Sam West meets Oksasenkatu.
On Wednesday 18th May, our final day in Helsinki, we met with Jakko from the artists group Oksasenkatu to discuss the possibilities for studio exchanges between their group and studio holders at Spike Island.
As we talked, we outlined the needs and values of each artists group and the importance of how beneficial these exchanges could be. There was a shared acknowledgement and agreement that this exchange process should not create a structure like a residency program, with all the administration and workload (both professional and artistic) that planning a residency requires.
That this would be counter-productive, producing quite a large job for people involved. Instead, these exchanges are negotiated by the artists involved who have been matched with each other by Jakko and ourselves. There is no fixed time span or way in which the exchanges should work and the idea is that artists swap both studios and accommodation for a time period that suits them both, with little cost to themselves other than travel and subsistence.
Inturn, both Spike studio holders and the artists in Oksasenkatu will welcome and support the visiting artists during their exchange, introducing them to the new cities and helping them establish their practices in a new city and a new context.
What was so great about the meeting was finding that Oksasenkatu were as interested in the idea of exchange as us and that this model fitted the ways in which both British and Finnish artists practices worked. We have kept in contact with Jakko and Oksasenkatu and are in the process of feeding this interest back to Spike Island Studio holders. Once we can see who is interested from Spike and in what capacity, then we will contact Jakko and begin the process of matching studio holders together.
