Four
days workshop, Creative Vision Workshop running from
May 18 – 21, 2016
and oragnised under BC1: Youth of Nigeria as Artists of
the Future.
Designed and
facilitated by multidisciplinary artist and scholar Wilfred Ukpong in
collaboration with Social Sculpture Research Unit Oxford, U.K, four Participants will be selected from
Abuja/Northern Nigeria, four from Lagos/Western Nigeria and four from the Niger-Delta/Southern Nigeria axis.
The workshop is an artistic workshop
that focuses on developing cross-sector creative strategies that enable young
artists and creative practitioners in Nigeria to become ‘agents of social and
environmental consciousness and change’. This phrase is central to the field of
socially engaged art practice and contemporary social sculpture.
Nigerian born and Oxford-based
multidisciplinary social practice artist Wilfred Ukpong engages the field of
socially engaged art practice (social practice art) that explores
trans-disciplinary creativity and vision with a social focus. Ukpong also
engages the field of contemporary social sculptures focus on the need and
potential for human beings to recognize an expanded form of social art that
includes shaping new social forms and structures as artworks. And sees the real
‘capital’ of society, as the internationally acclaimed late German artist
Joseph Beuys did, as the ‘social capital’ of an expanded understanding of art.
Ukpongs project over the past five years in the
Niger Delta – through supports from the Prince Claus Fund Amsterdam and Social
Sculpture Research Unit Oxford – has been focus on working with over one
hundred underserved local community youths in a series of empowerment and
conflict resolution projects through artistic workshop involving performance,
installations, photography and filmmaking initiatives.
The singular focus of this current project is
‘youth’ (between 18 and 29 years) who are artists and other types of creative
practitioners, who have a certain amount of language and skill in some form of
artistic practice. Working with this more specific focus, the seven days
workshop - involving twelve selected participants and six cultural managers –
will aim at exploring ways of inspiring and enabling new understandings and
forms of social-environmental artistic practice that can also have a social
enterprise focus and prospect.
In a context like Nigeria, and by geo-cultural
extension Africa, where art either means individual creativity or relates to
traditional forms of group activity, Ukpong is interested in developing a new
contemporary form of artistic practice in the margins of two worlds – between a
more westernized formal form of individualistic expression and traditional
forms of trans-disciplinary and cross-cultural practices with strong social and
ethical inclusion.
The core aim of his workshop project is to
facilitate ways that emphasize creative actions that support active engagement
in the shaping of individual life and the society. It will do this by engaging
a set of creative methods and strategies that supports individual participants
to become “agents of change” while contributing their potentials and capacities
for imaginative thought and creativity towards sustainable and humane forms of
development.
Aims:
The aims of this workshop project is to enable
creative individuals and artist participants to:
– Contribute to youth empowerment and
development in Nigeria by creating opportunities and platforms for creative
engagement such that can reduce restiveness in the country, and most especially
in the Niger-Delta region
– Deepen and expand their understanding of
their social potential and possibilities to become agents of change, social
artists as well as social and creative entrepreneurs while contributing to the
socio-economic development of Nigeria.
– Become more aware and appreciative of how
others can contribute to this agency through knowledge exchange and
cross-sector dialogues that can facilitate diversity for a broader cultural
atmosphere;
– Become more aware of the capacities and
contributions that can be made by professionals from different sectors and
disciplinary backgrounds to an expanded form of social art practice and
creative innovation;
– Become more conscious of their personal
potential to contribute to the shaping of a more humane and ecologically viable
society while directly impacting on the socio-economic development of Nigeria.
An exhibition presenting the outcome of this
workshop will be shown in Lagos, Oxford, and Paris, and will feature artistic
expressions and ‘visual maps’ of participants’ dreams, ideas, and visions. This
project will serve as a platform to select original participants for Ukpong’s
Blazing Century project while establishing an on-going network from within the
group of cultural managers as well as facilitating support through future
collaborative initiatives with the participants.
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