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2024, 2025
Tags: art, design, education, international,
Art School Maa is an alternative art school on the island Suomenlinna off the coast of the Finnish capital Helsinki. In 2024 Maa (Finnish for "soil" and "land") invited me to organise a week-long Good Praxis workshop for the opening of their academic year. As a result of this workshop and its underlying pedagogy of radical imagination, mutual aid and collective joy, Maa rector H. Ouramo has now invited me to collaborate on their new four-year research and development project titled “Future Art School - for the development of a diverse cultural field and to ensure the continuity of Art School Maa in 2025-2028” funded by the Kone Foundation.
About Maa
Maa has a 38-year history as alternative, self-organised education in Finland. Located in Suomenlinna, Maa is well-established and its three-year full-time contemporary artist programme prepares artists for the profession. Maa has a multidisciplinary, critical and broad focus. The school's education emphasises the importance of collectivity and cooperation in artistic work, the agency of the individual in society and the importance of art in an era of crises and injustices. The school acts as a throughway to various current and new forms of expression in contemporary art. Its curriculum includes painting, installation art, photography, media art, performance, sound art, community art and site-specific art, and its approach to all mediums is critical and context-based. The school's versatility is reflected in the graduates' broad expertise and in the diversity of artistic concepts. Maa has a significant role as a school that prepares students for both higher education and the realities of the artist’s profession.
Art School Maa is also a community of artists. There are over 50 teachers and lecturers per year, almost all of whom are self-employed freelancers. Maa contributes to the fragmented livelihood of teaching artists. Teaching artists gain teaching experience, which often leads to employment at other art schools. The members and the board of the association are also active artists in the art field, seeking new structures for teaching and artistic work that are based on community. In addition to the school, the association also maintains an exhibition space, Maa-tila, in Sörnäinen, Helsinki, with an independent programme and around 15 artists and a student group participating in its programme annually.
About Future Art School
Future Art School creates a new art organisational model that trains artists for the art field of the future. The project also ensures the continuity of Art School Maa's operations for four years and creates public, accessible and constructive discussion about the meaning of art education and the art field. The four-year duration of the project arises from the desire and need to develop the community's activities long-term, deliberately and with economic, social and environmental sustainability. Sustainability is a structural need for the association (in relation to its 3-4 year education programme) and in light of the current government's cuts to art and education. The aim is to make changes to the organisation through the community's own expertise and through maintaining the network of art organisations that Maa is already a part of.
It is crucial that we resist public-sector cuts by supporting collaboration and cooperationin the arts through holding onto all the knowledge that already exists and that can be developed and used to define the future of the arts and its principles. These are skills and knowledge that alternative art schools and artist-led organisations have created over long periods of time. Their ideas about accessible, diverse and equitable pedagogy and art making are such that they cannot be developed in administratively-heavy or seemingly value-neutral institutions. As larger educational institutions raise tuition fees (initially for non-EU and international students), it is important to hold on to the demand that Western society decolonises its methods of knowledge production and appreciates culture as the foundation of everything, making art accessible to all.
https://www.taidekoulumaa.fi/en