Kulturverket is a municipal organisation that employs professional artists and educators in arts- and culture-based projects. The organisation has, through several funded projects developed a working model labelled: Kids tell the pro’s what to do. Accordingly, the children are seen and valued as creators, who take part in visualising and generating ideas guided by the grownups in collaboration. Such an approach is closely connected with organisational structures, collegial atmosphere, didactic tools, and relational situations where arts becoming is taking place. Kulturverket is since fall 2020 a part of the municipal arts school in Umeå. Organisational negotiations are currently taking place, regarding how Kulturverket’s border-crossing activities could be adapted to the of structures of the arts school. In this paper we would like to illuminate turn the “dilemma” around and ask: What can the organisation model of Kulturverket contribute with, when it comes to open up for engaged, border-crossing, co-operative and multi-artistic activities? What possibilities and challenges shows themselves when aspects of time, space, gaps, and competence are seen as fluid? The example we want to use to fulfil the aim of the study: to illuminate how, and on what levels organisational norms and traditional structures are challenged, and what possibilities and new challenges 2 that occur when going beyond the Anthropocene based structure of a culture school, is a Kulturverket project called Sammankonst (commingtogetherart). This project includes disabled adults, and folk-high school students who contribute with ideas, life stories, and arts abilities and tellKulturverket’s educators and artists what to do. For three years, they collaboratively create and perform a musical. To be able to grasp the aspects of common and individual becoming within the project how that is related to aspects of organisation, we created a research entaglement based on post-human theory. This implies that nature and culture are seen as intertwined, agential and entangled, which encourages experimental approaches. Hence, situations seen as webs of relations were created, including the actors disabled humans, musical artist students, educators, artists, researchers, and varied digital communication tools. Inspired by internet-related ethnography observations, video recordings, collaborative writing, qualitative surveys and group interviews produced a material for analysis. Actor-network theory was applied aiming to describe how the constantly performed intra-active networks were constituted, as well as how the actors influenced each other. The results identify significant actors and trajectories in Sammankonst, that exemplifies intra-actions that challenge anthropocentric organisational structures of municipal arts schools.
2022.
Cutting Edge Kulturskole 2022, Online via Kristiansand, Norway, February 16-18, 2022