Arlington County Government, VA Arts and Entertainment, 13 Apr 2012

Previous Meeting Next Meeting

⏯

youtube image

►

From YouTube: Artscape: Face to Face

Description

Arlington's Sister City connections have led to many trips and cultural exchanges in the past, but nothing like this one. Artists from Arlington and our Sister City of Aachen, Germany took turns hosting each other, first in Germany and then here in Arlington. The result was two intense weeks of work, inspiration, and creation. This segment visits with the group as they spent a week creating together at Arlington's Artisphere.
www.artisphere.com.

A

B

I joined the primary school exchange together with my daughter in arlington and being very impressed by by the wonderful experiences we made. I asked our artist group if they weren't interested in trying to do such an exchange between artists in arlington too.

C

Monica is part of an organization called dryek, which is a women's artist collective in akin germany and the group drayek had been doing exchanges all over the world and when monica was here, she thought this would be a great place to do it also.

C

So we put out a call to artists in arlington and did some interviews with artists, and eventually we chose three who would be a good fit to go there.

D

And monica.

E

I found the invitation in my email box about a year ago and I was very excited at the idea of the exchange to actually go to akin germany and live and work with these women artists over there. It was a 10-day project with them, so we almost immediately went into action the next day going to the aola carolina the old monastery, where we were going to be working and exhibiting all of the supplies had been put out on the table.

E

This is a very intensive high energy 10 days for all of us, both in in april and now, because this is the window of opportunity for most of us to just do nothing but focus on creating our art and then have the joy of exhibiting it.

C

An artist exchange really is you know at its heart. It's a really intense collaboration among the artists.

C

It's really rare that artists get the time to spend time together in a and have the space to do it without any other obligations.

C

That was a model that the akin artists had that they had used in other exchanges and that's how we modeled our setup for the artist to come here to arlington.

C

What we knew would happen is that they would share space and materials and create work, but we didn't know what the product would be, and that was a really exciting piece.

C

D

So it's wonderful, we just look right and we just look to the left, and sometimes we are inspired, sometimes not that that's the way of life. I think it's it's to understand what other people do. What other people think.

D

It's to look to hear and to understand what their life is.

C

They really only had I'd, say five solid work days to be creating artwork and there was not a drip of paint left. There was no paper, no canvas every every material and then some were used in the process and they made the artist made a decision at some point to hang absolutely everything that was created during the process. So so the artist really came with an eye to get a lot of work done.

E

It's been a phenomenal experience for instantly feeling wrapped up in the warmth of these women and their group.

D

For me, life is, is exchange, art is for me exchange too. Hopefully,.

B

This is the start of a never-ending story, and it would be wonderful to continue to work together and to do other exchanges, and this is our hope. Thank you to all of you.