The Creative Residency for Sustainability has Started!
Together with our partners, we have just launched the Creative Cross-Innovation for Sustainability Pilot Project. During a seven week artistic residency period, visual artist Pilar de Burgos will work at the Boden Business Park premises in Norrbotten, Sweden. The aim of the Creative Residency for Sustainability is to integrate artistic practice into the regular everyday setting of the Business Park, and generate new dialogues and encounters around the topic of sustainability through artistic means. We are delighted to introduce you to the creative residency collaborators: the artist, the host company and the intermediary!
Meet the artist: Pilar de Burgos
Pilar de Burgos works with several techniques and materials in different fields like sculpture, installation and performance, working for temporary exhibitions as well as public art.
“This project interests me, because right now the industry in the north of Sweden is growing on a very large scale, and as a consequence, society will change.
I consider that culture has to play an important role parallel to this development and this project could create bridges between technological development and culture,” says Pilar, elaborating her interest in the collaboration.
Meet the residency host company: Boden Business Park
Boden Business Park is northern Sweden’s biggest place of opportunity. A meeting place for people with strong ideas. It is also the location and organisation for the municipality’s business development. The Boden Business Park area is constantly growing with office space, conference facilities, student accommodation, hotels, restaurants and gyms.
“In times of change, it is important to have meeting places where culture can act as a bridge between people with different backgrounds,” says Thomas Fägerman, CEO at Boden Business Park.
Meet the intermediary: Havremagasinet länskonsthall Boden
For Havremagasinet, contemporary art is a critical, remarkable, and unique language for addressing current global topics, often with strong links to our specific context in Norrbotten and the Barents region. The pilot is one practical experiment to create meaningful encounters with sustainability. In this process, Havremagasinet serves as an intermediary, supporting the collaboration between the artist and the host company. ”We are happy to be part of this experiment and want to learn more about the future possibilities of an art institution facilitating forward artful situations for exchange and collaborations among different fields, disciplines, and ways of working”, says Director Mariangela Mendez Prencke.
Stina Mattsson from Boden Business Park and Pilar de Burgos
About the Creative Cross-Innovations for Sustainability project
The project “Creative Cross-Innovations for Sustainability” is set to support the emergence of creative cross-innovations where professionals from the arts, culture and creative fields cross over to other sectors of society in new forms of collaborations. The project is implemented by the lead partner the Northern Dimension Partnership on Culture and supported by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland and the Ministry of Education and Culture of Finland.
As part of the project activities, the NDPC is carrying out a creative cross-innovation method pilot project. Under this development initiative, artistic residencies are reshaped in the context of an organisation outside the culture and creative sector (CCS) for cross-sectoral exchange. For a period of seven weeks, an artist will carry out an artistic residency in a non-CCS organisation to explore topics of sustainability through artistic practice. The aim is to create new dialogues between the arts and other sectors of society, and to approach sustainability in exploratory ways.
The NDPC, in collaboration with project partners Havremagasinet (Sweden), Tromsø Art Academy (Norway) and BusinessOulu (Finland), develops the method, prepares a tool for evaluating the value created, and shares the outcomes in a toolkit format for interested stakeholders. Later in 2023, the project will gather diverse audiences to engage with the outcomes of the artistic residency, and share the learnings during project events in Boden, Tromssa, Oulu and online.
Read more about the project.
