Preparations
Starting from scratch
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Past. The work with the fishery community in Sesimbra built on research developed within the Artful Dementia Research Lab and the Craft-lab at UiT The Arctic University of Norway, and on the experience of the Maritime Museum with the community.
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Experimenting
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Northern Norway. Prior to the sessions in Portugal we met three residents and two staff members at a residential care home. Together we disentangled a long and curled fishing line containing barbless hooks. We wanted to know what kind of interactions emerge from a complex collective work that is unusual to most of us.
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Meeting digitally
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Virtual. Some of us had never met before. We organised our artistic work and research during three digital meetings and a WhatsApp group with partners from Sesimbra and Tromsø. The meetings took place in the three months prior to the co-creative sessions.From the Maritime Museum in Sesimbra: Andreia Conceição, Eduardo Cunha, Filipa Feirreira, and Iolanda Avila. From UiT The Arctic University of Norway: Lilli Mittner and Jorge Santos.
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Making our hands dirty
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Outside. "One can never know materials just by reading about them or sensing them; one has to get one’s hands dirty. For co-creativity to emerge, one needs to become part of the materials." (Lukic & Mittner, 2023)
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Choosing colours
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Beograd. The colour palette of our artwork was inspired by the portrait of one of the first female architects in Serbia, Jelisaveta Nacic, painted on a building in Beograd by Andrej Josifofski .
We spent some time choosing colours and materials. The choice fell on yellow, turquoise and red acrylic because of availability, quality, price, applicability on canvas by finger painting, and desirable colour layering. |
Sharing ideas
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Sesimbra. In our first physical meeting we discussed ideas about what to do during the two-day workshop: our expectations for the sessions, composition of the group, spatial arrangement of tables, chairs and materials, timing and dramaturgy of the 2 x 120 min sessions, as well as the kind of music to listen.
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Deciding for Materials
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On the table. We prepared for both a fishing-hook workshop and a painting session, but the sessions were influenced by random materials we found in different oceans of the world. The collection of materials included: mollusk shells, fishing lines, hooks, acrylic paint, recycled yogurt cups, canvases in different formats and sand that the children were very eager to collect.
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Inviting seniors
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On the stairs. Our contacts in Sesimbra mobilized far more elders than we had asked for. Instead of working with six seniors we ended up with 16 seniors. Together we became a group of 22. in our very first session. Some of us knew each other from before, others had never met. These were just a few of the unpredictabilities that one has to live with.
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Collaborating into the unknown
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Future, When we welcomed the group to the first session many steps ahead were still unclear. However, we trusted each other and knew that the interactions, creativity and imagination of the group would lead us somewhere. This curiosity for the unknown is an exciting moment of creation.
Situated art intervention research impacts the way people interact with each other, with themselves and the larger world. It also creates new ways to collaborate. |