Essentially we match an artist in one discipline from one country with an artist in a different discipline from a different country and send them to a place which neither of them knows well. In most cases neither artist had ever visited the place we selected before.
We asked them to spend 4-5 days with each other, record their visit, discover the place and then come back to us with an idea for an original piece of contemporary art inspired by their exploration which we could co-produce with our partners in a non-conventional space. We did not want a pre-existing project – they had to invent a completely new work.
We chose sea harbours and resorts as the venues, and suggested that they think about or involve the metaphor of the sea in their proposal. They received a Date checklist. But beyond that, we left them to tell us what they would like to do.
In 2006 members of the Black/North SEAS partnership group each proposed artists to be involved in the project. We gathered all the artists together in the beautiful but decaying Casino of Constanta in Romania in September 2006 where we carried out a “test date” matching up artists and sending them on a half-day research around Constanta. They presented their ideas to the whole group and we selected the most interesting of these for the next phase. In 2006-2007 we paired the artists up, and sent them to the sea harbours and resorts we had identified as potential venues for the SEAS events. We then brought them all together again in Odessa in April 2007 to hear what they had discovered. After this meeting we made our final commissioning decisions.
We judged the proposals on their artistic merits and the practicalities of producing them before commissioning them as a SEAS production. The initial ideas which the artists presented of course needed refining. Since we planned that the art works would tour together as a kind of “travelling festival” the final projects had to be able to adapt to all the places it was presented in. We therefore asked the artists to create not site-specific works, but site-related works and to think about “types” of unconventional spaces rather than specific venues in the place they visited. For example, in most sea harbours or resorts there is usually a beach or sea-front, a town square, a shopping mall, a tourist street, perhaps an abandoned warehouse or a unused shop. We asked them to think of how they might animate these kinds of spaces.
Each Date had its own unique dynamic and specific outcomes, but they can be categorised into three broad groups.
Dates which worked well and which resulted in the artists making a joint proposal and creating a work together (eg Venelin Shurelov and Dritero Kasapi creating Fantomat and Karena Johnson and Melih Gorgun on Underneath.)
Dates where the artists tried to find a common project, but finally decided to work separately on their own individual projects (eg Dmytro Bogomazov and Siri Hermansen, and Metro-Boulot-Dodo and Wunderbaum) – often the individual projects reflected each other in some way having been inspired by the same experiences.
And Dates which didn’t work out and which one or both of the participants did not present a proposal or were not selected: an example is Javor Gardev, theatre director from Bulgaria and Peter Johansson and Barbro Westling from Sweden. Nevertheless the documentation of their date in Istanbul (which can be seen in the 25++ film documentary by A.p.r.e.s) provided valuable insight to the partners and other artists as they developed the project. All the dates provided fascinating insights which the project used in some way.