Hunnie featured as best practice at LOKO14

Hunnie spoke today at LOKO14, an expert meeting on the future role and function of mediators in art and public space.

Hunnie’s mediator, coach and ambassador Ella Derksen explained her role in the process of lobbying for the initial assignment, setting the right context, managing expectations and doing damage management with the stakeholders, and ensuring the (administrative and legislative, among other) wrap up of the project.

Now that institutional cultural bodies that traditionally employed mediators have disappeared due to governmental budget cuts, the field of mediators is shifting; independent artists and designers may well be the mediators’s clients in the future. This opens up interesting new ways of working together, and setting the agenda of a project. It also asks the question when a project ends, if we should still think in terms of ‘projects’, and what kind of new road maps we can set out for art & design in public space.

Hunnie partner in crime Henriëtte Waal raised the only question that mattered, to me – what is the mediator’s internal drive or desire to do what he/she does? The Professorship of Art and Public Space of the Rietveld Academie has launched DHAPS, a matchmaking platform for mediators and clients. My hope is it will contribute to reflection on art in public space practices (their pitfalls and ambitions) in The Netherlands. Publiekgemaakt.nl is a new blog, initiated to stimulate this kind of reflection.

image: Hunnie Overleven, sept 21, 2013. Courtesy HUNNIE, foto Arjen Damen (wilderness guide)