The Age of Flying: Youth’s Work and Dreams for the (Art) World They Need
NO NIIN Magazine, Issue 26, 24 September 2024
'We want to talk about the world: about ecological rehabilitation, friendship, rage, fear, countercultures, rest, alternatives to the nuclear family, free love, the abolition of gender, the abolition of borders, music, food, the ocean, self-determination, … dreams. Do our dreams hold their anarchic potential after they leave the private and enter our work life? What if dreaming has begun to feel impossible for our generation?'
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Micol Curatolo reflects on the collaborative work of PUBLICS Youth Advisory Board and their call for a healthier, accessible, and diverse creative industry. Can change begin with us?
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'The thoughts that follow are born from my experience as the project coordinator of PUBLICS Youth Advisory Board, a yearly collective of 18- to 21-year-olds working to question and expand PUBLICS’s programme while co-creating a platform for their personal engagement in cultural production. What can curatorial education do for young adults today? How does age matter? Can one ever create alternatives from within?
“PUBLICS Youth is a group of young people from different backgrounds and interests that learn about the art world together." It is “an opportunity to get to know each other by means of cultural exchange," explain Board members Matilda Järvi and Isabella Oropeza.
At first glance, the reasons to be of a Youth Advisory Board in an established organisation are two: to strengthen it and/or to initiate a change. Throughout this text, I hold two focus points that are simultaneous and dependent and yet, at times, contradictory: one are the needs, priorities, and centrality to this project of the Youth Board members and their journeys; and the other are the logics, needs and economy of PUBLICS as an entity and a structuring of labour.
Three lessons have emerged in my perception of this project around which I continue to develop my work with the Board: the importance of understanding oneself in relation to another; a collective agency can transform more than one alone could; one’s personal and collective learning must be accompanied by institutional learning for change to take place.'
The Voice as Practice workshop with Harold Offeh, PUBLICS and OpenUp, April 2023. Credits: Noora Lehtovuori.
