Considering our generation and our personal understanding of art as a way to actively work with and in the environment, we would like to focus this year’s Summer School on the topic of sustainability and our direct environment. This topic should be explored in interdisciplinary discourses and practices at the interface of art and research.

For the Summer School, we attempt to form a temporary community beyond the everyday abundance of goods, services and distractions. We regard this as a fundamental condition for opening up a space of possibility for change and sustainable acting.

 

In such a 'micro-community' it seems possible to learn from each other and to build a continuous possibility space of exchange between different cultures, perspectives and knowledge. The resulting network of people, knowledge and perspectives will then be maintained and expanded through a constantly growing digital research archive. In the form of an online platform a collection of diverse contributions on the theme of art-environment-sustainable action will emerge over the years.

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We want to combine artistic production with collective field research in Maříž, collect results and make them digitally accessible in the long term. The starting point for this is the mediation of artistic-craft practices as possibilities for sustainable action, such as the re-use and re-functioning of materials, for instance, to make consumer goods oneself instead of buying them new, as well as to show possible uses for natural materials and to strengthen the perception of one's own living environment.

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Our project aims to give a new perspective on the environment through site-specific artistic works as well as 'research results' that deal with the immediate natural as well as social environment on a historical, geographical or cultural level.
Based on our attempt to create a healthy community, we want to show an example of how it can work, based on the cycle of individual-community-environment, to actively make a small but important contribution in everyday life to the preservation of our living environment. It seems important to understand the process itself as a goal, as sustainability is based on the cycle of our ecosystem and must be kept in balance continuously. Accordingly, the collective process during the ten-day summer school and beyond is as much the aim of the project as the concrete project results.

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By living in a temporary community of participants, the team and workshop leaders as an experimental way of living in the municipality of Maříž, we would like to collect and at the same time try out ideas and possibilities of how to actively engage with the environment in everyday life through small, implementable actions. We ask ourselves in advance how we can live in this community without negatively influencing our environment, let alone exploiting it, - and on an ongoing basis how we can build a healthy cycle between the individual, the community and the environment.

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We want to prepare a ten-day programme in which, after three media-specific workshops, the participants can work continuously in different cross-media workshops or studios with the support and guidance of the team. Based on the individual specialisation of the participants, the workshop leaders would offer support within the framework of their workshops, depending on demand. The focus within the workshops lies on craftsmanship and ways of working and processing natural materials with simple means, so that work without professional equipment would also be possible after the summer school.

In general, the focus is on the development of a material consciousness in the artistic sense as well as in terms of the sustainability discourse, which is created through the use of found materials from the natural environment, the repurposing of otherwise unusable materials for artistic works, limited to what is available on site.

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The main part of the programme consists of individual work and the three main workshops on clay & ceramics, sound and textile & costume by experienced lecturers. Within all workshops, input and inspiration of a theoretical nature will be combined with creative practice. The practical part will be theoretically linked through a series of lectures by German- Czech artists, professors and specialists, and thereby related to the immediate surroundings through joint excursions and ‘field research'. Excursions include guided tours at Museum Maříž, Museum Humanum Fratres, Slavonice, Ceplecha’s sculpture garden and Pepino’s flower garden.

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This fixed programme is further complemented by smaller exercises, such as performance, improvisation, bookbinding and an open, daily offer of yoga, meditation plus an evening programme, as well as individual support for the participants by the team (who specialise in different fields) in spontaneous one-to-one sessions upon request. Each day is dedicated to a specific topic: environment, clay, sound, inspiration, textiles, surroundings, individual, collective, symbiosis.

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