Klik hier om naar de Nederlandse website van het Community Art Lab te gaan.

Op dit moment wordt er gewerkt aan de tweetaligheid van de website. Lopende projecten die eerder op deze website stonden, staan nu op de Nederlandse site. Bedankt voor uw begrip.

On April 1, the Community Art Lab hosts a special meeting for researchers and funds. Over the past few years, several Dutch researchers have investigated the effects of community art projects. The work of Sandra Trienekens and of the Community Art Lab itself are examples, but also the ad-hoc evaluations of Wil Oud of the Kohnstamm Institute of the University of Amsterdam and of Peter Brouwer of Holland’s largest research institute, TNO.

Aim
The event will be held in Fort Blauwkapel, on the eastern edge of the city. Some twenty researchers will participate as well as ten representatives of such large funds as Stichting Doen, Oranjefonds and the VSB fund. Also, some local cultural affairs officials and art journalists will be present. The explicit aim of this day is to frankly exchange methodologies with an eye to strengthening research in future. Critical reflection on community art research is still in its infancy in The Netherlands, as opposed to the Anglosaxon world, where a serious ongoing debate has evolved in periodicals like Research in Drama Education, the International Journal of Cultural Policy and the Community Development Journal.

Petra Kuppers and Neil Marcus
Special guests are researcher and community dance choreographer Petra Kuppers and her partner Neil Marcus, who will offer an interactive workshop to our participants.

CAL hopes to organize such meetings with researchers and funds on an annual basis, same as the separate meetings it has started to organize for artists/practitioners.

Like in many other countries around the world, carnaval in the Netherlands is a cultural tradition that goes back to the Middle Ages, and some say even to pagan rituals to celebrate the end of winter. Whatever the roots, it is a vibrant cultural practice that manifests itself in the Catholic areas of the southern provinces. In big cities like Maastricht, Roermond, Helmond, Breda, Tilburg, Bergen op Zoom and ’s Hertogenbosch carnaval has become a big urban street party attracting lots of people from the North as well. But particularly in small rural villages, the festivities bring together virtually the entire community. High point of carnaval is the parade in which small performances alternate with impressive oversize floats, the product of many months of collective grassroots art making. The creative processes start as early as August and are conducted in secret in farm barns until the final carnaval weekend, right before Lent. In the video below you can see an impression of one such parade in the small village of Alphen, located just a few kilometres above the Belgian border south of Tilburg. An interesting aspect of this parade is that in economic terms it is fully community-supported through local sponsorship from families, shops and small businesses.

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In the years 2006 and 2007 activities of the Community Art Lab (CAL) were mostly of an exploratory nature with only occasional in-depth research, such as in the community theatre productions ‘Maxima Comes’ and ‘In the Name of the Fathers’ and the YO Opera productions ‘Kuil’ and ‘Opera Flat 2′. In this period, we organized two festivals and two working conferences. In 2008 CAL shifted its attention more towards documentation, research and exchanging experiences among community artists and researchers. We continue to investigate community art with an eye to social effect, artistic quality and the ethics of collaboration between professional artists and community participants. We have also launched an online community art database, which for the time being is still in Dutch, but should give foreign visitors a global idea of the quantity and diversity of projects currently in progress in the Netherlands.

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Originally intended to be screened right before ICAF’s final debate on Sunday March 30, 2008, the video is now available for viewing here. For more information about Tenantspin, click here. Watch video:

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On 16 March 2007, at CAL we filmed an animated conversation between Ivan Iparraguirre from Chile and Jos Zandvliet from Holland. Ivan is the founder of Teatro Pasmi, an avant garde theatre collective from Santiago that has been working in Chilean prisons for more than six years. Jos Zandvliet was one of the original founders of site-specific spectacle artists Dogtroep. With Dogtroep, in 2002 he worked on a groundbreaking project with inmates of Bruges prison (Belgium). Since then, Jos has worked more and more in prisons, most recently in Krimpen aan de IJssel. With his partner, Septimia Kuhlmann, he runs community arts organization ACCU, which creates highly participative neighbourhood projects.
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Better late than never: we have finally finished editing a 35-minute video impression of the WHO CARES conference that took place on 20 September 2007. In this conference, professionals from the world of art, art therapy, social work and mental health care came together to look into each others’ kitchens and to explore possible ways of collaborating. At times, this led to verbal firework.

View the video.

Read the conference report of Who Cares written by Eugene van Erven (in Dutch)