Period: 19-29 April 2007
Team of AKV/ St. Joost tutors: Dyane Donck, Erik Hagoort, George Korsmit.
Team of PRO ARTE: Tatyana Bykovskaya (program coordinator), Elena Kolovskaya (director).
Partner institution:
The PRO ARTE Foundation is a non-governmental organization founded in 1999 to promote contemporary culture in the fields of visual art, music and dance. It is located in the Peter and Paul Fortress, St. Petersburg, Russia.
The PRO ARTE contemporary art program is designed for young people under age of 30 with artistic education or involved in the field of contemporary art. Goal is to shape their personal attitude towards the field of contemporary art, and to gain basic skills of dealing with new media.
http://proarte.ru/us/programm/new-media
Concept: Do it in Duo’s
Do it in Duo’s was inspired by the ongoing project initiated by curator Hans Ulrich Obrist: Do it! “With do it in the hand, you will be able to make a work of someone else’s art yourself.”
This project runs since 1993,
see: http://www.e-flux.com/projects/do_it/homepage/do_it_home.html
For the collaboration with PRO ARTE students, we adjusted the Do it! concept for duo’s. In short, the task for the students was: to provide instructions on how to make your work of art, and to hand these instructions out to your fellow, and vice versa. Other than the concept by Obrist the aim was to work together in this exchange of instructions and see where the process would lead.
Working
In St. Petersburg MFA students of AKV/ St. Joost formed duo’s with the PRO ARTE students. For one week they worked independently in St. Petersburg.
The goal was to collaborate, not by working from your own perspective but from the perspective of the other: to follow someone else’s procedure, to break through what you’re used to, to be open to surprises and discover new possibilities. Process was more important than the outcome, but in all cases results were shown at the end of the week, during a packed and festive presentation. There were stories, documentations, presentations of new video’s, drawings, performances, and a publication.
Visiting Program
Next to Do it in Duo’s a visiting program brought the MFA students in contact with:
- – the ideas and art work of necro-realist painter and photographer Vladimir Kustov,
- – the legacy of the late founder of St. Petersburg’s neo-academism Timur Novikov,
- – the ideas of the platform of artists, critics, philosophers and writers Chto Delat/ What is to be done.
Graffiti Wall-Painting in the City, by Stas and Sarah
Wodka toasting video by Sveta & Ilke de Vries
akv st.joost mfa 