Summer greetings from BIRCA
13. July 2020
| As it has probably dawned on most people, I am mostly at BIRCA these days and have had a wonderful spring. We are now closing down a few weeks for the summer – and it happens after the busiest spring in BIRCA’s history. That despite – or maybe just because of the corona crisis. All planned activities with international guests were canceled – residencies, courses and the TOCIF festival, so there was empty in the calendar. We decided in the board of the Association BIRCA Residency instead to open the place for free for performing artists based in Denmark – they really needed space to create art here during the corona crisis. Quit a lot applied for this and the result was that 27 projects were awarded a week of residency – 44 adults and 5 children have visited us in a corona residency in the period 26/4 to 5/7 – the last week in a special BIRCA kids residency with 2 artists families with children. In addition to this, we have hosted an Island Connect residency with 6 people and a Norwegian-Danish residency with 6 people. So it has been lively and fun here. We have of course complied with corona restrictions and only been here 10 at a time. And that has meant that we have not, as usual, been open to work-in-progress views. We all love this intense talk about artistic processes and I believe that the laboratory is of great importance. From August we will invite others in again. Here is a greeting from the happy families: Thank you for being so brave to try out the BIRCA Kids format – it was a hit and we are deeply grateful. Here from one of the artists: Thank you for time for immersion and creative flow. What a gift to get here in Corona time. And: Thank you for bringing together more different artists and creating a place to share thoughts and art. We really want to continue these free residencies to help artists unleash their potential, and if we get help we can further offer to cover transportation and food while they are here. If you would like to be a part of the good spirit at BIRCA, then support our fundraiser, where we gather funds to give free residencies to performing artist from all over the world in fall 20 and all year 21. For 3000 DKK (400€) we can invite a performing artists for one week with transportation and food paid. We use the platform Go Fund Me – find it here – every contribution is welcome. Recently, we got the really good news that our Island Connect residency program, which we have now run for 3 years with support in recent years from the Danish Arts Council, has now received support from Creative Europe in the years 2021-22. This means that we can grow our network between 5 residency centers further and support all artists who participate better. BIRCA itself will receive DKK 275,000. The new program will also add a major artistic project each year that will dive into a study of what it means to be an islander, how island communities are special. We are really looking forward to that. For my own part, I have actually been busy with coaching, several wonderful artists have joined in the last few months – I am deeply grateful because I love this work. I also had an successful online course in Artistic Entrepreneurship with Sofie Marin. But we have still decided that the next one will be live on BIRCA – if you are interested in this, feel free to write to me. I will breathe more slowly the next weeks and come back recovered 🙂 Warm summer greetings from a cold Danish summer Susanne |
