Artists for Artists: Mentorship through Care, Solidarity, and Reciprocity
a conversation between Stefanos Tsivopoulos and Chrisoula Lionis with Ayesha Singh, Raúl Hott, and Beatrice Rubio-Gabriel
Stefanos: Educational institutions have a significant role in teaching the thousands of artists that graduate each year. There is real value in that. However, with Artists for Artists, we’re trying to do things differently. AfA’s pedagogical format reflects the desire to create a safe environment that inspires trust and the freedom to share whatever early-career artists want to develop. That might be a project, an idea, a question about their work, feedback on a proposal, or what they might feel are shortcomings in their practice. Most importantly, we encourage participants to involve their paths in their artistic processes by sharing with peers and mentors information about the environment and the conditions in which they work and the structural and even emotional challenges they face.
Artists for Artists, in many ways, is the exact opposite of established pedagogical programs. It differs fundamentally from institutional structures because our objective is not to fulfill a curriculum, give a grade, or check absences. Most importantly, we’re not looking to monetize education. Our ambition is that Artists for Artists remain a non-institutional, non-normative, non-hierarchical space. AfA is an open space, and care and solidarity are at its center. This hopefully inspires artists to be who they aspire to be.
With this in mind, what has your experience been working in an academic environment, for a public institution, and developing AfA simultaneously? Are there any practical conclusions to draw from the distinction between a non-hierarchical, decentralized, hands-on platform and a more traditionally organized educational institution? How might public institutions benefit from an independent space like AfA and vice versa?
Chrisoula: This is an important line of questioning, and it became particularly acute when we developed the second edition, “Institutional Collapse.” The university is now an increasingly contested space full of contradictions and tensions. In my experience, the growing neoliberal drive in universities has meant that a new generation of researchers face pronounced forms of precarity, and their experience is marked by instability and disenchantment (I recommend Sara Ahmed’s book Complaint! for more on this).
This has, on the one hand, created an extremely competitive industry, but it has also cultivated a suspicion of the institution and a growing body of people working simultaneously inside and outside the academy. The critique that emerges from this insider/outsider position is at the forefront of important work on activism and the academy, for example that of Remi Joseph-Salisbury and Laura Connelly.
In terms of art practice, at its best, an insider/outsider position can open up access to new networks, legal protections through laws around academic freedom, and alternative pathways to funding. However, I would stress that while mutual benefits are certainly possible, I believe that independent platforms like AfA must be very careful to maintain their agility and independence from the demands of funders and resist the institutional co-optation of their cultural capital.
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