Libken Summer Academie Nr. 8

The one-week-long, interdisciplinary summer academy in Libken is an invitation to live and work together as artists, detached from familiar surroundings and structures. This is the eighth year that the Summer Academy is taking place in Libken, a former GDR landworkers' residence with a large garden in the Uckermark countryside.

The theme of this year's Summer Academy is Sustainability in the Arts / Political Ecology. What does a sustainable artistic practice look like, what effects does a more sustainable, collective life and action have? The Summer Academy focuses on exchange, reflection, expanding one's own artistic and creative practice/skills, and engaging with new knowledge, influences and encounters.

In times of climate crisis, conflicts and wars, one can be driven to despair, also with regard to the relevance of one's own artistic work. On the other hand, our tim offers the opportunity for change and something new. The rural environment and the collective living and working together in Libken can make exactly that possible: An engagement in calm, concentration, reflection, contact and production. Within the group of participants, we will not only reflect on our view on the environment, but also try to practice a perspective and attitude of reciprocity, of mutual, equal exchange. How do we acquire knowledge, how can we reflect on our working methods, how do we gather and integrate new experiences?

The workshops will be led by Özlem Altın (she/he) and Harry Hachmeister (he/him), and organized and facilitated by Sophia Kesting (she/he) and Jonas Johannes (he/him). We strive for a collective, equal space in which we can learn together and from each other. We will read texts, experiment with clay and other, largely natural materials and discuss our own work and that of the other participants. The Summer Academy ends with a public presentation on September 7, 2024. The extensive grounds and spaces of Libken offer opportunities for a variety of presentation forms.

Collaboration in Libken
Active participation in the organization and implementation of all joint activities and engagement in collaborative processes is the basis of our collective life and work in Libken. Furthermore, we understand the Libken Summer Academy as a moment of respectful and non-discriminatory interaction and clearly position ourselves against any kind of exclusion, racism and Anti-Semitism.

Costs: 600 per person,
Included are: accommodation, material, (vegan-vegetarian) meals.
We are offering two places at a reduced price for people in precarious circumstances. With one scholarship place for free participation, we would like to explicitly encourage people who are BIPoC, queer or affected by other forms of discrimination to apply. If your situation allows it, please choose the full price. By doing so, you also enable workshop participants with less financial means to participate.

More information:

Harry Hachmeister negotiates the themes of his art in interdisciplinary works that range from photography, drawing and painting to ceramics. He often groups the individual works into expansive installations that refer to states of no-longer and not-quite-yet. Transformation processes, provisional and intermediate stages form the starting points for Hachmeister's artistic exploration of different identities, bodies and their attributions. His bodies do not feel bound to their intended purpose but create a distance from normative reality through ambivalence, delicacy and play.
www.harryhachmeister.com

Özlem Altın (she/her) is an artist, mother and somatic practitioner. In her paintings, collages, photographs and artist books, she explores the still body and the inanimate in motion. For her work, Altın draws on a collection of photographs that she has compiled over the years and combines found images with her own photographs to create dense constellations. This complex network of images helps to formulate an all-encompassing mythological narrative about physical existence.
www.ozlemaltin.com

The Summer Academy was initiated and carried out seven times by Nadja Bournonville, Joachim Bartsch and Alexander Gehring. The 8th Summer Academy 2024 is conceived and organized by Sophia Kesting in cooperation with Libken e.V..