Curator, Master of Arts Ohtonen Hanna and working group (Support Structures Collective)

Feminist art centre – Setting up a support structure

Taiteellinen työ / siihen pohjautuva työ | Ponnistusapuraha

Support Structures Collective (SSC) is a transnational group of art workers based in Helsinki, requiring a kickstart grant to research and develop the operational model and organisational structure for a feminist art centre in Spring 2019. Planned to inaugurate in 2020, the centre will nurture and support the work of feminist, female identifying, non-binary, poc, queer artists and art workers. Its work may encompass curatorial advice, strategic networking, learning opportunities, and a sharing structure through which members can educate and help each other to form new collaborative relations. The centre will become a nest and a home for art projects and practices, allowing its members to move and develop within it, while collectively developing the centre itself. It will document, archive and promote the work of its members, and form symbiotic alliances with other actors in the fields of art, culture, activism and research. In 2019 SSC will organise a series of semi-public events about turning activist organising into a decentralised and democratic organisational model; sustainable fundraising; and experiments with feminist working methods. These will be facilitated in dialogue with a group of invited workshop hosts. SSC is driven by a need to get organised with and for others who need support within the Finnish art field; by a need to build an organisation that encompasses and strives from activist, feminist politics; and that sustains these politics as it develops.