Project 'They: Live - Student lives revealed through context-based art practices' aims to engage the student population to participate in the production of contemporary art by using the tools of community archiving and Artist in Residencies on campuses. Contemporary art practices have a large collaborative and participatory potential in revealing a specific view of history and life of communities, as well as of the needs of their members.

 

The lack of trans-national perception of student lives on trans-generational level imposes a need for methodological implementation of a strategy for collecting, digitizing and archiving, digital presentation of student intangible cultural heritage.  Furthermore, it calls for an inter-disciplinary interpretation and implementation of participative and context-based art practices which have an important role as one of the most effective approaches to sustainable audience development, given the decline in the audience aged 18-25 (student population among them) in participation and creation of cultural events. The need for and benefits from the European cooperation are reflected in the fact that student lives and their activities represent a live reservoir of innovative ideas and relationships, a source through which an evolutionary development of intellectual heritage can be followed and a completely new view of the European culture and its future development can be established.

 

Our main goal is to create an effective interdisciplinary methodology which involves digital archives as a resource for the context-based and participatory art practices. The outcomes of our project will serve as guidelines for managers of cultural institutions and art galleries, curators and artists for the further improvement of innovative approaches to the development of young audiences.

 

The experience and diversity of the arts organizations who are project partners, together with their commitment and huge inspirational drive to the topic of the project, are fundamental to ensuring that the results are applicable to a broad range of other organizations who aims to develop their audiences.

 

The consortium of partners consists of Project leader Students’ City Cultural Center (SCCC) from Belgrade, Serbia (Public Institution)and four project partner organizations: Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA) from Cetinje, Montenegro (NGO); Academy of Applied Arts from Rijeka, (APURI), Croatia (Public University); Faculty of Audiovisual Communication at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos (URJC) Madrid, Spain (Public University) and International Centre For Archival Research ICARUS Croatia (NGO part of the international network) and two affiliated partners: Institute for Art in Context, Universitat der Kunste (UDK), Germany (Public University) and Center for Public History (CPH), Belgrade, Serbia (NGO).

 

 

Photo courtesy of: Dragica Krgović, Aleksa Vitorović, Jana Gligorijević