tranzit.hu/

Please note that the application is open to Hungarian speaking artists .

This year, we continue the Artists at Schools project, which was originally announced—and carried out with positive outcomes—as a pilot project in 2012, and is based on the collaboration between artists and schools.

I. Specifications regarding content and structure

In the current political and economic situation, the changes made with respect to education concern steps towards centralization, a decrease in the autonomy of schools, and an orientation towards discipline, authority and performance. Art education is pushed to the background, while less and less space is allowed for individual opinions, critical thinking, creativity, experimentation, and play.

The objective of Artists at Schools is to raise and deploy the concept of democracy and its principles of operation within art-critical pedagogical practices, with the concurrent use of the potentials of art and critical pedagogy.

With the realized projects, we are looking for answers to questions, such as:
- What role can artists and their knowledge have in teaching democratic and critical thinking?
- What role can artists have in teaching in a school setting?
- How can democratic principles prevail in collaborative efforts between artists and students?

Within the framework of Artists in Schools, artists and students create collabrative projects, in which the creative process is carried out along democratic principles.

The project to be realized can be:
- a shared work of the artist and the students
- the students’ own project, realized with the help of the artist
- a project by the artist that is realized in collaboration with the students

The projects offer students an opportunity to become familiar, through meeting and working together with an artist, with a type of thinking that questions stereotypes or the acceptance of facts and statements resulting from routine or the compulsion to conform. In these projects, art appears not as an isolated field, but as a medium that fosters one’s sense of critique and responsibility, and facilitates the practice of freedom.

In selecting the applications, the understanding of the project as a local catalyst—taking into account the circumstances of, and possibilities available to, the school—means an advantage. Furthermore, projects whose concept contains elements that make longer-term artist-school collaborations conceivable (e.g. including in the project themes/elements of self-organization, self-teaching circle, advocacy, and solidarity) are also preferred.

Artists in Schools does not support the instrumentalization (i.e. neglecting in any form the particular study/participation needs) of its participants; it emphasizes the importance of providing students with agency.