MoKS - Evelyn and John Grzinich Workshop Mon/Tues 13/14 May

Evelyn Müürsepp- Grzinich is visual artist and cultural coordinator, based in Southeast Estonia.  After working at artist-in- residencies in Iceland and Finland, she co-initiated artist-in residence program herself in Southeast Estonia (now known as MoKS- Center for Arts and Social practice). While coordinating activities and finding financial and mental means for running artist-in-residence center, she also has maintained her practice as a visual artist. This ongoing life-university has offered her opportunity to learn from artists from all over the world and develop fruitful collaborations in various media.  Her main interest and ongoing work is with drawing where she explores how the repetitive movement of a pen/pencil affects the body and its motion. This surface-body-surface feedback is a generative method to shift from abstraction to figural imagery.

John Grzinich has worked since the early 1990s as an artist and cultural coordinator with various practices combining sound, image, site, and collaborative social structures. His interest and work with sound combines such divergent methods as field recording, kinetic sculpture, electro-acoustic composition, performance, spatial perception and acoustics, filmmaking, group workshops and exercises in listening. His compositions have been published on international labels such as: SIRR, Staalplaat, Erewhon, Intransitive, Cut, Elevator Bath, CMR, Orogenetics, Mystery Sea, Invisible Birds and others. 2012 saw the DVD release of "Two Films" on and/OAR. He lives in Estonia and works as a program coordinator for MoKS, a non-profit artist-run center.

website: http://maaheli.ee

Their collaborative workshop will take place on Monday and Tuesday 13/14 May in Mrua artist/to/artist

SERDE workshops Wed/Thurs 15/16th May

FOLK PHARMACY (guided tours in nature)

Folk Pharmacy - an artistic interpretation of the use of indoor and wild plants as food and folk medicine. In this project, artists re-introduce to the audience the tradition of plant-foraging, and invite them to turn these gifts of nature and their knowledge of them into a useful source of energy.

Folk Pharmacy is SERDE's outcome from the expedition in Kurzeme held in June 2010, and  is inspired by projects and people around Herbologies/Foraging Network.

http://www.herbologies-foraging.net

SERDE

Atmodas street 9, Aizpute, LV-3456

smg.serde@gmail.com

www.serde.lv

www.facebook.com/smgSERDE

Moonshine

The moonshine workshop is an artistic interpretation about making strong drink at home.

Although the tradition of making moonshine is wrapped in secrecy, research has been done for several years to document the making of moonshine at home. Whether it is called kandža or one of the other names for it—ļerga, dzimtenīte, samogonka, ļurcis or brendiņš, its production at home is cultural and historical and belongs to the non-material cultural inheritance of the world.

Every skill which makes it possible to use available resources is of worth in our modern circumstances. For example, it is useful to know how to make your own spirits, which can be used to make herbal infusions for drinking or for external use.

We invite you to consider this tradition from a different point of view, not moralizing about the making of moonshine as a social evil, but as a way to discover the inexhaustible ingenuity of people to meet their needs in circumstances where resources are limited!


Authors:
Interdisciplinary Art Group SERDE
Signe Pucena, Uģis Pucens

www.serde.lv

www.facebook.com/smgSERDE

Signe Pucena is artist and researcher of traditional culture and culture projects manager. Uģis Pucens – artist, restaurateur and producer of art and culture symposiums, festivals and exhibitions.
Signe and Uģis are co-founders of the interdisciplinary art group SERDE, which seeks to develop the regional and international collaboration between different culture fields, organizations and professionals.
In 2002 Signe and Uģis established The Residency and Workshop Centre SERDE in Aizpute. SERDE's main activities involve exchange between culture, science and education fields, including the hosting of residencies, seminars, lectures, presentations etc.
Since 2005 SERDE organizes various expeditions and fieldwork researches in the Latvian countryside, learning about the traditional cultural forms still existing in the contemporary age. Their creative and innovative approach to cultural heritage work with SERDE was recognised with the Latvian Folklore Grand Prize in 2007.

Background to The Future is Domestic!

“The Future is Domestic!”

Clare County Council and Outrider Artists propose to host an 8 day Episode: A workshop-led exploration of the theme “The Future is Domestic!” with artists from MoKs (EE), SERDE (Lv), Outrider Artists, Clare, and others in a rural domestic setting in Ennistymon, Co.Clare.

Outrider Artists  is a collaborative practice involving a core group of artists based in rural North Clare, supported  by the County Arts Office. They have a history of conflation of domestic & public spaces,  situating that impulse in a historical and activist trajectory. They now wish to research and develop this further through collaboration with previously established European partners in creating new innovative art.

Their work takes the form of Episodes, social choreographies that merge domestic & public space. Outrider Episodes are organised around transnational movement & immaterial exchange with Liquid (Estonia), Ian Tully, (Australia), Dr Igor Calzada, (Basque Country). They have had residencies and participated at international presentations in Estonia and in seminar workshops with SERDE & MoKS in Lithuania.

Their experience of hosting residencies/workshops/collaborations with artists from abroad has presented a mirror to their own art practice: naming and highlighting their strengths, boosting their confidence to make art:, stimulating new ideas and resurrecting old ideas for making work. It has also offered them exhibitions abroad,  developed collaborations with transnationally talented artists and pitched them into a position to help them sustain their rural art practice, a long standing area of interest with Clare County Arts Office.

Outrider Artists now wish to continue that positive creative empowerment through collaborating with Moks and SERDE. They have chosen shared work-shops & public presentations as the formats to explore the theme & acquire new artistic skills through the process of making. 

The unique creative team of Evelyn Muursepp and John Grzinich, from MoKs, both internationally recognized artists in their individual fields of drawing & sound have constructed a workshop that also has a level of social consciousness to be explored in its realization.

SERDE  are offering two workshops; gathering herbs and making vodka. In a country where alcohol abuse is rampant, this workshop should provoke intense discourse. Techniques of distillery and fermentation are new to Outrider artists and welcome as new methodologies for making & creating. Herb gathering has obvious rural connotations.

Outrider Artists, Moks and SERDE will give public presentations at the beginning & at the end of the week, in the Courthouse Gallery, Ennistymon, to a public audience, so to widen the contact opportunities with other members of the locality.

All partners recognize that this proposal offers future opportunities to expand individual arts practices as well as potential for future international collaborations.

Schedule of events for The Future is Domestic!

Schedule of events for “The Future is Domestic!” Gathering

In Mrua/artist-to-artist Studios, Monreal North, Ennistymon, County Clare.  MAY 10-20

Friday 10th: Arrival of artists from Estonia and Latvia

Welcoming dinner party with participants of The Future is Domestic!

Saturday 11th:  Settle in day for MoKS and Serde.

Sunday 12 th:

 11-1pm Walking the land with next-door neighbour Tom Barry who is an organic farmer and a local historian rich with the stories and myths of the place of Monreal North, the starry bog.

3-5pm: Sunday: Public presentation by Outrider Artists, MoKS and SERDE in the Courthouse Gallery, Ennistymon.

Monday 13th: Evelyn and John at MoKS sound and drawing  Workshop

9.30 16 artists meet up in Mrua

10-1pm practical workshop

1-2 lunch is served

2-4 collaborative and creative response time

4-4.15 tea time

4.15 to 5 discourse opportunity

Tuesday 14^th: continuation of Evelyn and Johns workshop

Wednesday 15^th /Thursday 16th  SERDE vodka and herbal workshop with same timetable as Monday approximately.

Friday 17th: Opportunity for collaborations and visiting studios

Saturday 18th: 3pm-5pm: Feedback and Futures: public presentation of findings, discussions about the weeks’ event in the Courthouse gallery, (visual presentation and documentation of weeks events to a public audience presented by invited participants).

Dinner- POT LUCK for all  who participated in the week.

Sunday 19th: Tour of County Clare cultural sites or whatever Serde and Moks artists wish to do.

Monday 20th: Bring artists to airport.