END OF RESIDENCY WEBZINE

Kristina Borg

I'm a freelance visual and socially engaged artist, spacemaker and art educator/lecturer, based in Malta. In my transdisciplinary research-practice I spend time integrating into specific communities and devote my attention to relationships between people. In dialogue with the community and/or the place, my work focuses on the co-creation of projects that are situation and context-specific, involving alternative, experiential processes that relate to socio-political and economic issues in urban-collective spaces – spaces that range from the city to the supermarket, from the walkway to the sea. You can explore more about my practice by visiting
https://www.kristinaborg.com

- my moment of realisation
Mid-way throughout the process I have realised that an important factor and thematic was emerging from the workshops I was holding with the participant community members. It became obvious that the way how their local public space is being aggressively privatised is greatly affecting their well-being, highlighted through emotions of sadness and anger.

- any tools / methods / resources to share
Throughout the past months, due to the second lockdown, I had to experiment with shifting hands-on workshops to online mode (mainly using ZOOM and a bit of Mentimeter). Albeit feeling very hesitant at the beginning, and without ignoring all the challenges and complexities encountered, it somehow worked out. Participants seemed to have enjoyed it and commented that everything was well-planned.

- a question I am left with
How can I create sustainability for my own practice, whereby projects and experiences can have a long-term effect, beyond, for example, the funding timeframe? – I consider this as a crucial question which I intend to continue investigating.

- something I will carry forward
I have found this residency extremely beneficial not just for the artistic-action-research project I proposed at the beginning, but it also helped me to clarify and confirm thoughts for another project I’m currently devising in relation to alternative and community economy. I’m sure that I will return to all the resources, concepts and references that were shared.

Link to the wider European research project AMASS – Acting on the Margins: Arts as Social Sculpture, which my artistic-action-research project Batman Gżirjan forms part of. AMASS has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no 870621.
https://amassproject.weebly.com

Link to the European AMASS Facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/amassproject/

Link to the local (Maltese) AMASS projects Facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/AMASS.Malta/

The Batman Gżirjan project is a socially-engaged art-research project which examines how local inhabitants in a busy and changing town are affected by over-construction, private development, and encroachment of land, and how local people can react at development which is not in their best interests. The project is collaborating with a group of locals from Gżira – a town in the Central Region of Malta which originally developed as a small working-class suburb but which has quickly been transformed into a business community of hotels, restaurants, online gaming companies, real estate, financial institutions and offices. A second group of community members includes fishers who frequently visit the area and spend time on its seafront.