Spring is in the air and we/you are beginning to think about the summer.

In this regard we want to introduce a very special institution

The International Summer Academy in Salzburg, Austria

The Salzburg International Summer Academy of Fine Arts, founded in 1953 by Oskar Kokoschka as the “School of Seeing”, in Hohensalzburg Fortress, is the oldest of its kind in Europe.
The Summer Academy has always remained faithful to two principles: the internationalism of the teaching artists and students, and the opportunity for professionals, art students and amateur artists to participate in courses together. Kokoschka regarded his “School of Seeing” as a counterpart to traditional, national art academies. His concept allowed no dividing line between artistic craftsmanship and humanistic, intellectual education.
for complete information: www.summeracademy.at

The academy is a wonderful place to experience, the locations especially Hallein have incredible spaces to work in and we want to point out the courses we think could be most interesting for jewellery makers.

Above all the course with Lucy Sarneel:
her assistant will be Martina Muhlfellner (Alchimia alumni and long year teaching assistant)

the course title is

Treasures of imagination
  three weeks from: 22.07.2013 – 10.08.2013
Medium/Media: Jewellery design, experimental material research
Location: Alte Saline Hallein the workshop space for jewellery is amazing and enormous and gives possibilities for installations – presentations with all kinds of media and also the possibility of dialogue with the other classes run at the same time.

This course emphasises the specific role that jewellery plays in our mass-oriented, efficient and high-tech world and the individual value it represents to us. Attention will be paid to each student’s personal perception of jewellery, but also to the diversity in the history and tradition of jewellery.
With personal guidance, students will develop “their own cosmos” through research, sketching and writing, in order to inspire and encourage their personal working process. The course is a playground for discovering new ways of applying techniques and material according to the individual imagination of the student, rather than a course about particular jewellery techniques. The students are encouraged to reflect on their work individually as well as collectively. Making, reflecting and communicating are keywords in the working method. This results in a challenging and open approach to jewellery. Jewellery-related discussions and guest lectures are initiated to increase students’ awareness of the meaning of jewellery. In the final week the participants are expected to present their work to the public in an inventive way.
The course aims to reveal and encourage each student’s “treasures of imagination”, as well as their drive and expressiveness in the field of jewellery.

Lucy Sarneel, born in Maastricht (NL) in 1961, lives and works in Amsterdam as jewellery artist and teacher at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, department of jewellery. She studied basic jewellery techniques at the Stadsacademie Maastricht and continued her study at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, where she graduated in 1989. Her work is internationally recognised in private and museum collections.
Lucy Sarneel’s work refers to culture and time. Her work provides a counterweight to the high-tech, efficient and mass-oriented world in which cultures are disappearing as a result of commercialisation and globalisation. The visual language of her jewellery is associative, often sculptural, and encourages the free experience of thoughts and feelings.

But as stated before the Academy could give the possibility to jewellers to work in other media and especially in different size which can be on the one hand liberating. We are used to work in small-scale and the change of scale can bring be very inspiring, as also the work in other media and the encounter and dialogue with artists from different fields.

Schälling | Enderle
Stone quarry intervention
 04.08.2013 – 31.08.2013
Medium/Media: Stone sculpture, drawing, photography
Location: Kiefer Steinbruch Fürstenbrunn

This location inside the stone quarry is a complete life experience. Students work and sleep all together with the teachers in a house inside the stone quarry and far from anything in the middle of a mountain – you can work at all times because there is nothing else around, it is a kind of complete spiritual retreat.
From Saturday evening 3 August, simple dormitory accommodation is available for € 7.– per night in the quarry grounds.

The course includes three-dimensional or multi-layered approach to the matter of stone and to the quarry itself. Questions will be: WHY here, HOW and for WHOM.

The unusual locality – working on-site in the surroundings of active and disused quarries – offers ideal conditions for intervention and research into minor and major connections between actions and transformation, as for example the interaction of construction and destruction. This exploration will be undertaken both individually and jointly through schematic or actual on-site interventions. The point is to recognise the multiple overlapping of levels of time and action, and to make these manifest in one’s own work.

Traditional stone sculpture is one possibility, but other methods and media, as well as theoretical study, are encouraged and supported. The course also offers instruction in the development of techniques for working with the properties of the stone itself without handling it directly.

Artists Doris Schälling and Jörg Enderle see sculpture as an explorative process. Their individual works and their joint projects since 1989 focus on stone as material and the stone quarry as a place of enquiry. In order to get closer to the origin and the aesthetic of the stone, the motto for the sculptures, photographs, paper works and videos is “thinking from within the stone”.

_________________________________________________________________________________

Shaina Anand / Ashok Sukumaran
Rough guide to the media arts
22.07.2013 – 10.08.2013
Open to all.

Medium/Media: media art
Location: Alte Saline Hallein

Shaina Anand and Ashok Sukumaran with their collective CAMP where one of the most interesting works at this year’s dokumenta and the course is in Hallein.
On my point of view Hallein is the best location for courses – big space, small town – not a spiritual retreat but a beautiful landscape and just 30km from Salzburg – by bike (beautiful cycle roads along the river) or bus just half an hour to reach the city Salzburg.

This course, part history, part practical, will explore big questions raised by media art – a term usually used to describe software art or electronic practices. However, we expand this definition to all distributive media: radio, television, CCTV, electricity, the internet and other “networks”. These media are particularly promising in that they continue to challenge and change what art can be. The class will look back at moments of such promise, of utopian potentials in technology, where artists tinkered, hacked, intervened and assembled art that could powerfully imagine and realise ambitious, “real world” projects.
We will also take a practical look at the properties of certain media, such as radio, television, video, internet, that suggest what kind of art can be made with them.

The focus will be on process, reception, sensuality, and the role of technology. Interested participants should see themselves as artists who work outside of studios.
Shaina Anand is a filmmaker and artist, and a co-initiator of CAMP and Pad.ma.
Ashok Sukumaran’s interests are in archaeologies of media, and in what haunts or underlies network forms and material distributions.

_________________________________________________________________________________

Leya Mira Brander
From etching to pop-up book
22.07.2013 – 10.08.2013
Medium/Media: Metal engraving, etching and paper sculpture
Location: Festung Hohensalzburg

This course is right in the middle of Salzburg, on the top of the hill inside the medieval castle. fantastic location on the one hand on the other in the busy city full of tourists and also much more expensive regarding food and accomodation than Hallein. But the course could be of much interest.
The aim of this course is to gain a thorough knowledge of various techniques of printing on paper, and then to process these prints into three-dimensional objects.
The course will be divided into three stages. First, the participant will be invited to think about three different images: a portrait, a landscape and an object. These images can be created during the course or they can come from your personal archive. They will be etched each in a different copper plate and we will make a small edition of them.
Then we will use some of the prints from the edition for the construction of a pop-up book, trying to mix the portrait, the landscape and the object.
Finally, the participants will choose one of the images to learn how to transform a plane image into a paper sculpture.
The main objective of the course is to think about the infinite possibilities of relation between the images and the different ways of cutting prints to construct a solid work of art.

Leya Mira Brander was born in 1976 in São Paulo, Brasil, where she also lives. She has worked with metal engraving since she was 17. Today, she has a collection of approximately 1000 copper plates. What interests her most about working with prints is the possibility of creating something completely new with each print.  Brander never makes an edition. All the prints she has ever done are unique, because she is in search of endless possibilities to relate the images she has recorded. Recently, she has also been interested in researching a possible combination of engraving and sculpture, and how paper is a material that can make this possible.

________________________________________________________________________________

Tania Bruguera
Arte útil (useful art)
 12.08.2013 – 31.08.2013
Medium/Media: Workshop, social practice
Location: Alte Saline Hallein
Tania Bruguera is an extremely interesting artist and person who could give a completely new point of view on many important issues concerning also our field.

“Arte útil” (useful art) aims to transform some aspects of society through the implementation of art, transcending symbolic representation or metaphor and proposing with their activity some solutions for deficits in reality. Most “useful art” is structured as a long-term project, and the way it operates is dictated by the practical impact of its strategies. “Useful art” practices try to address the levels of disparities of engagement between informed audiences and the general public, as well as the historical gap between the language used in what is considered avantgarde and the language of urgent politics, science and other disciplines.

Bruguera created the Useful Art Association in January 2011 to provide a platform to meet, exchange ideas, and share strategies on how to deal with the issues of implementing the merging of art into society. Similarly to this association, in her course Tania Bruguera will work with the students in an open manner, through discussions, printed texts, action groups and public events, examining what it means to create “useful art”.

Tania Bruguera is one of the leading political and performance artists of her generation. Bruguera’s work researches ways in which art can be applied to everyday political life, creating a public forum to debate ideas shown in their contradictory state and focusing on the transformation of the passive condition of “viewer” into an active one of “citizenry.” Bruguera uses the terms “Arte de conducta” (conduct/behaviour art), “Arte útil” (useful art) and “Political-timing specific” to define her practice. Bruguera’s long-term projects have been intensive interventions on the institutional structure of memory, education and politics.

________________________________________________________________________________

Olga Chernysheva
Artist’s territory
 12.08.2013 – 31.08.2013
Medium/Media: mixed media
Location: Festung Hohensalzburg

The topic of the course is “Artist’s Territory”. It will deal not with style, but rather with occupying some invented or discovered territory. In the current art scene, a work of art cannot be apprehended at first glance, since every work is an integral part of an “artistic landscape”. The important thing is the extent to which that landscape is detailed and convincing. Literary comparisons might include invented or constructed places such as Dostoevsky’s St. Petersburg, or Kafka’s fictional but still recognisable city.
Participants will work on their own artistic landscape. This may be entirely fictional, or it may contain details taken from reality. It will have a number of different, interconnected themes. Every new tonality, every new nuance will be intelligible and come alive only in the context of the existing body of work. The smallest change, however trivial or coincidental, may completely alter the whole perception and interpretation.
As a starting-point, we might take sketches made in the town, or perhaps visual comments on some spaceoriented text. Our media may be drawing, painting, sculpture, video, photography, or even poetry or ready-made. In any case, intuition will drive us towards our subject, with empathy as our guiding principle and our primary resource.

______________________________________________________________________________

Christoph Draeger
Simsalaboom! Before you learn to fly, learn how to fall
 12.08.2013 – 31.08.2013
Medium/Media: Collage, assemblage, installation
Location: Alte Saline Hallein

The end of the world, predicted for 21.12.2012, is already history, but we have known since Nostradamus that “after the Apocalypse” is before the Apocalypse. Like terminal storage depots for nuclear waste, constantly debated situations that will never come to pass have explosive potential. What can be saved and recycled from the post-apocalyptic (informational) waste? What lies behind the phenomena, behind the flickering screens, behind the decadent projection surfaces of all-encompassing consumerism?
The “age of collage” (Summer Academy 2012) persists, expanding into the third dimension. We will move our laboratory to the Alte Saline Hallein, where the rooms allow for expansion. In this course, the situational character of the sculpture explores the potential that lies in everyday objects when their meaning is altered by placing them in a different context. How can one combine existing materials into collages, assemblages, sculptures or installations so as to create new contentual relationships? The focus is not on the object (or the image) itself, but on what is created with it. Thus context becomes the determining factor.
Situations are created, absurd spaces constructed, Installations set up and then discarded. Possible fields of association: the construction of destruction (and vice versa), the hysterical object, political agitation, humour and subversion, asceticism and ecstasy.

_______________________________________________________________________________

Robert Kuśmirowski
Everyone has the same chance
 22.07.2013 – 10.08.2013
Medium/Media: mixed media
Location: Alte Saline Hallein

In this course, the participants will study theoretical and practical questions involved in sculpture. At the beginning, Kuśmirowski will clarify various matters in relation to his own work, such as how different materials interact, and how he deals with institutional restrictions, including safety and fire regulations.
In the ensuing, practical phase, each student will be allotted a workplace with the same materials. This strict specification of place and material is balanced by freedom in the choice of subject. The challenge for students is to develop an individual theme, against the background of their own knowledge and experience, using the given materials. Kuśmirowski will be on hand for advice, which will be geared to students’ individual needs and previous knowledge. The final week brings a surprising shift which will allow participants to discover new perspectives and terrains, always in relation to their earlier work and to that of the other participants.
The aim of the course is for students to work out new perspectives and possibilities in sculpture, to learn detachment from their own works and to experiment with the temporal limitation of a work. They should discover how something new can emerge from working with given material and situation.
The concluding days will allow room for discussion, and for deciding how to mount a good group exhibition for the Open Day.

For full information and application: www.summeracademy.at