Hybridity, Greening and Agents of Transformation

Photo courtesy of Cartographies of the Vanishing Now fieldwork, MA Ecology Futures.

ELIA Executive Director, Maria Hansen looks towards brighter days, post-Covid when we can meet in person and enjoy each other’s company again.

Assessment and graduation time – these are rollercoaster days for you. Thank you for taking time to read this newsletter. It comes at a time when we are thinking post-Covid, making plans for when physical meetings will be possible again. To this end, the ELIA team are planning some events in autumn, which we hope can be realised in a live face-to-face setting.

Throughout the past year, we have learned the enormous benefit that online gatherings can have for our community in terms of access and inclusivity. We now speak of some form of hybridity entering all our events in the future, to ensure that all of you can be part of the conversation, even if you cannot be there in person. For ELIA’s upcoming Academy in lovely Brussels, this is entirely the case. With our hosts, we have prepared an exciting combined online and physical schedule. The ELIA Leadership Symposium will, if all goes well, take place in beautiful Tallinn, Estonia. Here, we also hope to incorporate an online component to ensure more can join in. Stay tuned and save those dates!

On a completely different topic, here is a shout out to you if your institution is already integrating the topic of the climate crisis into the curriculum. Very much on my mind at the moment, as we look forward to our upcoming session on ‘How to Inspire Green Transformation in Art Making’ which I will co-host together online with ELIA Representative Board member, Úna Henry from St. Joost Academy of Art and Design in the Netherlands.

At St. Joost, a Masters programme called ‘Ecology Futures’ explores a more eco-centric paradigm in art making, which is developed in collaboration with the Fiber Festival in Amsterdam. Students and teachers of ‘Ecology Futures’ are co-creating this online session with ELIA. I hope you will join us in diving more deeply into this topic of transformation and adaptation around climate change in arts education.

We will also hear from colleagues at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, about the recently launched Erasmus+ project called ‘Plastic Justice’. And we will have a few surprise reveals up our sleeve during this session, too much to share here. This important conversation will take place on Friday 4 June at 12:00 CEST – one day before World Environment Day. Many of you have asked us to develop events around this topic and this will be first of several sessions. So please join us, share your ideas and be part of the conversation!

Speaking of student engagement at ELIA, there is still time for your students to be part of episode two of our student-driven conversations about the New European Bauhaus, entitled ‘Agents of Transformation in Art and Design’, co-developed with the Berlin University of the Arts. For one hour on Friday, 28 May, students from ELIA member schools have the unique opportunity to speak to representatives from the European Commission to continue the dialogue on this co-designed European initiative. Read in this newsletter how your students can register. One final big scoop and important date to share with everyone in your institution: we are so excited to announce that EU Commissioner Mariya Gabriel has agreed to join ELIA students for the final episode of this program. This not-to-be missed (online) conversation will take place on 6 July at 10:00 CEST.