The first part of the Making it program has been a transformative journey characterized by various stages of development. We witnessed the gradual construction of a foundation of responsibility and care for individuals and collective work through various encounters, workshops, lectures and discussions.
At the beginning of the week, we mentioned this beach near Libertas, where we held our meetings, where it takes courage somehow to take the plunge. If we had to describe the workshop experience with an image, we think back to the closing evening of the week: all of us together on the beach when we had already taken the plunge.
The starting point of the program was the concept of being an artist and how to consider growth as a process within impossibilities where comfort can become an enemy.
How to be positioned, how to expose oneself, how to have a voice, the responsibility to be a vehicle for someone else. It means also to be able to see a failure as a blossoming of potentials.
We are constantly here to discipline ourselves. How do we love? How do we treat materials? And the people?
The process of the program was also focused on the idea of itinerary adjustments: everyone presented a project proposal that evolved with the passing of the days and a letter they wrote to themselves in ten years.
All these improvements and changes of perspective were enriched through the dialogues with mentor Jaša, co-mentor Laura Rositani and the incredible guests who presented different angles through their own experiences. Tjaša Pureber, as activist, gave us all a vision on how to be brave enough to take a position and have a voice through a collective fight in order to help the most vulnerable and abused. How art can have a role in that and how every gesture can become political?
Confusion as a tool that leads you to a process was one of the topics Arthur Duff tackled when he presented his work. He raised awareness on the idea of community as a support system and on the idea of creating your own existential room that requires to be defined through self-awareness and individual processes.
Michele Drascek added a further reflection for the participants on the concept of archive: archive as an obsession, as a work and as an artwork. Archive as a living creature not only as collecting materials and cataloguing.
Concerning European funds and opportunities for the further development of young artists and workers in culture, Sabina Briški from Motovila presented a spectrum on how to support your work and research through international EU grants and opportunities.
The writer Noah Charney involved the participants in a beautiful exercise on memory and an imaginary location in your mind where you can store mnemonic images, a “memory Palace”. The closing lecture was held by Vuk Ćosić who stressed the importance of having good allies, communicating and keeping the tempo inviting the artists to feel the urge to keep the drum going.
One of the tasks we asked the participants to accomplish at the very beginning of the program was to take care of the closing moment on Saturday: they were invited to find their own public, to plan an event taking care of cooking and coordinating among themselves. This was deeply exemplifying of the steps the whole group took through the week managing to collect ideas, plan some activities and presenting them in a beautifully thought way.
The first phase of the Making It program in Koper was structured to involve the artists at various levels of experience. It fostered a week-long, immersive environment where participants engaged in constant dialogue and collaboration. This shared journey cultivated strong bonds and a supportive network. The program offered a comprehensive interdisciplinary curriculum, covering topics such as artistic production, writing, activism, fundraising, and archiving. It allowed the elaboration, discussion, and development of project proposals that, in a short time, acquired form and structure to then move on to the real and concrete phase of presentation within an exhibition project in Berlin in November.
