On invitation from Kalmar artmuseum, Kultivator opened a pop-up folk high school as an interactive sculpture/happening at the “Ljus på Kultur” Festival.
Background
The purpose was to activate the Berga-Norrliden area. Kalmar municipality invited Kalmar Art Museum to work with artists around activating the area between two residential areas in Kalmar municipality, Berga and Norrliden. Kalmar Art Museum has previously worked with Kultivator, an experimental collaboration between organic farming and art found in Dyestad, Öland. Kultivator’s work has since the start in 2005 been imbued with ideas on participatory and joint artistic processes, where spectators are invited as co-creators, both in art and in public places. The artistic coordinators Mathieu Vrijman and Malin Lindmark Vrijman both teach at Öland Folk High School on a general line and see folk education and folk high schools as a sovereign force for democracy, culture and social change. They have therefore chosen to, as a sculpture / performance / happening, open a folk high school at a designated place between Norrliden and Berga, and also award a scholarship at a summer course at Öland Folk High School.
The exterior shape of the work will is built up of interconnected joists, which suggest a building and room layout, but with open walls and ceilings, as a full-scale three-dimensional drawing. The actual construction is be done together with participants from Öland Folk High School, several residents in or near the Berga – Norrliden area during Saturday. During Sunday and Monday, the Folk High School is manned by Kultivator, as well as participants and staff from Öland Folk High School. Visitors and passers-by are then invited to taste, try, listen and see at the folk high school; in practical work with artistic techniques, simple cooking over open fire, choir singing, Swedish, poetry reading and more. You can also meet the school’s principal in his office and if you are interested, fill out an application for the scholarship that gives a week’s summer course at Öland Folk High School in the summer of 2017. The scholarship will be awarded during festive forms when the school closes on Monday.
The project is announced through posters and flyers in the area, press releases, social media, and last but not least through the network of new arrivals, both from asylum residents and residents in the establishment phase, which Kultivator and the folk high school built up over several years of work with the target group.
Purpose and goal
To create, in a living, unexpected and direct way, meetings between people in the Berga – Norrliden area and the department of folk education. Folk education has historically been a success factor for integration in Sweden, when the rural population was to be formed both for political assignments and jobs outside the agricultural sector, and has still enrolled in its aims to reduce the gaps in society. The aim of the project is to start a relationship, where people with different backgrounds can meet and new networks be established. The idea is that the visitors will open their eyes of the folk high school’s many qualities as a form of learning with social commitment, and the folk high school will be enriched by yet more participants from areas where this form of schooling is less well-known.