WE LIVE HERE 2014: Mapping Spaces

WE LIVE HERE – an initiative of Nicole Beutler, Marijke Hoogenboom and Andrea Božić – is a platform that strives to connect the responsibility of the individual with the creative power of the community. It aims for shared inspiration, enthusiasm and new insights.

WE LIVE HERE is a statement and a working title. As artists and cultural workers we acknowledge the need to reappraise the public and other spaces in which we operate. Through this platform we aim to create a space to meet, think and work together beyond the sphere of projects and productivity-driven timetables. We will create a temporary community of professionals from the performing arts and beyond, offering a space for encounters.

WE LIVE HERE stems from an urge to slow down; an urge to resist the constant demands for presence, movement and response; an urge to find time for thinking together; an urge to make space for what we need and miss; an urge to claim the nuanced complexity of being in the world; an urge felt by engaged practitioners in the Netherlands and beyond.

WE LIVE HERE combines a series of public events with separate working sessions that are open to a limited group of participants. Every year the core program consists of different activities that might include artisitc encounters, exchanges, lectures, excursions to the surrounding of Amsterdam, workshops and many more.

WE LIVE HERE 2014: Mapping Spaces

As in previous years we are inviting professionals active in different fields of the performing- and visual arts to join this temporary community. Opportunities for reflection and experimentation are rare in the current climate of efficiency and market-driven economics, but ever since our first academy in 2011 we have been creating an alternative platform for artistic encounters, providing space and time to exchange, work and think together. Now it’s 2014 and in recent months we have found ourselves, and the independent scene as a whole, strengthened by many political changes that have caused a shift towards official recognition of the independently operating artist by Amsterdam’s political establishment. Partly in response to these ongoing developments, we decided to focus this year’s WE LIVE HERE on mapping the city; connecting places and activities, exploring ways of engaging with each other’s artistic activities and strengthening links between them.

The approximately twenty participants will spend four days together, visiting locations in the city that provide alternative models for living and working together, exchanging models of working in several sessions of HOW DO YOU WORK?, attending performances at Julidans Festival, visiting other arts events and – most important of all – lunching and dining together.