In the years 2006 and 2007 activities of the Community Art Lab (CAL) were mostly of an exploratory nature with occasional in-depth research. In 2008 CAL is expanding its activities by involving students from cultural studies, social work and theatre studies programs. Our main goal in 2008 is to design and test a three-prone approach: social effect, artistic quality and the ethics of collaboration between professional artists and community participants. The idea is to develop research instruments and methods and to implement these systematically over the next few years.
In order to do this work as efficiently and effectively as possible we are currently preparing to set up and maintain a continually updated data base of all community art projects in the Netherlands. We have hired Margreet Bouwman to coordinate this work. She just finished her M.A. in Arts Education from Fontys in Tilburg with a thesis in which she compared a community theatre project with a community-based visual arts project. She will start working in August and hopes to launch the data base before the end of 2008.
In addition, we are closely monitoring seven community art projects in Utrecht, Haarlem, Amsterdam, and Eindhoven.
- preparations for YO Opera’s ‘Opera Flat 3′ (which will start in the fall of 2008)
- the second year of Living With Differences, in which Anouk de Bruijn is preparing a new project with women in Lombok , Güner Güven is developing a play with youngsters in the village of Maartensdijk (under the smoke of Overvecht), Tessa van Gent will continue her multimedia performance experiments in Zuilen (Utrecht), and new addition Suzanne Reindersma who is developing a play with migrant women in the neighborhood of Lunetten, where she lives herself.
- multidisciplinary youth festival ‘Radical? Act Normal’ (scheduled for 13-17 December 2008)
- ‘Expedition New-West’, a community-multidisciplinary art project of Public Amusement, a long-term initiative in the western neighborhoods of Amsterdam directed by Fenneke Wekker and Femke Janssen
- the Story Kitchen of Titia Bouwmeester and Ted van Leeuwen of Fifth Quarter in the Slaughterhouse neighborhood of Haarlem.
After the summer of 2008 you can expect to find periodic updates (in words and images) on the Dutch-language version of this site, which is under construction.
Seminars
At least once a year, CAL wants to bring together the artists and researchers involved in the projects that we are monitoring in order to frankly exchange experiences and provide feedback on each other’s work, using the CAL research data as a starting point. The first of these seminars is scheduled for 17 and 18 December 2008. In this collaborative way CAL seeks to continually finetune its instruments and research methods.
