Finland-Africa Platform for Innovation FAPI Pilot

Introduction

The Pan-African/Nordic Studio project is a multi-year collaboration, between Uniarts Helsinki and the Centre for Contemporary Art Lagos, exploring place-based, artist pedagogies in Nordic and Pan-African contexts. 

 The work builds on the history of two experimental pedagogic projects, one in the African context (Àsìkò Pan-African Art School) and another in a rural Nordic context (the Nordic Studio for Continued Engagement at Rejmyre Art Lab’s Center for Peripheral Studies). The project explores the intersection of these two developed pedagogic experiments and lays the groundwork for ahybrid Pan-African/Nordic educational model and platform. 

The vision of the project is to develop a sustainable, collaboratively constructed, pedagogic framework for practice-based, site-responsive encounters in African and Finnish contexts and to articulate and disseminate the pedagogic methodologies developed within the framework in order to impact the future of university-level art pedagogy. 

Outcomes

• A multi-year series of encounters, staged in selected African and Nordic contexts, in which artists and curators gather for practice-based exchange and collective study of contextual art practice/pedagogy 
• Public Events 
• A series of publications 
• Conference/symposia presentations 

Project Stages

Inhabiting / Accompanying 
2022 Site-visits 

Making together towards 
2023 on being just of Lagos 
2024 on being just shy of Helsinki 

Sharing what has been made 
2023 presentation at On Not Knowing conference, Glasgow School of Art,  
2024 On Place-based Artist Pedagogies and The School of Shying a Way books, 
2024 The School of Shying a Way events at the CCA Lagos Bisi Silva Library in Venice 

Helsinki Shyness Workshops - August 2024 

A research group composed of artist teachers from the Nordic and African region gathered in Helsinki, Finland to offer a series of 5 public workshops exploring dimensions of shyness. Each workshop was co-hosted by a different small arts organization in the Helsinki landscape. 

Find out more: On Shy­ness: A Finnish/​Pan-African Ap­proach

Lagos Shyness Workshops - May 2023 

A research group composed of artist teachers from the Nordic and African region gathered in Lagos, Nigeria to develop the first series of workshops exploring the concept of shyness within artist practice and pedagogy. 

Pre-Study – May 2022 

As part of the relationship development process in this multi-year collaboration, a small group of staff from Uniarts Helsinki participated in the facilitation team for the 2022 edition of the Àsìkò Art School that took place in Cape Verde.