How do you position yourself to your art?
How tight is the bond between you and the issues or ideas you are working with?
What if you would release this bond and adopt out parts of your research temporally to someone else?
The Adoption Project takes on the bonds and habits between you and your artistic practice. It challenges the perspectives and positions you engage with in your artistic process and takes them away from your personal involvement by handing them over to a different look, practice, or routine for a certain period of time. A clear defined section of your project shall be packed in a 'box' and given up for adoption, while you will take a section of someone else's research temporally under your 'protection'.
In this sense the Adoption Project aims to facilitate you with tools to put your proper work in a public sphere long before it is 'completed'. We understand this process as an effective instrument of research.
How does it work?
- 'give it away' First, you are going to enclose and extract a section from the complex of your research case. This may be a part you don't know how to deal with, a part you would like to be infected by with foreign qualities, or a section you already gave up. Then you condense this section to a 'package' - readable for an 'anybody' - and release it from your personal care. You put it on disposal to be adopted by someone else – maybe by means of a lottery. Everyone who is involved will give away part of his research and receive parts of others – adoption is based on mutuality.
- 'care about' In the following adoption phase you will hence be in charge for a package yourself. You will feel responsible for the assignment delivered to your hands. You will have to take up a stance for it, to care for it and to charge it with the best of your intentions and qualities. You will approach it through your own eyes and tools and, as you adopt it, you will treat it as if it would be yours and use if it was for your own purposes.
- 'give it back' Changed, charged and re-bundled you will give the adopted package back from the foster-artist to the mother-artist. The third phase will happen in PA-F, where you will hand it over to the mother-artist in the context of his/her research presentation.
Timeframes:
Introduction to the project during the opening week in January. First working phase during the Half-way-days, February 18th and 19th. Second phase Workshop, March 18th to 22nd. Third phase in Pa-f, March 30th to April 5th.