Photo: Sophie Barbasch

About the project:
The project builds on the history of two groundbreaking international projects, one in the African context (the Asiko Art School) and another in rural Sweden (the Nordic Studio for Continued Engagement at Rejmyre Art Lab’s Center for Peripheral Studies).

The Pan-African/Nordic Studio creates a local, regional and international discursive framework to support practice-based, site-responsive artistic actions and practices that produce cross-culturally relevant insights. The vision of the project is to develop a long-term, collaborative framework for practice-based, site-responsive encounters between African and Nordic artists. 

The program is built on an organic pedagogy in which the learning comes from the interaction between the group, the structure of engagement and the site. The 'local' and 'other-located' artist participants each re-see the selected site, and their approach to site-responsive making, through engaging with the perspective of their peers approaching the site from their respective positions. Such an organic pedagogic approach promises to deconstruct and reconstruct artistic practices in this socially vital field of practice.

Relevance for Globus Opstart:
The project is anchored strongly both in Nordic and global contexts. The project creates something new by aiming to establish and develop new networks and sustainable collaboration between Finland, Mali and Nigeria.