Marcel Bamberg - Election 2018

Start date: February 2018

Duration: 2 months

Short description project: I tried to get elected for the Utrecht municipality in 2018. My campaign was a video campaign, for which I made short videos in which I interviewed people from my neighborhood about their knowledge of our city. My last action was to let a tattoo artist apply '1/9' on my right arm, because 1 in 9 children in Utrecht live in poverty - something I wanted to change as a politician.

Why did it fail: I did not get elected. So, looking from the 'I want to get elected'-point of view you could say that's failure. From the other hand, I have never regretted the tattoo nor the video series I made. And I'm happy I have not become a politician, after all.

View Marcel's current projects here.

Tampere Intercultural Art (collective) - Connected: Peer to peer learning programme

for the Finnish art and culture industry

Start date: June 2021

Duration: 3 months

Short description project: The working group applied for a 5-year grant money to have a functioning artistic career accelerator for international and Finnish artists in the region. With the project "Connected – Yhteyksissä", foreign-born and local artists from Pirkanmaa learn from each other by engaging in networking sessions organized in 2022. Expected outcomes of the project target a smooth transition of foreign-born artists and cultural workers into the field and working environment in Finland. Foreign-born professionals will get a hands-on ntroduction through building a relationship with local professional peers in Pirkanmaa. The local professionals participating in networking sessions will, in turn, make international connections that open possibilities outside Finland and get to know the linguistically and culturally diverse pool of peers to build long-lasting relationships.

Why did it fail: It was a really ambitious, long project to apply on the local scale. The impact factor in the job market would not have been sudden. Therefore, it is not scalable. Also, the organization does not have a bureaucratic entity, which means that it is nearly impossible with this big amount of money and an unregistered working group...unrealistic expectations!

Anna Püschel - no working title, something with Freemasons

Start date: April 2013

Duration: +/- 4 months

Short description project: I've always been fascinated by conspiracy theories and by people who said they hold the key to some ultimate truth, as if they REALLY know what is going on in a world in which most of us are totally lost. I got very interested in the Freemasons, especially in the women's branch since it's such an old dude club and they're not keen on sharing anything.

Why did it fail: I had a lot of stuff going on at that time and this project grew very quickly very fast. Within a short time, I had access to the Freemason archive in The Hague and photographed the head of the Freemasons in the Netherlands. I had so many questions, and with every question answered 10 new ones popped up. I wanted to investigate into their symbolism, the role of women in their movement, their connection to the outside world, the roots of the movement, its entanglement with mysticism… there was just too much and I could not choose. At some point, since I was still in art school, I had to drop it because despite having loads of material I did not have one concise red thread to present for a jury. So I ended up picking something completely different just for the exam. I thought I'd continue it at another point but then life happened, and I never did.

View Anna's current projects here.

Charles Poulsen - LANDWORKS - An art and landscape project for the Southern Upland Way

(Scotland, UK)

Start date: March 2004

Duration: 7 years

Short description project: “The idea is to have a continuous corridor of artwork along the route of the Southern Upland Way (a walking route from the West to the East Coast of Southern Scotland, a distance of 212 miles) which has been grown or made from the earth rocks and water along the way. There is nothing new in growing art or land art. What would be new would be the overall concept, the scale on which it is done and the shear concentration and ambition of it.” (quote from the initial project proposal 2004).

I started with a pilot project, money was provided (£3000) by the 3 local councils along the route of the Southern Upland Way. I created Point of Resolution. This growing sculpture was made by cutting a series of ‘circles' into heather, which from the viewing point - the point of resolution - looked like circles. From the air or when moving away from the point of resolution, they proved to be distorted ovals. This pilot showed that you could make a very large work for quite a small sum (it still exists). At this point I brought in an art consultant, who helped free of charge. For the next six years, we tried to persuade the Arts Council of Scotland to be interested in funding a couple of new growing sculptures for the project a year, over a number of years. We made several applications for funding, all failed. We produced a printed bound document of 30 pages with text and photographs to back up these applications.

Why did it fail: It was possibly too ambitious, it may have scared the funder? It felt it was the sort of project that didn’t fit with what the Arts Council was trying to do at the time. We were not known to the arts council from previous projects, which I believe was a major factor. In addition, they would not meet us in person. All communication was by email or phone which made it impossible to build a relationship with the funders and to convince them of what we were trying to do.

The time spent felt like failure at the time, but I learnt a lot and became more self-reliant. The applications increasingly went down the rabbit hole of arts council demands. We asked for advice on applications, but they would keep adding things: working with schools, running education projects, workshops, public consultations, etc. We lost site of the original vision. I am now wary of fundings, because they nearly always distort the original intention. You end up doing what they want. Since then I have gone my own way. If I apply for a funding, it’s only on the basis of it being a help, rather than it being vital to a project.

During this period I did a lot of drawing for growing sculptures, producing a lot of ideas on paper. I started working in a wood of a friend and made growing sculptures there, learning a lot in the process. In 2018, Hugo Burge visited me. He’s the director of a large house and estate, named Marchmont House. He had seen some of the drawings I made during the project years and wanted them to become a reality. Since then I have completed 8 major works in and around the Marchmont Estate. You can find them here.

Ilona Rijkeboer - NACHBARzuNACHBAR

Start date: October 2020

Duration: 9 months

Short description project: Nachbar zu Nachbar was a social art project I started in collaboration with the krudebude e.V. association in the east of Leipzig. The aim was to strengthen social cohesion in the neighbourhood around Stannebeinplatz (square) and to fight loneliness, which had increased during the pandemic. Creative workshops and social activities, following covid guidelines, would lead to the placement of a public sculpture on the square. The sculpture would function similar to a postbox, except that the use of stamps was unnecessary and the local residents would be responsible for its functioning: every time a postcard would be inserted, another one would come out to be delivered. This way, the local residents would get familair with the names and addresses of their neighbours, hopefully helping towards the building of a community. Apart from the postbox function, we would stimulate the sculpture to become a meeting point and hotspot for neighbourhood events.

Why did it fail: The project could not be done without the involvement of the local residents, but all events and workshops were postponed during lockdown (covid). When the lockdown was lifted, they were still impossible to plan due to the ever-changing covid restrictions and a general fear of people to engage in social activities. On top of that, I got stuck in the funding application process.

It was a combination of a too ambitious project and a progressive loss of motivation over the waiting time.