• Raise Your Voice | Call for Participants 

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    Posted: 18 December 2023


    Call for Netherlands-based designers, artists and makers

    Developing self-reflective situated design practices


    Raise Your Voice (RYV) is a 5-month learning and coaching trajectory for Netherlands-based designers, artists and makers who focus on social, economic, political and ecological challenges in their work. The aim is to support them in the development of their professional practice and to stimulate self-reflection.

    The programme consists of: content sessions that stimulate self-reflection and help participants position themselves and their practice; practical sessions that focus on skills needed to set up a professional design practice; an international exchange to the Salone del Mobile in Milan to expand participants’ international network; and individual coaching. The trajectory is concluded with a zine that bundles the participants’ experiences and development to share the results with a broader public.

    Raise Your Voice is organised in collaboration with the alumni department of Design Academy Eindhoven, the Master Institute of Visual Cultures of St. Joost and DutchCulture and kindly supported by Impulsgelden Kunstloc Brabant and Stichting Cultuur Eindhoven.

    With growing (social) inequality, 21st-century colonisation wars, economic crises, record temperatures, and the increasing extinction rate of species, it appears we are in a permanent state of crisis. We need to change the way we do things. With the European Green Deal and the New European Bauhaus project, Europe is looking at culture and the creative industries to contribute to the development of alternative scenarios to find a way out of this mess.
    Raise Your Voice is a learning trajectory for designers working on these complex topics, helping them to develop their voices. During the trajectory, we will discuss the role, if there is any, that design should play in the social, environmental, and economic challenges we face.

    Content Sessions
    The content sessions focus on discourses still marginal in the design field. RYV confronts participants with knowledges, stories, methodologies, and practices that challenge our society’s foundations and are rooted in indisciplinarity, complexity, embodied and indigenous wisdom, decolonising design, critical pedagogy practices in design, and new materialism. These sessions are supported by references prepared by the participants upfront and then discussed together, accompanied by a workshop. In this way, the sessions become a collection of notions that participants can decide to include in their practice, questioning their position through the provided inputs. The four content sessions are briefly described below.

    Practical sessions
    In four practical sessions, we will work on skills crucial for setting up a professional practice. In these three- hour sessions, participants work and reflect on their practice and will receive feedback from Baltan and other organisations.

    Individual coaching
    While content and practical sessions address the whole group, each participant can request up to 4 hours of individual coaching in the timeline of the trajectory.

    International exchange
    The group will go to the Salone del Mobile in Milan. There will be studio visits, and we will meet organisations from the Baltan network, such as ADI Design Museum and MEET Milan. This trip is also an opportunity for the participants to engage for a longer time with each other and each other’s work, which will reinforce the peer-learning.
    Apply

    We are looking for designers, artists and makers with a practice based in the Netherlands who have environmental, social, cultural and political factors at the core of their practice or have the ambition to focus on these topics. We will select 15 participants to join the trajectory. We encourage recent graduates to apply.

    Costs for participation are €350 ex VAT. This is an all-in fee, including participation in content and practical sessions, coaching, travel and accommodation for joining the international exchange to the Salone del Mobile in MIlan.

    If you want to participate but do not have the financial means to pay the fee, please include this in your motivation letter.

    Deadline for application: January 31st, 23:59 CET
    Notification of selection: Beginning of March

    Please send your application to Sarie Hermens via an email to sarie@baltanlaboratories.org

    To include in the application (free format):
    • Motivation to participate and introduction of who you are
    • Current project(s) you are working on
    • (optional) portfolio + link to your website / socials

    PROGRAMME OVERVIEW
    Please note: All of the gatherings will take place at Baltan Laboratories in Eindhoven and are meant to be evening events. Dates might be subject to change.

    → KICK-OFF GATHERING / MAR 14
    The program starts with a kick-off gathering. This will be the occasion for the participating designers to get to know each other and the coaches. Together, we will do exercises that will help the designers voice their current ideals and beliefs. During this first gathering we will work on an intersubjective glossary that redefines concepts with new meanings that suit the group’s desired reality.

    → CONTENT SESSION #1: MYTHS AND STORIES / MAR 21
    Stories are fundamental for the way we understand ourselves and the world around us. Could we together create a story that steers us towards a more loving and caring relationship with the planet and all its inhabitants? We will talk about myths and stories. Through a series of storytelling tools, we bring ecological issues into the narrative conflict of a storyline, getting to know the potential and the impact that a story can have on our lives and the Earth.

    → PRACTICAL SESSION #1: PROJECT PROPOSAL / MAR 28
    For the first of the practical sessions, we start by working on a project proposal. Participants will prepare one beforehand, and we will collectively discuss those during the session. Baltan presents examples of successful project proposals and descriptions, from our practice and others. There will be time for the participants to work on their project proposals.

    → PRACTICAL SESSION #2: BUDGET / APR 11
    Participants make a budget based on the project proposal discussed in the first practical session. Collectively we will discuss those and give feedback. Baltan will share guidelines and tools that help set up a budget - such as the Fair Practice Code and various guidelines for deciding on a fitting fee. There will be time for the participants to work on their financial plans, with support from Baltan.

    → INTERNATIONAL EXCHANGE AT SALONE DEL MOBILE IN MILAN / 17-20 APRIL

    → CONTENT SESSION #2: EMBODIMENT / MAY 2
    What if we rely more on our bodies to sense the complexity of the world? Can intuition, emotion and feeling help us to take responsibility and change our behaviour? Through a series of performative exercises we explore body, voice and rhythm as tools for research and experimentation.

    → CONTENT SESSION #3: PLURIVERSE / MAY 23
    How can we create in a way that allows different worldviews and knowledge systems to co-exist? Can non-Western knowledge systems be leading in redefining our relationships with each other, other species and the planet? We will start from Arturo Escobar’s Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the making of Worlds.

    → PRACTICAL SESSION #3: LOCAL & INTERNATIONAL OPPORTUNITIES / MAY 30
    In this session, Dutch Culture will present various international financing opportunities and residency spots. Dutch Culture is the network and knowledge organisation for international cultural cooperation. They support the Dutch cultural and creative sector with information, advice and training. We will also present opportunities in Noord Brabant.

    → CONTENT SESSION #4: MATTER MATTERS / JUN 6
    A focus on the material aspect of making. We are, as quantum physics, indigenous knowledge and complexity theory tell us, radically connected to everything that exists. Everything is made of the same matter, a temporary configuration of atoms being formed and transformed. Can we design for this temporality?

    → PRACTICAL SESSION #4: ARTIST STATEMENT AND POSITIONING / JUN 13
    As a final exercise, participants formulate an artist statement. They will present their positioning to the group (free format) and later in the zine.

    → ZINE PUBLICATION / JUL 31
    We conclude RYV with the publication of a zine. The zine will contain the developments and reflections of the participants, short essays by invited writers reflecting on the programme, and a glossary with concepts, notions and references that were part of the RYV curriculum. The zine will be published both online and in print.

    About Baltan Laboratories
    Baltan Laboratories is a cultural lab based in Eindhoven. Baltan initiates and supports art and design projects that focus on societal issues in an imaginative, collaborative and indisciplinary manner. Through her program, Baltan aims at creating space(s) for rehearsing change: hopeful and critical spaces, spaces that empower and emancipate, and inspire us to act.

    Raise Your Voice is kindly supported by Impulsgelden Kunstloc Brabant and Stichting Cultuur Eindhoven.

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