Description
Art Reactor is a community-based artistic project. It incorporated artistic and cultural content in a project dealing with community and sustainability topics, in collaboration with local and national art institutions. The aim was to promote local art and cultural life and as well sustainable practices for a more attractive community image.1) ‘The Art Party’ (a DFT artistic project) toured seven islands throughout Denmark and launched a new project about community art and sustainability: “the Art Reactor”. 2) There were seven residencies on different Danish islands. We spent a few days on each island and, with the local schools and volunteers, collected waste from local households and separated the compostable waste (such as food scraps) from the non-degradable. 3) In collaboration with local artists, museums, and art associations, we arranged workshops for young people (8–18 years old, depending on the island) and together turned the rubbish into works of art. A collective parade and performance led to transforming degradable waste into a natural reactor (underground), or better, into an art reactor. The non-recyclable artworks are currently stored in the local art museum or institution in a persistent time capsule as a warning for future generations, to be opened and revealed in 2030. 5) City partnerships: We also collected waste at the relevant municipality’s town hall. We did it partly to create visibility around our arrival and in part to emphasise that here too there is something that must be thrown away, something that must be recycled, and something that we must collectively transform into something new. We contacted our future local partners by emails and following calls. At the time of planning the project, we already had a good reference list of activities with Kunstpartiet/Art Party that we could demonstrate to the new partners. info@detflyvendeteater.dkdid you face any obstacles? Obviously there was the obstacle of COVID restrictions; we kept the physical events in open air or in a limited number, with frequent (daily) testing that was anyway a standard requirement in Denmark for schools and institutions we worked with (school activities, museums and most of the workplaces were held open in that period with daily testing every morning upon entry). Another challenge was to create a schedule that is well-organised but flexible enough to allow eventual alterations in case, for example, isolation (fortunately, we didn’t have such a case). Interestingly, although we thought we may have difficulty finding partners in that exceptional period, the contrary was true: the local partners were happy to have some cultural and social events around and expressed a clear need for them.
Challenge they identifed
Our particular interest was in raising awareness about the challenges of waste management in isolated and confined environments, such as islands, and promoting good recycling and waste reduction practises. Need to establish connections between diverse individuals within the community (artists, students, politicians, and others) Need to create new audiences for DFT on a national level.
How they assess the results?
In keeping with the project’s original concept, we concentrated on groups and small communities. Also, the pandemic situation motivated us to hold events with a safe, limited number of attendees. We were able to attract a sizeable audience of 22,000 people by simply bringing the activities outside and into the open air in the Covid period in Denmark. This was a new successful collaboration for 77% of the total collaborating institutions (30 from the official 39 partners), and DFT obtained a nationwide future partnership network. After finishing the tour, we asked for feedback from all participating schools and institutions and prepared a detailed report concerning financial balance, audience statistics, promotion, and collaborations, as well as future follow-up ideas, that we shared with all sponsors and participating institutions. We represented the projects on more national sustainability platforms. As a result, in 2024, we plan to launch a new regional project about community engagement and sustainability in South Denmark that will be built upon the experiences of the Art Reactor, and it will experiment the topic of art as a form of renewable energy.
Tools
Reserach & Policy- As part of the preparation and during the project, we participated in meetings about sustainability at the national level, e.g., in the national meeting Future Sustainability in Danish Performing Arts and in Aarhus, organised by Christian Gade Bjerrum, the founder of Sustainable Performing Arts NU and also the figurehead for the Art Reactor project. During the project, we visited the Danish Parliament and collected objects and messages from its members, which are held at present in the time capsule in Copenhagen Contemporary. The younger generations were our target audience. We reached out to them through educational institutions, and our workshops had to be organised and adapted to fit their school schedules – specially the 10- to 16-year-olds. \we adapted the content of the workshops to the different age groups’ level of readiness and our team’s experience with youth education. Our interventions and events were open to everyone in the community. In the frame of the project, we created an experimental mini-series, “Don Chri-Hot,” that threads the environmental issues of our days with an artistic aspect.
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