistic activities?

The project forms the beginning of my further work in the field of artistic interventions in cultural education. The long period of activities at local level showed me the importance of time-intensive working to enable something to develop together and allow work at eye-level. I have learnt to harmonise my own position as an artist with the needs of the participants, reassess them again and again and adopt an open-minded approach in working. I see myself as a mediator looking for aspects to take up, bringing along different material and providing an aesthetic framework.

Which topic turns up again and again in your artistic activities?

My works of art are very strongly based on locations and spaces which I research and take a new look at together with various groups. Redefining familiar narratives and redesigning spaces are at the centre of my work. One focus here is experiences made by women and dealing with public and private spaces. I am interested in putting different narratives on top of each other and linking up with locations to enable the creation of new spaces for thought and encounters as well as in developing a common language of art.

What do you seek to achieve with your arts education activities?

To me, arts education work means creating and opening up common spaces to enable new narratives to develop, question existing structures and enable participation. Art as a shared experience and communicating in a common language which evolves through and in constant exchange. It can develop new new narratives on existing places or positions, challenging both the audience and participants to question their own perceptions and behavioural partterns, thus creating scope for novelties and a new understanding of culture.

What, in your view, is the essence of an artistic intervention in arts education?

It creates places of exchange, encounter and the discussion of different positions and opens up new scope for knowledge and discourse. Awareness of different realities of life can be created with artistic means. For me, such activities are always an exchange and transfer of knowledge, a common quest and common negotiating of topics, always staying open-minded and at eye-level. They question conventional cultural practice, create new art venues and enable participation from the perspective of the participant and the observer.

Aaesthetic research on light pollution, 2013-2014

“Ästhetische Forschung zur Lichtverschmutzung” (aesthetic research on light pollution) is a successful interdisciplinary art research project addressing a volatile topic which pursues the goal of bringing regions far away from culture into cultural exchange. Regarding societal, cultural, astronomic and ecological aspects, the project comprised an aesthetic research process debating the problem of light pollution. In three project cycles, a discursion on design was developed which evolved into visual communication, into object and installation art and into a photo documentary exhibition format. The aim of each project phase was a presentation section with works of art which in turn represented the basic platform for ideas and impulses relating to the subsequent working group.

http://publikation.kulturagenten-programm.de/detailansicht98f7.html?document=113

What have you taken home from this project for your artistic activities?

In addition to the aesthetic experiences of the youths, it was important for me to show with one’s own creative results and the debates which have been triggered that it is up to everyone to maintain a democratic, self-responsible and thus sustainable contribution to the development of the environment in the sense of an open, extended concept of art.

Which topic turns up again and again in your artistic activities?

My work as an artist takes place in the border area between science, nature and art. It addresses natural and social phenomena and is based on dissolution and recreation, with an intermeshing of the analytical angle, aesthetic sensitivity and artistic re-forming. I create parallel worlds of new opportunities and unnaturalness. To me, it is a must to confront a world based on solid research with my own world of art and create new realities. Here, I work chiefly with two art media: painting and installations.

What do you seek to achieve with your arts education activities?

I am firmly convinced that art and culture move people, stimulate indispensible experiences and constitute an essential contribution to a progressive, democratic society and advances it can achieve. Based on this, my cultural education activities focus on aesthetic research. It is especially important for me to show that it is up to everyone to maintain a democratic, self-responsible and thus sustainable contribution to the development of the environment in the sense of an open, extended concept of art.

What, in your view, is the essence of an artistic intervention in arts education?

Art is an act of self-dramatisation, but it also creates identities and is a way to adopt the world. The world of art thrives on conquering new dimensions, and in cultural education, it is a possibility to experience the invisible. Here, the artistic intervention, my professional perspective, acts as an initiator for an art-practice, but certainly also critical discussion of one’s own world of thought in connection or confrontation with the public sphere.

X-Worlds

One year long, for one day a week, five artists from music, dancing, the fine arts and drama and around 35 pupils of the fifth, sixth and seventh forms dealt with the topic of X-Worlds. In an orientation phase, everyone was familiarised with the disciplines and then had the opportunity to opt for one particular branch of art. In the following weeks, questions then arose regarding gravity and weightlessness. Which other physical laws could there be? What changes our perception? Is a shift in perspective enough to cause this? The project evolved into a performance for the school community, who travelled around the school building, discovering a wide range of different worlds.

What have you taken home from this project for your artistic activities?

That the art process often starts with questions, and that they might not necessarily become fewer in the course of the process. While some questions may find an answer, others will have a force and strength forbidding them to ever be answered.

Which topic turns up again and again in your artistic activities?

Over the last few years, in my work as an artist, I have particularly focused on the issue of space or the immediate environment, together with entering into a relation. Dealing with what is surrounding me in terms of architecture, objects or bodies.

What do you seek to achieve with your arts education activities?

Ideally, I would like to see the participants acquire an extension of their possibilities to use their bodies and playfully and freely choose their form of expression. I want to inspire people to have the courage to come up with their own ideas and creative impulses and feel confident in having them, so that the threshold is lowered for them to become more inventive themselves and put their ideas into practice, expression, form and motion.

What, in your view, is the essence of an artistic intervention in arts education?

For me, an artistic intervention in arts education is first of all about an interruption. It is an opportunity to step out of what is familiar and possibly automated and gain experience which might be new, unfamiliar and different. One’s own field of experience is thus expanded.

Russion without a dictionary

Together with a team of young producers, dramatists and artists, we have developed a project called “Russisch ohne Wörterbuch” (Russian without a dictionary). The project helps children with a migratory background to learn Russian through drama, storytelling and art practices. Together with the children, we told stories about ourselves, compiled our own vocabulary and drew comics about the life of migrant children in Russia. We worked together with Boarding School No. 28, in which 150 children and youths from crisis families and children from migrant families studied. Many of them did not speak Russian well. Not only did this have an impact on progress they were making in their school subjects, but they were also affected in their communication with others. Our courses helped the children to learn Russian with creative techniques, and without the dictionary.

Which topic turns up again and again in your artistic activities?

Based on my training as a journalist and documentary film producer, I have always seen art as social practice. Since 2011, I have been working as a cultural manager and curator. My work often confronts me with the topic of privileges. Every human, every child is naturally talented and gifted. But often, society offers no opportunity and no favourable environment for individuals to realise their potential. Therefore, it is important for me to deal, for example, with the topic of migration.

What do you seek to achieve with your arts education activities?

I hope that my arts education work is contributing to world-wide justice, inclusion and peace. But I would at least like to achieve that all individuals believe in their uniqueness and express themselves freely.

What, in your view, is the essence of an artistic intervention in arts education?

Presently, arts education has a considerable potential to result in changes regarding the most important challenges. I am sure that both the education system and the educational concepts will have to undergo significant modifications. In this sense, art and artistic interventions in education can lead to inspirations, new approaches and new energy. I hope that artistic interventions are promoting interest in conventional knowledge and simultaneously offering new opportunities to get to know the world better.

Which topic turns up again and again in your artistic activities?

The focal aspect of my art projects is location-specific interventions in the public sphere as a location for political, economic and social communication.

What do you seek to achieve with your arts education activities?

In my workshops, I seek to actively involve participants so that new, alternative histories are experienced and internalised and, ideally, result in direct action for more global justice.

What, in your view, is the essence of an artistic intervention in arts education?

An artistic intervention in arts education ought to support the process of developing new visions of society based on solidarity and mutual understanding.

Experiencing cultural education and making it alive, 2018

In 2018, I conceived the ongoing project “Kulturelle Bildung Er(be)leben” (experiencing cultural education and making it alive). Er(be)leben invites young people to participate artistically in the discourse on public spaces as creative urban inhabitants and engage in urban development. How does the everyday perception which young people have of the urban area differ? How does their current life relate to the history of Berlin?

What have you taken home from this project for your artistic activities

This project showed me how little the wishes and needs of young people are addressed in the discourse on urban development. Since then, I have been attempting to integrate insights of the young generations in my activities.

Blood is thicker than water, 2015

The stage production “Blut ist dicker als Wasser” (blood is thicker than water) portrays four very different pairs of siblings aged from eleven to 70 years. The project had its debut at “Theater Bonn” in 2015. Based on the biographies of the non-professional performers, mutual relationships are negotiated in a humorous and touching manner. Fourteen-year-old Karlotta gives an account of her stroke and the accompanying consequences for her and her brothers, while sisters Johanna and Katharina are in a constant identity conflict, sisters Nijole and Leonarda talk about cohesion in times of crisis, and Jochen describes the feeling of loneliness in an extended family.

What have you taken home from this project for your artistic activities?

I staged “Blut ist dicker als Wasser” whe I started working as a freelancer, and the artistic and human experiences were important for me in many respects. I have above all learnt that networking supporting and professional disciplines when cooperating with lay people is crucial. There were a team in the field of dramaturgy, equipment and video who were able to put the personal family histories of the participants onstage into an artistic and protected space. The production was also adopted in the repertoire of “Theater Bonn”, so that the participants could be sustainably supported.

Which topic turns up again and again in your artistic activities?

In my stage productions, I again and again look for new aesthetic forms to deal with contemporary feminist and socio-political topics. Here, I constantly encounter myths, tales of heroes and fairy-tales. I am fascinated by their symbolic and visually stunning strength, and I believe that the “old” stories are ideally suited to serve as a template to critically address contemporary issues. Here, it is important for me to create sensual spaces for the audience to experience things and humorously question clichés and obsolete narrations.

What do you seek to achieve with your arts education activities?

I believe that the political force of drama lies not only in its “end product”, the performance, but also in the way it has been produced. To me, drama is like a sort of experimenting laboratory for society. Actively and self-determinedly participating in processes can be unbelievably forceful and strengthening. With my arts education activities, I seek to create free spaces enabling encountering and communicating – with oneself and within a community.

What, in your view, is the essence of an artistic intervention in arts education?

To me, artistic intervention means jolting, pausing or shifting one’s own perspective. This means thinking up or rethinking cultural formats in order to enable critical debating of social structures. Asking oneself again and again: how can taking part in culture be made accessible to all at an inter-sectional level? Which topics and whom do I create space for? What and who remains invisible in this context?

JUKEBOX 2.0, 2020

“Jukebox 2.0” is a dancing piece for two professional dancers which I was commissioned to develop for the dancing scene in Baden-Württemberg in the context of the communicating format “Tanz in der Fläche”, which imparts contemporary dancing to target groups beyond the city ballrooms, basing its approach on a triad of artistic presentation, communication and participation. Thus the piece progressed with 18 participants (15 to 78 years) in Ehingen (Donau) to the “Jukebox 3.0 Ehingen”. Currently, a further development with 20 Erwachsenen aiming for a “Jukebox 3.0 [in] Geislingen” is underway.

A sample view: https://vimeo.com/484054126

What have you taken home from this project for your artistic activities?

From this intergenerative project, I have in particular taken home the perspectives on dancing among the different age groups. I have learnt a lot about what really are very different interests and will always bear them in mind in future concepts and performances.

Which topic turns up again and again in your artistic activities?

In various forms, the impacts of handling technology and digitality on human behaviour appear again and again as a topic in my artistic activities. In addition, I am fascinated by processes such as changes and transformation – both at physical-abstract and at the narrative level

What do you seek to achieve with your arts education activities?

I am convinced that people working artistically enrich themselves and, in the art context, encounter other individuals who have an inspirational effect. That is what I find so fascinating in my work. With my artistic activities, I seek to form communities which collectively develop a more sensitive understanding of art and recognise the opportunity to strengthen and multiply individual self-consciousness precisely through this work.

What, in your view, is the essence of an artistic intervention in arts education?

It is target group-oriented, inclusive and thoroughly constructive!

Illustrating my history with pottery, 2019

In the summer of 2019, I worked at IN VIA, reg. Ass., together with women of Afghan and Yazidi origin and developed the project “Illustrating my history with pottery”, which was based on the visualisation of storytelling. The idea was to open up one’s own areas of experience and communicate the stories – together with other participants as a connecting element. The aim was to gain mutual confidence and create spaces for encounters and communication. While doing pottery, topics such as what used to be and what is now home, emancipation and women’s rights arose. For the sake of privacy, taking photos was not allowed at IN VIA, which is why I later on designed the “Tooth of pain” object which relates to a participant’s story and her toothache while fleeing.

What have you taken home from this project for your artistic activities?

For my work as an artist, as a result of the project, I realised the importance of recognising the needs of the group and developing creative or artistic methods for them, and I realised the significance of accepting all forms of insight as equal and involving them in the work process.

Which topic turns up again and again in your artistic activities?

The following topics are involved in my interdisciplinary work and research:
collections and archives as an art strategy, curator activity as an art medium, bidding farewell as a strategy for a new start and to illustrate the events of the day.

What do you seek to achieve with your arts education activities?

With my arts education activities, I seek to create more acceptance of diversity in the art and cultural landscape, as well as to contribute to inter- and trans-culturality becoming commonplace in the art and cultural context and to sociocultural interests being considered in arts education.

What, in your view, is the essence of an artistic intervention in arts education?

I regard combining artistic intervention with arts education as a highly interesting and, indeed, necessary endeavour. To me, artistic intervention is a constructive critique of the existing ossified structures in arts education aimed at being able to agilely address the diversified urban society in the here and now. Such “interventions” can act as opening spaces and opening strategies for interaction and participation in which inter- and transcultural conflicts can stimulate the development of identity at individual and organisational level.

I thought I was a panther

“I thought I was a panther” is a music theatre performance for children aged six years and older. It is based on the story of the same name by author Paola Mastrocola. The plot was adapted for the stage by Duo Papagena. Spoken texts, instrumental music and interactive sections alternate, with fluid transitions linking dialogue, sound, text and music. The music by Munich composer Helga Pogatschar combines contemporary playing techniques of the flute and the oboe with hip-hop beats and is based on German folksongs and nursery rhymes. The audience can play an active role in the story themselves, turning into beavers, panthers and parrots, and have to help, sing along and laugh along with the performers. This project has been supported by the Department for Culture of the State Capital Munich, the Culture Foundation of the “Stadtsparkasse München” and the Bavarian Music Fund.

What have you taken home from this project for your artistic activities?

For my own work as an artist, I was able to learn from this project which strengths projects reaching across branches of art can develop. “I thought I was a panther” contains concert, drama, composition and choreography elements. The audience are interactively involved and can thus deal with what is happening onstage in different ways, directly reflecting the emotions triggered by the music to the performers.

Which topic turns up again and again in your artistic activities?

I often ask myself who the people are who are listening to me today, and what they ought to take home from experiencing the concert.

What do you seek to achieve with your cultural education activities?

My aim is to consider cultural education as an integral element in conceiving concert formats. Here, participating in culture ought to be possible for all age and target groups, indeed for all groups in society. I am particularly keen on the aspect of the “cultural institution as a learning location”.

What, in your view, is the essence of an artistic intervention in cultural education?

Music is so much more than beautiful sounds. Music can heal, music can link up, music can transcend boundaries. It is particularly important for me to also realise concerts outside the familiar environment, for example in social and educational facilities.

Carolina Nees is a music communicator with the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra and a freelance oboist. She studied the oboe at Mozarteum University Salzburg and has worked throughout Germany as an orchestra musician. Nees is the founder of the free Ensemble Duo Papagena, whose focus is on music theatre presentations for children. At the University of the Arts Bremen, Carolina Nees completed the course “Experiencing and communicating music”. She then worked at the “Badisches Staatstheater Karlsruhe” as a concert pedagogue for the “Badische Staatskapelle”, and in 2019, she started working as a music communicator for the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra. Nees writes concepts for children’s and youth concerts and is onstage as a spokeswoman and moderator. Since 2018/2019, Carolina Nees has been teaching theory and practice of communicating music at the “Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst Mannheim”.

Shoes – personal versus impersonal, 2011

In 2011, I presented some of my work in the Traces Exhibition at the Centre de Formation Refuge Icyugamo in Masaka. The installative piece “Shoes – personal versus impersonal”, which always causes irritation, could be viewed, as well as various series in glossy and acrylic paint, partly also involving collage techniques, on the topics of traces and routes.

In parallel to the exhibition, together with art historian Katja Vobiller, I organised a workshop for children which was aimed at teaching them the basics of design. Here too, the topic of “traces” was a common thread in the workshops, in which the children discovered their artistic talent and experimented with lead and colour pencils, paintbrushes and paintboxes, crayons and scissors. After the workshop, the children had the opportunity to present their works of art.

What have you taken home from this project for your artistic activities?

For me, arts education in the context of communicating with the children was an important experience, for here, as had been the case in my career as an artist up to then, the topic of identity played a major role.

Which topic turns up again and again in your artistic activities?

Recollection, or Ukumbusho in Swahili, my first mother tongue, is of key importance in my work. Here, I take recourse to traces, both as a conceptual basis of my work and as material, which signal the condition of homelessness and destruction through the leaving behind of people and objects. I process biographical experiences of radical fear and loss, linked to uncertainty regarding the future. I prefer to use industrial gloss paint because of its destructive potential as a toxic paint and at the same time because of its functionality.

What do you seek to achieve with your arts education activities?

I am above all interested in the discourse over works of art. In my arts education work so far, for example with children in Masaka in Rwanda’s capital province of Kigali or with students in Berlin, I experienced mutual inspiration. It promotes the common artistic process and teaches us the interesting experience of communication between creators of art and recipients, which we experience in day-to-day educational work.

What, in your view, is the essence of an artistic intervention in arts education?

From theory to practice in the course, how cultural education takes up the interface between artistic activities, pedagogical work and culture management and also strengthens my own position as an artist is of great significance to me. A further important aspect for me is to strengthen collaboration with other branches of art, keeping in mind the challenge of digitalisation in educational work.

Forms of Apolda

In the context of the International Building Exhibition Thüringen (IBA), an outdoor sculpture made of concrete and rammed loam was erected in Apolda. Loam was beaten and concrete was poured with residents, Lessing Primary School pupils and students. Sustainability and circularity, but above all the simplicity and immediateness of processing these building materials were crucial aspects. The aim was to find a form open to interpretation and enabling spontaneous adoption – as Land Art, a bench, or a lounger.

What have you taken home from this project for your artistic activities?

For me, working in the collective and seeing how different individuals contributed their skills to the overall project was especially enriching. Here, I was able to learn how ideas or work process transform and improve in the groups.

Again and again, the different perspectives of the participants on artistic production prove to be stimulating and also sharpen my perception of my own works of art.

Which topic turns up again and again in your artistic activities?

My artistic activities focus on the conditions of art production and issues of presentation or representation in art. Here, I am furthermore interested in questions concerning digitality, participation and self-organisation in communicating, or also how the problem of classism – an issue which has received too little attention in my opinion – can be countered in art practice.

What do you seek to achieve with your cultural education activities?

Cultural education activities ought to seek low-threshold approaches and thus involve as many different people as possible. Here, it is important for me to create a situation which gives everyone involved a feeling of trust and equality enabling them to contribute their respective knowledge and individual abilities. It is meant to facilitate shifts in perspective, strengthen self-confidence and integrate individuals through experiences.

What, in your view, is the essence of an artistic intervention in cultural education?

My vision of artistic interventions in cultural education is to overcome old dogmas in art – such as authorship and artistic “genius”. Ideally, independent and collectively generated works of art emerge during the interventions which can do without singular authorship. Here, I am interested in creating sustainable spaces which develop not only for the brief moment of an event or a seminar but can be used or viewed on a lasting basis.

Ole Meergans (*1988) is a visual artist and lives in Berlin. He studied sculpting at Berlin University of the Arts, visiting Manfred Pernice’s class. In joint exhibitions or in projects in public areas, he deals with classic sculpting, room installations and the architectonic space. Meergans is interested in art in buildings, above all from the former GDR, and the issue of figuration und abstraction. Geometric, preformed concrete blocks without any use – similar to those in the Berlin prefabricated housing estates – can be found in his works, together with figurative or even deformed busts of gypsum or bronze, or 3D-printed. He is a member of the COLLCOLL artists’ collective, which has set itself the task of organising discourses on reclaiming the city, participation and self-empowerment through artistic intervention.

Ich will Meer – I want the sea / more 

Dancing theatre project “Ich will Meer”, initiated by “Seitenwechsel e. V.”, supported by CHANCEtanz

The aim of the project was to link up ten- to fourteen-year-old girls from three different youth centres and impart dancing, drama and stage presence. On a number of workshop weekends, the girls intensively learnt dancing and developed a theatre performance of their own on a rehearsal trip to the Baltic Sea. Although the overarching topic “Ich will Meer” (I want the sea/more) had been fixed, the contents of the individual scenes came from the girls themselves. We, the dancing instructors and choreographers, looked at the topics girls are concerned with, such as mobbing at school. Finally, the 30-minute performance was presented to the parents, friends and relatives on a proper stage.

What have you taken home from this project for your artistic activities?

Dancing offers a multifaceted range of options for personal expression. This project showed me how all the participants could develop new abilities in their own way, both with regard to dancing and personally, which resulted in more self-confidence. Especially in hip-hop and in crump, there is enough space, so that people can all find their own environment. Such projects give people access to dancing as a tool for individual expression which they would otherwise not be able to afford.

Which topic turns up again and again in your artistic activities?

In my studies (B. A. in civilisation studies and social sciences, M. A. in religion and culture), I intensively dealt with topics such as racism and other forms of discrimination. I have always been interested in why and how people create enemy stereotypes and how they seek to dissociate themselves from whom they perceive to be “others”. I wanted to find ways to counter such processes. In art, and above all in dancing, I recognise a potential for this. In my artistic work, I focus a lot on the positive effects of dancing.

What do you seek to achieve with your arts education activities?

Dancing brings people together, dancing is communication (body language), and this creates a platform on which social boundaries can be opened up. With my arts education activities, I seek to develop projects making use of the potential which dancing bears. With dancing projects, I would like to help young people and adults to deconstruct prejudice and enemy stereotypes. I believe that crump can also reach people who would otherwise hardly participate in art and culture and at the same time ought to become more involved, e.g. in the debates on racism.

What, in your view, is the essence of an artistic intervention in arts education?

Art always offers a lot of scope. As a dancer, I can reinvent myself again and again, and thus I am in permanent dispute with myself. Making use of art as a medium, dealing with certain topics in arts education, creates countless access points and opportunities to look at these topics. To me, this scope for possible individual development is the essence of artistic intervention in arts education. Everyone can decide for herself or himself how intensively he or she wishes to deal with the subject.

KreativLabor (creative laboratory) 

The “KreativLabor” (creative laboratory) is an interdisciplinary cultural project at Charles Hallgarten School in Frankfurt am Main. Five artists from the fields of the fine arts, music, literature, drama and dancing work one school-day a week throughout a school year with special needs school pupils of the fifth and sixth forms, addressing a topic from an interdisciplinary angle. The topic of the year is chosen according to the focal interests of the pupils, the aim being to integrate everyone in the project in order to ultimately present the results which have been achieved to a school audience of pupils, teachers and parents.

What have you taken home from this project for your artistic activities?

That it is a good idea to keep the artistic process open-ended for as long as possible so that the pupils’ creative potential can develop completely freely. The aim is to engage with art and its wide variety of materials, techniques, forms, and interpretation and experimenting options. Often, these personal experiences do not fit into a timeframe, and it is sometimes difficult to present them. Thus the focus should not be exclusively on the artistic result.

Which topic turns up again and again in your artistic activities?

At first glance, my sculptures often appear to be inconspicuous and almost trite. The circumstances of day-to-day life are ironically questioned. Here, I like to choose well-familiar aspects out of their usual context and show new perspectives. Sometimes, one has to take a close look in order to see where these objects differ from what one is used to. I am generally interested in whether one can view things differently from what they were originally meant to be.

What do you seek to achieve with your arts education activities?

I want to develop creative spaces for cultural education in which one can freely realise one’s own artistic ideas in an unbiased manner in a team. Here, the individual goes through an artistic process with all its ups and downs. This also means that the process remains open-ended for as long as possible, so that the entire creative potential can develop. This isn’t always easy, but I see myself as a companion asking concrete questions for individuals to reflect on their own artistic development and to drive the creative process.

What, in your view, is the essence of an artistic intervention in arts education?

I see my role as an artist in arts education projects as that of asking questions in order to enter into communication, artistic exchange and action with others. Artistic impulses are meant to inspire, but certainly also to irritate my counterpart. The idea is not to straightaway find a solution or answer to everything, but to commonly develop ideas in an artistic process, review results critically, discard approaches and experiment anew. To me, it is important to look outside the box, which might often be challenging, but can also be fascinating.

Walter Gropius: Workshop weeks

To mark the centenary of the Bauhaus, in cooperation with Walter Gropius School in Erfurt, the idea arose to develop a sculpture with the pupils doing justice to the artistic claim of the school’s name giver, Walter-Gropius, which could ultimately also be realised in the school building. For this purpose, three workshop weeks were held with eight to twelve youths each. Initially, in a jury session, three models were shortlisted from the model works which were later on put into more precise terms. In a further session of the jury, one work of art was chosen which was then implemented by a metal processing company.

What have you taken home from this project for your artistic activities?

The challenge in this project was to rouse enthusiasm among my workshop participants and sensitise them to the dimension and seriousness of the project. Explaining the individual steps of the process in the right words to a counterpart requires an additional review of what is purely an intuition. Many subconscious actions in one’s own creative work thus enter one’s consciousness since one has to explain them again and again to the participants. In this project, I have learnt a lot about the need for communication with those involved who are responsible.

Which topic turns up again and again in your artistic activities?

My work always starts with simple geometrical forms, such as the circle, the square and the bar, which obviously undergo a process of modification. These elementary forms are folded or cut apart and newly arranged according to predefined rules. Inquisitiveness seeking to show the living and non-visible essence of geometry is at the forefront of my examinations. Folded spaces are developed which can be traced back to their original setting with imaginative attention. One is challenged to take a close look and understand the playful links between surfaces and spaces. I look at them as “Visual Sounds”.

What do you seek to achieve with your arts education activities?

In my workshops and projects, I seek to have teaching art put more emphasis on practice, or to create an atelier atmosphere, something that can seldom be achieved in conventional school lessons. Working together and vying to find good solutions results in questions of immediate importance which can directly be discussed on the basis of the given situation. Taking these questions seriously builds courage and inspires the participants to think in larger dimensions. In this manner, outsiders in particular can learn to focus on certain topics. The general aim is to rouse a passion for and confidence in the creative process.

What, in your view, is the essence of an artistic intervention in arts education?

With my artistic interventions in arts education, I seek to break the mould of what has been achievable so far and sharpen anew the view of what the status of art is. First of all of course among school pupils, but also among teachers and parents. It is experiences beyond everyday life at school which get pupils to venture out of their comfort zone and thus reveal something which lies deeper. Thus I would like to leave lasting experiences for posterity which can only seldom be gained in the normal operations of our education system.

Pixelation Space Invasion, 2019

In the 1970s, the subway for pedestrians and cyclists was clad with green-brown tiles and was subsequently viewed as a “no-go area” in the district. Having already designed a major mural painting for the school playground of a higher secondary school in Göppingen in 2017, I was invited to work out a new concept for the subway considering the wishes of the school pupil and parent community. The original tile structure offered an ideal screen for painting. The brown and dark ambient was lightened up by applying white dispersion. Pixel objects in arrow structures were drawn hard-edge-style on the existing grid of grout strips between the tiles and coloured with neon paint. The arrows point in both directions and visualise the movement of through traffic. The concept was realised with 27 higher secondary school upper grade students in three days.

What have you taken home from this project for your artistic activities?

My artistic approach enables me to design projects which open themselves up to others and become viable with their participation.

Which topic turns up again and again in your artistic activities?

To describe my work in just three words, it’s SPACE AS CANVAS. Here, I view physical space as a canvas and an active field of action. Painting in an expanded field is the object of my artistic research in theory and practice. A contextual and conceptual approach opens up new levels of meaning and perception in the development, generation and perception of the works of art. Through projects and concepts, I explore an extended understanding of art and illustration. The extended image is the result of processes which are based on experiences in space. My artistic process is open and unbiased. Again and again, making references to the respective different situational conditions creates a work of art which can never be fully determined in advance.

What do you seek to achieve with your arts education activities?

I open up spaces. Art and communicating art reflect processes going back to experiences in spaces. Not only are physical, temporal, spatial or object-related links formed in interaction with our environment. The process also involves communication, encountering, intervention and participation. Only in active participation are experiential spaces, and hence dialogical fields of action, opened up. My emphasis is on these fields, which today are the hybrid, dynamic forms of expressing a contemporary understanding of the visual arts and vibrant, transdisciplinary teaching practice. Here, departments are linked at interdisciplinary level, transitions and boundaries are fluid, and teaching and artistic practice go hand in hand.

What, in your view, is the essence of an artistic intervention in arts education?

Artistic interventions are art in a context which develop via the application of situational knowledge based on testing, experience and experimenting. The extended image comprises the recipient and the producer in the respective situation. This is illustrated by the various levels of perception and action in my practical work and in my teaching philosophy /project conception. I design concepts for a specific context, addressing the concrete requirement and the individual issues involved. My aim is to adapt the design of educational concepts to the respective demands in imparting art and to run projects which mean new experiences and additional knowledge for all participants.

otto mops – onomatopoeia

My most important objective in this project was to introduce children to lyrics with the poem “ottos mops” by Ernst Jandl and above all inspire them to take an interest in language. In the project, it was possible to discover language with all one’s senses and develop it further, very much in line with Jandl. The originality and uniqueness of his poems enabled the children to gain access to language in a creative way. In the course of activities such as dancing, rapping, role-play and onomatopoeia, language turns into sensual perception and sound as well as haptic experiences. With the aid of the children’s creative interaction and ideas, language evolves into more than just a means of communicating; not only can it now be heard, it can also be seen, felt and changed.

What have you taken home from this project for your artistic activities?

That it is possible to spontaneously adapt and redesign contents so that they are right for children and youths at precisely this moment.

Which topic turns up again and again in your artistic activities?

In my artistic work, the topics of breakthroughs and openings turn up again and again.

What do you seek to achieve with your arts education activities?

It would be nice to be a visionary enabling people to discover and experience an individual concept of freedom through art via cultural education activities.

What, in your view, is the essence of an artistic intervention in arts education?

An intervention in arts education enables us to open up spaces, thoughts and liberties. Rigid teacher-centred teaching wouldn’t allow this.

Kalle – raised garden beds, 2021

Having presented the project at the “Ideen-Forum Nachhaltige Stadt” in the “bauhaus reuse Pavillon”, we built banks of raised flowerbeds with old floorboards and pallet boards in a Berlin inner city square in a joint activity with neighbours and people who got together with us spontaneously. Untreated robinia posts are anchored in the flowerbeds which, while creating the illusion of a forest, also act as climbing supports or can be used to hang objects onto. Thus we have created seating in a semi-circle, contributed to greening the square, and enabled community gardening and more communication in the neighbourhood, also over the controversial topic of traffic calming. Furthermore, exhibitions and workshops can be held at this new location.

What have you taken home from this project for your artistic activities?

By building the banks of raised flowerbeds for the community with familiar people and people who used to be strangers, a feeling of community has developed which people not participating can also notice. The benches are almost always occupied and are treated with care. The raised flowerbed banks offer an opportunity for dialogue, something that has been missing in particular during this pandemic.

Which topic turns up again and again in your artistic activities?

Dealing with nature as a place of longing, but also a place of inconsiderate destruction, when humans place their needs above those of all other living organisms.

What do you seek to achieve with your arts education activities?

I seek to achieve that the participants see the world a little with different eyes, feel plants as living organisms, become more aware of the forms of trees and their leaves and thus treat nature more mindfully. I would also like to contribute to the participants perceiving themselves with more awareness, finding more peace and expressing this artistically.

What, in your view, is the essence of an artistic intervention in arts education?

It enables surprising aesthetic experiences, rouses us, causes us to question things and, ideally, shows solutions. It gets people to talk.

kontext:europa

The project kontext:europa brings controversial cultural assets onstage and looks at cosmopolite Beethoven. With the instrumentation of Irish, Scottish and Welsh folksongs, Beethoven has his contemporaries participate through the aesthetic lens of Viennese classicism – in the historical, social and human needs of these peoples. Centuries-old conflicts are taken as themes, and demonstrate the resentments or links persisting among these people up to this day. Addressing this in the form of music and discussions offers an interesting reflection of these events.

What have you taken home from this project for your artistic activities?

It was astonishing for me to see how well the discussion was taken up in the course of the concert. Only this enabled the creation of a link with the on-going conflicts between the peoples affected.

Which topic turns up again and again in your artistic activities?

The only aspect which all the fields I work in really share is music itself. However, some questions accompany my work all the time. How much does the musical tradition of the past 300 years bear on us. What out of this is truly wealth? Why is there so much which keeps us from adopting an open, modern handling of this tradition?

What do you seek to achieve with your arts education activities?

We often let our opinion of artistic work be influenced by numbers of clicks, suggestions or assessments. I would look forward to contributing to a firmer self-consciousness in order to experience culture with inquisitiveness, and without reservations.

What, in your view, is the essence of an artistic intervention in arts education?

I like Joseph Beuys’ claim that “Every human is an artist”. For arts education activities, this means that there is no need to teach people art. Instead, we can create and experience art together.

Comic workshops

The photo gives an impression of my comic workshops. My workshop activities are very important to me because they guide me into many different contexts and I feel deeply enriched by the inter-human contacts and the breadth of the topics which we work on together there. For many participants, actively dealing with the medium of a comic is just like an excursion to an unknown area whose options they can now tap. After commonly embarking, and having covered a few metres, I withdraw a little and accompany the participants, walking side by side with them through the creative and content processes.

What have you taken home from this project for your artistic activities?

In the workshops, each group creates its own framework and its own dynamic. I never know in advance what to reckon with, and I quickly have to feel my way into different perspectives and work modes. This has also widened my view of my own working methods. Each time, individual experiencing, which I seek to make accessible in my workshops, becomes part of my own experience, which in turn lets me return to my personal projects, my obstacles, blockages and routines with a greater degree of awareness.

Which topic turns up again and again in your artistic activities?

At the pure content level, depending on the context, my work focuses on very different topics. However, one aspect that is frequently contained concerns the interfaces and links between the individual and society. I like to deal with historical, social and socio-political issues. What is interesting for me regarding the preparation of the corresponding projects is the research and the opportunity to delve into a certain topic, while during the production phase, I am thrilled by the search for a suitable narrative. I love languages and often experience my work in analogy to learning, exploring and translating a language.

What do you seek to achieve with your arts education activities?

A picture is a picture. A whole page of such pictures becomes a style bearing an inherent logic and a language of its own. Comics can differ from each other individually just like the people drawing them. All of us tell stories every day, and most of us are capable at a motor level to draw a matchstick man. Putting these two together gives you the foundations of a comic which can touch and take along other people. I want to make experiencing that “I can draw a message via which I can enter meaningful communication” liveable.

What, in your view, is the essence of an artistic intervention in arts education?

In arts education, an artistic intervention ought to offer the participants an opportunity for a lasting experience. Ideally, it is not confined to the moment of participating but above all develops its true impact afterwards. The space which it opens and keeps open is just as important as the active, creative moment. The intervention is an impulse inviting individuals to reflexion and a more in-depth handling of an issue, as well as contributing to the individual’s development by providing a protected space enabling the encounter of joy, and sometimes also frustration, one’s own ideas and new impressions.

KreativLabor (creative laboratory) 

Which topic turns up again and again in your artistic activities?

What, in your view, is the essence of an artistic intervention in arts education?

Project ID – idea & identity, 2015

The “Projekt ID – Idee & Identität” (idea and identity), run in cooperation with zakk Düsseldorf in 2015, was a several-week-long writing workshop for girls and young women. Its aim was to create a protected space in which they could focus on themselves and on different forms of text and, setting out from this, discover approaches to writing. We discussed feminism and sexism in literature as well as how one’s own identity and perspective influence writing. During the preparation of the text presentation on the reading stage, we dealt with elements of drama and voice training and worked together with an actress on stage performance training.

What have you taken home from this project for your artistic activities?

Just like in all my other projects, I learnt quite a lot in this one, too. Eye-level is important to me – I believe that the relationship between the course director and the participants should not be a one-way street. We all learnt from one another in Projekt ID and benefited from the experience. And I was shown once again by the project what a considerable and crucial role both communicating via art and culture and the mutual networking of artists plays – especially among those who continue to be underrepresented in literature: for example, women, non-binary and queer people.

Which topic turns up again and again in your artistic activities?

On the one hand, there is the issue of confronting one’s self: my own identity and perspective, its inherent privileges as well as experiences of discrimination. On the other, what particularly interests me in my prose is the psychosocial, interpersonal relationships and (power) dynamics, also against the background of societal structures and formative processes. In addition, for me, improvisation is not merely a recurrent topic but also provides access to writing and to language.

What do you seek to achieve with your arts education activities?

I want to sharpen awareness of language not merely being a means to an end but something that also has to do with power. Words and stories hold power, and who utters or tells them also plays a role, as does whoever receives them. Here, regarding the development of identity as part of cultural education activities, I see a considerable potential for self-reflexion and self-empowerment. Since the research for the latest book I had published, there has been no question that the topic of self-care also plays a role: art and culture not as a luxury item but as part of self-caring practice.

What, in your view, is the essence of an artistic intervention in arts education?

Less theory and more practice. For me, accessibility and making things accessible plays a central role. Approachable art and culture which can be experienced and lived by people with the most different backgrounds. So, in my case, approaching language and literature via my own writing, my own expressiveness, my own textual definition. Pausing for a moment and questioning, opening up new perspectives through one’s own experience — and new experience based on trying out, experimenting and improvising. These experiences have always also shaped my own approach to artistry.

Frappanz – Kollektiv kultureller Freiheiten e. V. – Workshop Digital Painting, 2020

In the summer of 2020, together with actors from the fields of art, culture and science, I founded the charitable association “Frappanz – Kollektiv kultureller Freiheiten e. V.”. With this initiative, a direct link to the urban area is to be created, as well as an open platform on which we can address social topics, make artistic practice tangible and actively participate in the development of the city and society together with other artists. Our project „#outofthebox“ comprised various different workshops on the topics of “Radical Empathy“, “Upcycling”, “Design” and “Digital Painting”. For us, the “Frappanz” is a rehearsal, activity and resonance room all in one.

What have you taken home from this project for your artistic activities?

Owing to the pandemic, my workshop “Digital Painting” in the project referred to above was run as a purely digital event. Nevertheless, it was important for me to print the results and present them in a pop-up exhibition in the real-life “Frappanz” room. Since not everyone taking an interest was able to visit the real-life room, this activity was chiefly documented via the Social Media channels. Individuals and works of art switch between realities in real-life and digitised form. It is particularly this interaction between the analogue and the digital world which I take an interest in as part of my work as an artist.

Which topic turns up again and again in your artistic activities?

In my artistic work, I am particularly interested in the options for the perception of different realities and the interaction between digital and analogue elements. Here, I look for conflations, but above all also for boundaries and irritations which question everyday visual habits and can lead to new localisations.

What do you seek to achieve with your arts education activities?

I want to encourage people to try out shifting their perspective, to liberate themselves from conventional notions and structures and let go of their own perception habits. Personal as well as social spaces to develop can be opened up and newly defined by experimenting, asking questions, discussing and researching. Cultural education activities can encourage people to actively get involved in and commonly design their personal environment and our society as a whole.

What, in your view, is the essence of an artistic intervention in arts education?

In arts education, an artistic intervention is an opportunity to gain new experience and insights. Impulses and a range of options for interaction can encourage the participants to adopt new perspectives and get new ideas. Interaction can be performed face-to-face or digitally, although it ought to be based on an unfamiliar stimulus demanding rethinking things.

Im&ExportMoves

Im&ExportMoves is a transcultural theatre and dancing project. With the aid of drama and contemporary West African dancing elements, it creates a space of intercultural encounter and exchange between people with a wide range of origins. For seven months, the participants examined societal and inter-human topics in an interdisciplinary context and developed a play which they presented at the “Festspielhaus Hellerau” – European Centre for the Arts, Dresden. Im&ExportMoves is a cooperation scheme between the “Festspielhaus Hellerau, Dresden” and the “Verein Afropa e. V.” which was developed and is directed by Olga Feger. For this production, she brought together an international team of directors consisting of artists some of whom had a migration history or experience as a refugee of their own.

What have you taken home from this project for your artistic activities?

This work showed me even more clearly how important it is to create and maintain a protected space as a basis for a creative process – and just how much more exciting live acting is in comparison to artisanal perfection. The interdisciplinary fusion of dancing, drama and music as well as the different ways of working in the international team were also very fulfilling for my work as an artist.

Which topic turns up again and again in your artistic activities?

My work as an artist usually deals with socio-politically relevant topics. My latest activity addressed power, power structures and handling any type of otherness, as well as the issue of what we ourselves refer to as “normal”, and how absurd this can appear to be from another perspective.

What do you seek to achieve with your arts education activities?

Arts education activities open different doors for each individual. Doors to oneself, to handling oneself, others and society. With my arts education activities, I seek to encourage people to open up new spaces for themselves and others and try themselves out in them. I want to create a place in which one can deal with a wide range of questions, shift perspectives and further develop as an individual.

What, in your view, is the essence of an artistic intervention in arts education?

To me, an artistic intervention in education features a creative moment. Empowering oneself, developing one’s own creative skills and effecting a self-defined transformation process. I regard artistic intervention as a moment of freedom in which I can newly discover and position myself in relation to myself, the other and the world.

The sound of wrinkles

When people can’t get to art, art gets to them. In this “cultural work via dropping in on people”, I visit institutions, clinics, quarters and private living rooms, and through making music together, I take up the great longing for inter-human resonance. For this purpose, I travel around the county equipped with flute, voice, guitar and accordion, many simple instruments for joining in and amplifying gadgets and make music in front of windows, in living rooms, on stairs and in gardens. In the context of sing- and play-along concerts, I enable older and old people to participate in culture and in designing activities. We enter a musical dialogue. Here, music is experienced in an entirely new way: intuitively, interactively and improvisationally.

What have you taken home from this project for your artistic activities?

Owing to different aspects shaping their lives, experiences in life, needs, abilities and cultural tastes, my target groups are highly heterogeneous. The music I “bring along” to old people and the artistic language change again and again, given such a backdrop of diversity. We learn from and with each other. Here, the challenge for me as an artist is to offer people in the process of aging, with growing impediments and insecurities, musical options in which they can develop and maintain a positive feeling of being alive. So what is needed is aesthetic-creative, humane and people-friendly approaches to handling aging. Ultimately, such approaches will also contribute to shaping our common cultural and social future.

Which topic turns up again and again in your artistic activities?

Playing music, listening to music, moving along with music: at a cognitive, motor, emotional and affective level. How can reality be experienced aesthetically, holistically and multi-dimensionally with the aid of music? Is (inter-) actively, intuitively making music together by improvising the key to all this? How can I process an artistic field so that creative forces can grow and act in it? I am seeking the interpenetration of art and everyday life, the aesthetic perspective on everyday aspects, a familiar, everyday view of music – beyond virtuosity and exclusivity. All individuals are musical, are touched by music in their own way, everywhere, and a whole life long.

What do you seek to achieve with your arts education activities?

Especially in the rural regions, which are usually underserved with culture, and where age-appropriate cultural events are usually lacking, I seek to stimulate and activate people in their third and fourth stages of life with aesthetic, experience- and perception-enhancing music projects.  Via the encounter with themselves and music (instrument, voice, dancing), identity, finding one’s self, developing one’s abilities, self-efficacy, acquiring insights and self-realisation (“finding one’s own tone”), learning and further development become possible. Old people’s quality of life can be maintained and improved with musical means.

What, in your view, is the essence of an artistic intervention in arts education?

I try to create an aesthetic space in a familiar, calming and stimulating atmosphere in which art can emerge and develop. In this space, I accompany people in recalling moments in life, familiar aspects – a song, a piece of music, an instrument – or also sensations such as happiness, grief, love. Familiar aspects are put into a new context during a dialogical process out of which new forms emerge. For example, the protest song “Bella ciao” is newly texted together and placed in a personal context or rewritten instrumentally as a mourning blues. Here, the actors experience new experiential environments and self-efficacy – in the music, they perceive their own creative strength.

Circus and language, 2016

In 2016, in cooperation with the German Children and Youth Foundation and Circus Cabuwazi (Project Beyond Borders), I developed a circus language promotion project for children from refugee families which imparts language in a playful manner centring on physical motion. The ten-day format aims at boosting both community and individuality, and provides the opportunity to learn and use the German language in an unbiased way. The children’s habitat is turned into a colourful space for development in which they can try out various circus disciplines, make circus props, explore words and their meanings in an artistic way and prepare a circus show together.

What have you taken home from this project for your artistic activities?

Working with language and abstraction has often been part of my research on motion or a method to experiment with motion qualities and rhythms. Trying things out and playing with children gives me new ideas and refreshes my perception of my own practices. In the project weeks, I often worked with clownesque exercises and noticed how they became drivers of de-escalation and promoted mutual awareness and understanding. Tangible artistic energy in a project is taken on further, and new, creative impulses emerge.

Which topic turns up again and again in your artistic activities?

My artistic work often focuses on perceiving and experiencing. I am interested in what attitudes emotions or, also, misunderstandings subjective impressions and experiences can stimulate and how internal conditions move us to form and change our body. I want to know what is concealed behind what is visible. The aim of my work is create understanding and dispel appraisals and stigmatisations which a perception of “weird” modes of behaviour and seeming otherness can lead to.

What do you seek to achieve with your arts education activities?

I would like to enable people to adopt a creative approach to various topics and encourage them to consciously perceive the environment, change their perspectives and discover something new. My work focuses on exploring one’s own thoughts and creativity, as well as on identifying individual peculiarities and facets of movement or other abilities. For me, it is important to create an environment in which understanding and participating as well as learning from one another is possible across boundaries in order to promote self-confidence and respectful action.

What, in your view, is the essence of an artistic intervention in arts education?

To me, artistic interventions in arts education is an attempt to shift notions and an invitation to (re-) discover or (re-) interpret the environment with the aid of aesthetic means and designing methods which are above all made accessible and understandable. The artistic experience brought about by one’s own creative experimenting promotes personal development, strengthens self-confidence and motivates individuals to take on challenges more open-mindedly.

New Cologne – how many megabyte?!

“New Cologne – how many megabyte?!” was a live jump and run which I realised together with eight youths (12 to 14 years) at the “Theater an der Parkaue” (Berlin) in the context of an Easter holiday workshop. I provided the framework for the play, which the participants had to fill under my supervision: together, we invented the world in which the play was performed and built the corresponding storyline. The participants were actively involved in creating the stage setting and developing the puzzles. In implementing the concept, they took turns performing the different roles.

What have you taken home from this project for your artistic activities?

Performing Playstation with young people and talking to them is more important than working out a perfect script on your own.

Which topic turns up again and again in your artistic activities?

In my activities with the Künstler:innenkollektiv, I look for artistic strategies and options for producers and recipients to encounter each other in a room and commonly enable something unplanned, something new, to develop.

What do you seek to achieve with your arts education activities?

With young people, I seek to bring the process and the manner of working to the fore and thus commonly question results-oriented working.

What, in your view, is the essence of an artistic intervention in arts education?

Working artistically enables an individual to address topics freely and find one’s own way to explore these topics. To me, bringing such openness into thought in arts education is the artistic intervention.

A cultural landscapes map

In coordination with the City of Bad Liebenstein, I designed a tourist map with the cultural sights in the city and its surroundings. Together with schools, the Youth Art School and a planning agency, 50 children drew up lists of what they deemed important sights and highlights, drew them on site, transferred them to the linoleum and then cut and printed it. The result was a unique cultural landscapes map – a project involving children, applied local history, an introduction to artistic intaglio printing techniques and professional marketing in tourism.

What have you taken home from this project for your artistic activities?

I was surprised how happily and enthusiastically the children delved into the activities. They gathered and arranged the various sights to a much greater extent than expected and were eager to cut and print the lino blocks. This boosted my notion of involving children and youths in particular much more strongly in decisions or directly conferring decisions to them and seeing myself merely as an accompanying person. But it is precisely this approach which very often becomes a tightrope walk because the target of sponsored end-products has usually already been set. So, conversely, one ought to give priority to initiating and supporting projects enabling true participation.

Which topic turns up again and again in your artistic activities?

As a graphic designer, I am more of a service provider than a freelance artist. Again and again, I have to arrange and structure things, work out what is important, illustrate it, bring it to the fore. And then there is the question of artistic realisation. It is an interesting balance between freely designing aspects and what the demands of the client are. Here, for me, it is important to sound the limitations, and risk and try out new approaches.

What do you seek to achieve with your arts education activities?

I want to encourage, if not to incite, children, youths and grown-ups to become inquisitive. To me, that is the foundation of trying out new things, experimenting, researching. I believe it is essential to support young people in particular in seeking, finding and also going their very own ways, even if this may mean bucking the trend. This calls for courage and confidence, which can also be roused and boosted by cultural education activities.

What, in your view, is the essence of an artistic intervention in arts education?

Especially if you want to show how one can choose one’s own way of doing things, direct contact, communication, experiencing encouragement by other artists will make everything that much easier. Artists often live, work and think unconventionally, in a visionary or dreamy manner, sometimes quietly and sometimes loudly. They act off the mainstream. They maintain an un-pedagogical approach. Ideally, they are authentic and unfettered by system constraints. To me, directly getting to know one another and working together, debating and experiencing friction with a wide variety of artists is the very essence of artistic intervention in arts education.

Getting drama into schools

In the project “Theater in die Schule” (getting drama into schools), I work with pupils and teachers of a certain cohort as well as artists from different disciplines on an interpretation of our own of an existing stage play which we have previously visited. Here, drama experiences develop which enable us to bring all project groups – drama, dancing, video art, equipment, gaming and food art – together in interdisciplinary processes. I prepare the framework for the theatre production and discuss it with the teams, so that as much as possible can be created in interaction. I accompany the processes and gather all the results. One special challenge in these projects is working in the physical space of the school, in which the pupils develop something which otherwise would not fit in with day-to-day life there.

What have you taken home from this project for your artistic activities?

In the school, there is a field of tension between the institution school, with its rigid structures, schedules, hierarchies, statutory orders, breaktime bells and its claim to perform artistically high-quality work and enacting. This abyss has to be bridged. Here, I noticed the strength which drama and cultural education can release even if they are in a very confined setting. In a sterile theatre space, where so much focuses on “creation”, the school as a location turns into a laboratory in a wide range of spaces which are conquered. Dramaturgical discussions on stage decisions are taken, and songs, props and texts are created. Already early on, it becomes clear that this production belongs to the pupils!

Which topic turns up again and again in your artistic activities?

When working with children, the same topics turn up at different levels of intensity and urgency. While the issue of participating in drama with non-professional performers and writers often starts and also stops where the logic of supportive measures defines access and exclusion, in practical work, what turns up again and again is the aspect of one’s own position onstage and the topics which are dealt with there. In my work, it is a cross-cutting issue to consider power-critique levels and setting them as a basis to work on in staging. Here, the focus is on the issue of physicalness onstage which calls for its own level of interpretation and thus questions viewing and staging habits and puts them to the test.

What do you seek to achieve with your cultural education activities?

At the interface between emancipatory and cultural education, there is an enormous potential for locating and experiencing self-effectiveness. Since schools in particular have to cut budgets for cultural-aesthetic lessons ever more drastically, programmes are in decline which offer the opportunity to develop one’s own aesthetic expressiveness and receive impulses. Therefore, through close contact with schools, I seek to share my knowledge, networks and options to continue to be able to integrate cultural education in such institutions. In addition to school contexts, my focus is on drama activities and performances involving and addressing an audience and corresponding to optimally real conditions in society, being consciously followed and countering the theatre canon with a perspective.

What, in your view, is the essence of an artistic intervention in cultural education?

First, that it has been enthusiastically staffed while also possibly being painful and loud, or quiet and stormy or soothing and pricking. Second, that it is perceived. Third, that it has the potential to grow.

Céline Bartholomaeus (*1988) studied “Kunst in Aktion” (art in action) and “science of art” at Braunschweig University of Art (HBK). Since 2017, she has been working at Braunschweig State Theatre as a drama communicator with the focal areas of “Intersectionality and Diversity” and as Project Director for “Theater in die Schule”. Before her activity at Braunschweig State Theatre, she worked as a freelance theatre pedagogue and education consultant with various institutions and realised art projects and stage productions with a focus on empowerment for BIPoC, critique of racism and political education. Since the 2018/2019 season, she has been working as a part-time lecturer at the HBK Braunschweig for “Theater in die Schule”. As the co-founder and Chairwoman of “Amo-Braunschweig Postkolonial e. V.”, she links her practice as an artist with discourses on the critique of racism and power.

Tracing one’s own tracks – creating new worlds

Referring to Saxony-Anhalt’s long history of migration and integration, youths got together to develop four project pillars in transcultural cross-media education workshops. Each of these pillars related to a concrete project, one of which was my first book. Together with poets, layout designers, illustrators and publishers, .lkj) Sachsen-Anhalt and ICATAT e. V., the book “Die Fackel der Angst. Von Homs nach Magdeburg” (the torch of fear – from Homs to Magdeburg) was created, which I have been focusing on in workshops and readings since it was published.

The project was backed by its own blog, so that the youths were able to blog their own artistic results.

https://eigene-spuren-suchen.jimdofree.com

What have you taken home from this project for your artistic activities?

This experience made me more aware of the role which art in general has in developing young people’s personalities. Art and literature help them freely express their opinion and work together to achieve the goals they have set themselves. As an author, I have developed my own view on  arts education. My book project won’t be over when the book is published, for that is only the beginning of a journey which then goes on through discussions, workshops and creative thought.

Which topic turns up again and again in your artistic activities?

Since coming to Germany I have developed an interested in intercultural history between the Orient and Central Germany. Through multi-media cooperation and by using various cultural education methods, I am attempting to illustrate the diversity of Magdeburg and turn the “enemy stereotype of the other” into a stable bridge between long-time residents and new inhabitants. These efforts have already been put into practice in a number of projects. In this respect, the book project “Der Pascha von Magdeburg” (the Magdeburg pasha) is a very good example of such successful intercultural activity.

What do you seek to achieve with your arts education activities?

I would like to create new perspectives for cooperation, engage in an active sharing of information, views on life and targets, integrate new arts education methods in my project activities and pass on the insights which I have acquired, so that they have a lasting impact. I want to more actively strengthen the role of youth clubs in rural areas through regionally based intercultural activities and establish scope for creativity in which young people can develop their own talent in a multilingual and interdisciplinary framework.

What, in your view, is the essence of an artistic intervention in arts education?

To me, strengthening the role of art in the context of arts education appears to be an important aspect because this enables the formation of a creative environment which children and youths need to develop and consolidate their own personality in a special manner. For example, integrating music and drama can encourage the participants to expand their artistic and intercultural abilities and can get them out of what might be a bubble of exclusivity and into the group. With these creative means, they learn how to work together with others and contribute their individual skills to the collective effort.