Describe your collaborative partnership

Conceptual performance artist Elin Wikström worked with the teachers in a secondary school in Uddevalla Municipality in Sweden during 8 months. The objective of this work was helping teachers to guide youth with low motivation back to completing primary education eventually leading to further studies or future employment. Since traditional methods had backfired, mainly due to stiffening demands of conformity, various unconventional approaches such as alternative pedagogies were attempted. The activities included:

• Socratic conversations
• Photography on the theme of Visibility/ Invisibility
• Project on the theme “Where is the border between the human being and his/her performance?”
• Experimental artistic methods

The project allowed new ideas to be born and problems to be revealed, at the same time as it trained the teachers to face uncertainty and the unknown.

Provide evidence of your success

The project revealed the need of alternative pedagogical perspectives and tools at school that challenge the role of teachers to better face failure. “We are used to keep things under control, but now we’re learning to let go and be more relaxed in the face of things deemed ‘wrong’ and adopt a more playful attitude towards the learning process. The right to be wrong can be very liberating.“ The teachers and the artist created a new mental framework that includes unexpected things like failure. It helps them to realise the extent to which success at school is based upon judgement, competition, and conformity. The new perspective on their work as teachers also includes the importance of creating a balance between fixed objectives and chance. This is where the artist’s perspective became very relevant and crucial; artistic creativity is often regarded as a value in itself, and thus it can offer a sense of freedom from utility thinking. The project also strengthened staff cohesion.

Why is your collaboration special and not a typical client-customer relationship?

The project has been a collaboration where both the artist and the teachers engaged on equal terms. The artist was invited to take part in the processes and challenges that the teachers were confronted with in an open and sincere way. The teachers and the artist did "their" project in an autonomous way – it is not the artist’s project, and it’s not the teachers’. The process not only developed the teachers and their work place; the artist had the chance to reach a group of people in a unique environment, reinforcing her methods as a conceptual performance artist. Another special characteristic of this project, not often found in client-customer relationships is that this project had no goal at the beginning. This is also the strength of the collaboration: the goal became apparent during the course of the project. By not defining and focusing on a goal, the partners could entirely focus on the processes that are awakened by engaging in artistic work. This allows new skills to be born.

Websites

• Studio / Agency: (ELIN WIKSTRÖM conceptual performance artist)
• Client: gymnasiet.uddevalla.se