Migrating Art Academies

Published on Sunday, 05 June 2011 22:57

CouchSurfing
July 17th - 21st, 2011. Nida Art Colony
Coordinator: Alvydas Lukys; Curator: Mindaugas Gapševičius
Project website: http://www.migaa.eu

The 6th laboratory of the Migrating Art Academies (MigAA) project continues with its shaping format – a synthesis of mobility, art and sciences. The CouchSurfing laboratory aims to bring together more than 10 European art universities schools and other cultural organisations to set rules for a cooperation model which will offer emerging artists professional knowledge and feasible mobility. The proposed network of cultural organisations offers a low-budget model for artistic collaboration and tutoring based on “CouchSurfing”, the practice of moving from one friend's house to another and sleeping in whatever spare space is available.

The CouchSurfing laboratory will reside at the Nida Art Colony quarters on the Baltic coast. Representatives from 13 art universities from 10 European countries:  Lithuania, Norway, the United Kingdom, Estonia, France, Germany, Finland, Poland, Sweden and Belgium are all taking part in the project.

More than 20 emerging artists will participate in a 4-day long workshop led by Dr. Matze Schmidt (>top e.V, Berlin). Participants will be introduced to the technics of Streaming Media. The CouchSurfing metaphor is helpful here as it does not address the hotel service, it scores an environment based on hospitality and exchange. A 48 hour long programme for live streaming will complete the workshop.

The two day CouchSurfing seminar will focus on future collaboration among cultural organisations. Around 40 participants will discuss current problematics in art education and inter-disciplinary creative practice. Ideas that emerge from CouchSurfing should become a collaborative model for MigAA partner organisations while discussions on  recent crises in art education will outline further theoretical and artistic aims of the project.

Further development of the project looks to implement proposed ideas; representatives of collaborating organisations will offer a list of planned international seminars, workshops and lectures while emerging artists, art students and other creatives will attend proposed events.

The MigAA project is an ongoing aggregate network of participating art academies, people and events. A radical departure from the traditional learning process within bricks-and-mortar, MigAA released a cadre of graduate art students for a series of mobile and located explorations that, literally, spanned Europe, from the Baltic beaches of Lithuania to the Gironde Estuary in France, the Tatras mountains of Slovakia and elsewhere. With public manifestations in Linz, Austria at the prestigious Ars Electronica festival, in Berlin at the Collegium Hungaricum, in Royan, France and numerous other places on the way, the students piloted their Media RVs (recreational vehicles) along the highways and byways of Europe.

Migrating Art Academies CouchSurfing is kindly supported by the Culture Support Foundation of the Republic of Lithuania, the Nordic Culture Point, the Goethe Institut, the Embassy of Sweden in Vilnius and the Embassy of Norway in Vilnius. CouchSurfing is organised by Vilnius Academy of Art in cooperation with Academy of Media Arts Cologne, the Lithuanian German Forum Association in Vilnius, and Nida Art Colony in Neringa.