The Dreamwork is a free, global, digital publication made by and for artists. The Dreamwork contains a collection of artistic ideas that have been trashed for any given reason. Actually, The Dreamwork is sort of a conceptual junk yard for professional artists.
Maybe the artwork was too expensive to finalize. Or it never got any funding. Maybe someone thought the idea was too stupid. Or maybe the work never was completed. Or, maybe it was finalized, and now the artist (yes, that is you) dreams of seeing the artwork through a new pair of eyes. This digital publication will hopefully become a place, where you can roam through thrown-out ideas, and maybe use them to experiment or expand.
The project was initiated by Blix Art and Production in collaboration with Failure, Understanding, Care (& Kunst) as a collective project to promote collaborative processes that can increase the art's environment and climate awareness.
Through this website, an artist can submit a short poetic description or written draft of their trashed idea, together with a hand-drawn sketch to describe it. After a short process of proofreading by a site admin, the draft or poem gets uploaded to the digital publication The Dreamwork. The idea may then be read by another artist and gain a new life. All artist who submit an idea gets access to the whole publication.
This enables artist to share their trashed ideas with other artists, read about other unused or disregarded ideas and recycle concepts.
This emphasis on environmental and eco friendly requirement will hopefully inspire new thought processes for our future creative actions. It might even change some of our pre set egocentric attitudes about what art are and how it should serve our communities.
We are imploring those who use ideas from our publication to realise these works in line with the “rules” of the Manifesto.
Rather than making art about the environment, or about ecological crises, we hope this project highlights and utilises the constraints of working with environmental care as another means of exploring the universal issues which artists will continue to explore, regardless of situation. Our wish is not to critique but to do. We hope to disregard the common sense pragmatism, which leads us to short term ‘practical’ decisions which reinforce an environmentally damaging status quo, instead trying to engage the radical as plausible, creative and within reach.
The project has been funded by the Norwegian Arts Council’s Project Support (Prosjektstøtte visuell kunst, og Prosjektstøtte til miljø – og klimakrise- kunst og kultur), and with additional support from Tromso Kommune in 2020.