NEW THEATRE INSTITUTE OF LATVIA

contemporary performing arts in Latvia and abroad

With the stories of “Upside Down Kuldīga” collected and told, the audio story walk through Kuldīga opened at the international contemporary theatre festival “Homo Novus” (and it continues to be discovered by new audiences through the “izi.travel” app), we want to tell you about the origins of this community commissioned art project – how the idea came to Latvia and then to Kuldīga, to which many people from Kuldīga responded. From among them, three art commissioners were selected – Vendija Bakanauskaite, Ieva Štro and Elīna Beitika – who in 2024 developed the criteria, selected and commissioned a project created especially for Kuldīga and together with the people of Kuldīga: Jurģis Spulenieks’ audio story walk “Ačgārnā Kuldīga”. It turns out that the roots of the idea lie in America, so it is perhaps not surprising that the “Upside Down Kuldīga” dance has become popular among American “TikTok” users.

Democratising Art Commissioning by Involving Local Communities, DemArt from now on, is a small scale project funded by the European Commission program Creative Europe. The aim of this project is to involve local community members in the art commissioning process in order to produce meaningful artworks for the communities they lived in to show how art can serve as a powerful tool to foster social change.

This project was inspired by the experience of the Queens Council on the Arts’ Artist Commissioning Program in New York when former ACP Manager Daniel Valtueña presented it at the IETM Satellite Girone in November 2021.

The Queens Council on the Arts is one of the five arts councils in the city of New York. It was founded in 1966 and its mission is to foster and develop the arts in Queens County and to support individual artists and arts organizations in presenting their cultural diversity for the benefit of the community.

In 2017 thanks to The Scherman Foundation QCA inaugurated the Artist Commissioning Program (ACP) which aimed to democratize the traditional commissioning process by enabling local community members, or “art commissioners”, to fill gaps in US culture by awarding commissions to Queens artists and art organizations. ACP was implemented between 2017 and 2022 and was shaped following two different models: a neighborhood-based model between 2017 and 2020 and a discipline-based model between 2021 and 2022.

For the first three years, QCA selected a group of art commissioners, or local Queens community members, to award a total of four $10.000 art commissions each year. Every year, art commissioners and artists belonged to two underrepresented Queens neighborhoods: in 2017-2018, Jackson Heights and Jamaica; in 2018-2019, Jamaica and Flushing; and in 2019-2020, Flushing and Maspeth/Ridgewood.

As the funding for this program was not renewed by The Scherman Foundation after a 3-year contract, new funding was provided by the Mertz-Gilmore Foundation whose focus on dance oriented ACP to a discipline-based model. In 2021-2022 a new iteration of the program took place now involving a total of 5 art commissions who awarded 3 $10.000 art commissions and 5 $2.000 individual art commissions in the fields of dance and choreography and open to all neighborhoods in Queens.

The DemArt project was built on this model but incorporated different features. First, local organizations shared an open call for art commissioners which in this case had an age restriction. Second, once art commissioners were selected they evaluated the artists applications and selected a total of 3 finalists who were awarded 1.000€ each to develop their project. Then a final project was selected and received a total of 10.000€ in order to be developed. On top of these main changes, the project ran for two years instead of just a few months and incorporated an international component all project participants benefited from by attending meetings and sharing good practices.

The result was a transnational community both local and international which developed three wonderful artworks selected by community members and developed by local artists which strengthened the communities they created for by unveiling unseen features from the spaces and people that inhabited them.

Text by Daniel Valtueña.

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