Duration: 2-hours weekly for 7 weeks | Summer Special | Thursdays: 17 June – 29 July 2021 | Conversations across borders and practices | Caroline Bergvall: Convener & Lead artist | Open to nine practitioners |
Overview
BRING YOUR PROJECT TO THE TABLE
AND YOUR EXPERIENCE TO THE CONVERSATION
The focus is on deepening and supporting you through a welcoming and exploratory group process. This is slow and intimate time and space to support your practice, possibly through an ongoing or emerging project, while exploring thoughts and ideas about motivated purpose as a small dedicated group. It wishes to meet the need for continued shared practice input as we all return to different social lives. Its focus will be especially on exploring interdisciplinary and transnational ways of working.
Starting at the beginning of Summer, the course is timed to support any changes and transitions you might be experiencing in your practice, and help you prepare take new risks with your creative directions for the Autumn/Fall. The sessions are structured to help you explore new avenues in the setting of a small working group of peers based around the world, from various disciplines. The overall form is loose, welcoming and generative. It is open to nine participants only.
Practice Conversations is group work designed to support your creative confidence in an organic and meandering way. It takes the time to enable you to discover new and surprising steps within your own work, deepen your own practice, and the place you envisage for it. Committing to being seen by others and witnessing their own questioning is also when surrendering to one’s own processes can provide the most surprising and connected insights. The result is a more centred and integrated awareness of your own work and of others’ work, an enriched and better-equipped sense of both personal and shared purpose. These are crucial values to navigate today’s splintered and uncertain emergency situations.
Who you are and what you bring
The course very strongly welcomes practitioners who are committed to working and developing their practice/s across fields, knowledges, borders, languages. It is especially crucial to explore and create tools, mindsets and networks that can help repurpose and occupy our dangerous and transitional times. This will be supported by my long-standing commitment and experience of inflecting art-making with interdisciplinary, transnational and queer-led approaches.
Especially suitable to practitioners from creative and/or innovational disciplines who are curious, open to sharing and receiving with others, are comfortable with process and ideas development and have some project experience.
English is the course’s vehicular language but not necessarily your only working language.
We work together in 3 different ways:
Practice Conversation: This is a conversation in the round, a time for engaging with one another’s queries, dilemmas large and small, and turn these into insights as well as shared learning processes. Its starting point is framed by some specific questions or focus that emerge from your own practices and are distilled from the coure’s starting points. Dialoging and listening as a steady group creates a valuable space to slow down and let new thoughts arise. These open up to larger questions around renewing a sense of collective purpose, risk-taking and motivatedness.
Practice Detail: Each session allows for detailed attention to aspects of your own project or general process. A sharing and listening session. You prepare and meet in duos/trios following specific principles of engagement that encourage fresh perspectives. The time exists to favour confidence , supported risks, and tactical as well as pragmatic thinking. You will grow your own work, learn new processes, help grow that of others.
Individual Surgery: Each of you will be offered an individual one to one tutorial with Caroline as part of the course.
You will leave the course :
- A more authentic and aware practitioner.
- Energised about the power of engaged group listening.
- Clearer about the value of interdisciplinary commitment.
- Feeling purposeful, motivated and supported.
- Full of ideas and new ways of working.
- and, with an established peer group to go forwards with.
Details:
Group sessions: 7 sessions : 2 hours weekly for 7 weeks
Individual surgery: One individual surgery with Caroline per participant included with the course.
Thursdays, 17 June – 29 July 2021
UK BST 5.30-7.30pm | Continent CEST 6.30-8.30 |
North America EDT 12.00-2.00pm | PT 9.30-11.30am
Fee: £350 + handling fees (paid in full, or in two instalments made prior to the first session)
This Summer Special is limited to nine places.
To reserve your place, please fill in the form below. You’ll then receive an email with payment details :
Feedback
For me the most exciting element was developing ideas around the themes within my group, exacting how each of us could in our own, unique way bring something alive and responsive to the fold, wedging to a whole.
I learned how to experiment more with ideas and how to disrupt the perception of how work should be conceived.
Working with Caroline is an expansive and exciting process; things move fast, connect, flicker, catch, and instill. A lot happens in a brief time, drawing embers through work that remains long after the screen closes.
Sharing the path
My experience
For the past year of lockdown I have run online arts practice workshops with the aim of supporting practitioners of all kinds and to help nurture a productive and generous environment of peers. I have also been offering individual mentoring sessions, to writers and artists of all levels who would like more personal discussion, project and creative development support.
I have over 25 years of experience teaching writing and art practices in universities and art colleges across the world. I have held appointments at Kings College London, Dartington College of Arts, Bard College Summer Program, Temple University Philadelphia, School of Art and Design Geneva. In many of my roles, I have been responsible for curriculum development, research supervision and have structured as well as taught writing and interdisciplinary courses. As a Fellow for institutions such as Cambridge University, Whitechapel Gallery London or the Gray Center for the Arts Chicago, I have been invited to create writing-led public events.
As well as undertaking teaching and lecturing roles, I often work with external organisations to host in-person and online workshops with artists and writers looking to hone and develop their craft.
