Part 2 of our Guest Blog series with Lucy Biddle of the Postcards From Europe project…
Here, Lucy takes us right to the start, to tells us how NOISE, helped her collective get funding through the EU’s Youth In Action programme…
“It’s finally here! After a summer of emails, meetings, and careful planning our exhibition, ‘Postcards from Europe’, is open to the public, and our website is up and running. By the end of next week our book will be back from the printers and we’ll have begun our month of creative learning workshops at Wem Town Hall in Shropshire.
Back in May of this year NOISE festival suggested that I and a friend of mine applied for some funding from the European Commission; We had a plan to put on an exhibition of new work by young and emerging artists, and NOISE thought it was the sort of project which could be supported by the EU’s ‘Youth in Action’ programme. ‘Youth in Action’ is the programme the European Commission has set up for young people. It aims to inspire a sense of active European citizenship, solidarity and tolerance among young Europeans and to involve them in shaping the Union’s future. My friend and I gathered some more people keen to take part, spent some time developing the concept, and sent off the application promptly. In June we were thrilled to find out that we had been awarded the funding.
Our idea matured since NOISE first suggested the Youth in Action programme to us. We transformed an initial idea into an ambitious pan-European art project, with the intention of creating opportunities for discussion, learning and collaboration between young artists from across Europe.
Although ambitious, the premise was simple: we asked young artists from all over Europe to produce a piece of work responding to the place in which they lived and worked. The work had to express something interesting and real about their relationship to their environment. The only other limitation was the size - 120mm x 170mm – the size of the average postcard.
At the end of the summer we would select a number of the submitted postcards to form an exhibition in Wem Town Hall, an emerging centre for arts, learning, community and enterprise in the rural West Midlands. A bespoke website would also be created for the project, featuring the postcards in the exhibition, along with profiles for each participating artist, built and designed by a young web designer. Finally, a book, featuring selected postcards, and interviews with established creative practitioners, and participating artists would be designed and produced by the team as a tangible record of the project.”
Part 3 up soon…..
