— lahkonit — tilnærma — lähestyä — approach

The workshop is placed in the intersection of Crafts, Design, Performing Arts and the respective Pedagogies. Each partner school will bring their expertise in to foreground in order to construct a dialogue between multiple voices and approaches. The key objective is to acknowledge and foster various means how the arts, design and crafts can investigate the cultural diversity and to bring the emerging issues for discussion. The town of Kautokeino (Guovdageaidnu) is the home of Sámi University of Applied Sciences and a key Sámi cultural centre. The workshop will have over 30 participating students from Norway and Finland, but also from more than 10 other nationalities. The project will also collaborate with the local secondary school pupils and with the local artists. The project is led by Professor Toni Kauppila (KHiO), Associate Professor Hanna Guttorm (SA) and Lecturer Riku Saastamoinen (Uniarts Helsinki). The project will end into a public event, where the student groups will exhibit and perform their discoveries.

Our world is becoming ever more complex with increasing social, cultural and ecological challenges. The age is considered as one of super-complexity, where there are no more singular solutions to problems, but rather an attempt to formulate the right questions. The expanding quantity of data does not necessarily help, as the means of processing that knowledge are in doubt. The critical and explorative attitude to approach issues precedes the conventions of reasoning.

Here the arts and crafts enter the picture. The emerging modes of artistic research may open up alternative approaches for knowing that can be both tangible and deep, rooted well in our immediate cultural experiences. The acknowledgement of diversity of approaches with all our senses become a way of being in this world with the added criticality and reflectivity for contextualizing given issues at stake.

The theme approach refers to this arts and crafts attitude as an attempt to harvest new relationships to the topic. This embeds an idea that our artistic processes help us to encounter different cultures beyond right and wrong, good or bad, but rather to approach something in order to come closer.

The town of Kautokeino works as a context for this workshop. The living everyday Sámi culture and the local educational institutions give a framework for multicultural exchange of ways one can explore various approaches for beginning to understand, to appreciate and to have a dialogue on the diversity of cultural practices.