ELIA Vice President presents during EU Week of Regions and Cities

On 12 October, 2021 ELIA Vice President, Jørn Mortensen spoke during the EU Week of Regions and Cities signaling the relevance of bringing in the young and art’s research potential to face the challenges of the 21st century.

Representing ELIA Jørn Mortensten has together with colleagues from ACE (in addition to other organisations), invested time in the New European Bauhaus Collective which is a grouping of several pan-European organisations to collectively support the development and implementation of the New European Bauhaus initiative. Fittingly, he participates at the workshop New European Bauhaus: Achieving aesthetics, sustainability and inclusiveness at local level which aims to reflect on the ambition to make our habitat more sustainable, inclusive, and beautiful and how this ambition can be translated into tangible initiatives. At the very beginning of his speech he poses the question: “Must not the goals we aim to achieve be reflected in the way we work and what would that mean?” To find an answer to this he reflects on two imagined case studies. 

Bring in the young

The first case study features a young person in her early 20s. “Let’s call her Anna”, Jørn  suggests, encouraging us to imagine the future of this young woman should we fail to meet the Paris climate agreement's goal of keeping global warming well below 2 degrees compared to pre-industrial levels. By the time Anna is 34, it would not only be a lot warmer, sea levels would rise, the Arctic Ocean would be ice-free once every ten years, 99% of coral reefs would be dead and developing countries and many people would be threatened. 
“This is the 2035 scenario (don’t even dare think about the 2071 scenario) and it is alarming. Both physically but also morally towards “Anna” and her fellow generation”, says Jørn. He believes this means on the one hand that institutions have to involve the younger generation in their work, involving students, in particular students within arts and design in different ways. In this context, Jørn mentions the project Agents of Transformation in Arts and Design, which was initiated by Berlin University of the Arts and ELIA. This student driven platform for systemic change through art and design formalises a communication pipeline between students in Art and Design and the European Commission. He also points out the relevance of students in decision-making circuits like city councils, public policy, research projects and so forth. "Let's work as we aim. We must include the students!", he insists.

Bring in art’s research potential

Besides young people, Jørn also sees art as an essential factor for solving our problems. “Fiction has enabled us not merely to imagine things, but to do so collectively. We can weave common myths such as the biblical creation story, the Dreamtime myths of Aboriginal Australians, and the nationalist myths of modern state”, he explains. This means that human beings not only have the ability to imagine, but that this ability is also important for social bonds. Furthermore we use our communication system to create new realities. “This is where art comes in. Art requires imagination. It is through art we enter the extra-physical, and where we test out morality, ethics, politics, social regulations, desire, the dark side of mind, etc. Art provides us with a tool the hard sciences can’t offer”, he explains. 
And that is precisely why art can be used to meet the challenges of the 21st century. Artistic research is a powerful tool that we can use when other research traditions are at a loss.
After provoking much needed thought and re-evaluation Jørn closed with a simple yet powerful call to action – “Bring in the young. Bring in art’s research potential.”

Read about ELIA’s Strategic Focus for 2020 – 2024  and how ELIA members aim to tackle some of the biggest issues affecting higher arts education today.