Artist work in the post-rural context: Everything you want was already here

Wednesday, September 10, 2025 10:00 AM 10:00
Monday, September 22, 2025 2:00 PM 14:00

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Title of the course: Artist work in the post-rural context: Everything you want was already here
a KUNO intensive course focused on site-responsive making in rural contexts

Intensive course dates: September 10th- September 22nd, 2025

Level: MFA

ECTS: 5

Host institution: Konstfack University College of Arts Crafts and Design, Sweden
Project partners:
Academy of Fine Arts, Uniarts Helsinki, Finland
Vilnius Academy of Arts, Lithuania

Location: Rejmyre, Sweden

Eligible students:
4 MFA students at each of the following institutions:
Academy of Fine Arts, Uniarts Helsinki, Finland
Konstfack University College of Art, Craft and Design, Sweden
Vilnius Academy of Arts, Lithuania

- Additionally, 3 slots will be open to students across the KUNO network.

Application deadline: April 8th, 2025 (application closes 23:59 CET).

How to apply: please submit an online application by the deadline. Apply with:
- A brief statement of interest, explaining why you would like to take part of the course and how it relates to your existing practice or new possible directions that you would like to explore.
- A link to an online portfolio or website.

NOTE: Please ensure you can attend the entire course dates prior to applying. In order to maintain a strong group within this intensive study period, it is not possible to attend only part of the course, to arrive late or to depart early.

Intensive course description:
Artist work in the post-rural context: Everything you want was already here is a two-week intensive, site-responsive course that takes place in the small glass factory town of Rejmyre, Sweden and is hosted by the artist-run organization Rejmyre Art Lab’s Center for Peripheral Studies. Participants will explore issues central to making site-responsive art in ‘rural contexts’ and create an artwork in response to the site of the course.

The course will bring together MA students from the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki, Konstfack University College of Arts Crafts and Design in Stockholm and the Vilnius Academy of Fine Arts along with select MA students from other KUNO schools.

Artist work in the post-rural context builds on the history of the three-year KUNO intensive course Rural Contextual Practice (2022-2024). With this new edition of the course, we bring our focus more explicitly to a questioning of ‘the rural’ as a categorical place, inviting artists to develop ways of working beyond rural/urban binaries.

…We thus call for an end to the use of universal or global concepts such as ‘rural’ (or the ‘urban’) and for a concern with the way places are ‘made’. This will entail a focus on ‘power’ as certain actors impose ‘their’ rurality on others. We term this the study of the ‘post-rural’.

Jonathan Murdoch and Andy C. Pratt
Journal of Rural Studies, October 1993

The 2025 offering revisits the theme of our first offering in 2022 (Everything you want was already here) through the lens of ‘post-rurality’. We bring our attention to notions of abundance and lack, in relation to the sites we inhabit and our artistic practices, and an increased focus on the ways spaces are understood and constituted as ‘rural’.

This transdisciplinary course explores contextually responsive art practice with a specific focus on ‘the rural’. The dominance of the urban in artistic discourses and the marginalization of the rural, as an often invisible space of industrial production and resource extraction, combine to form a strong argument for focusing our attention, within the space of master-level art and craft education, on developing our conceptions of the rural and rural publics and our capacity to make complex works within and about rural contexts.

Our chosen theme, Everything you want was already here, is an opportunity to explore conceptions of abundance and lack in our respective approaches to art, craft and making. Rural spaces have historically attracted artists seeking a respite, or a near total escape, from the implicitly urban art worlds. This has changed radically with the expansion of high-speed internet and in a post-pandemic society. All of the participants in this course are currently enrolled in art academies in different large cities of Europe. These urban areas, and the academies themselves, are places of abundance in many ways, in terms of the resources and opportunities they present. Those of us who inhabit these urban institutional art spaces also come to recognize that, in all this seeming abundance, there is also a great deal of lack (over regulated time and space, disconnection from the natural world/the source of the materials we consume and the people who produce them). Rural areas in turn present different forms of abundance and lack, real and imagined (‘open’ space, decreased regulation, different conceptions of time, social disconnection etc.).

The course is an opportunity for students pursuing master’s degrees in fine and craft arts as well as media art, to meet and engage in a site-responsive exploration around these issues, through their own existing practices.

COURSE COMPONENTS

The activities and methods of the course include:
- guided tours and independent exploration of the site, introduction to industrial forestry, farming, glass and iron industries, local crafts and various constituencies in the community
- a series of collective exercises initiated by each of the facilitating artist teachers
- collective meals
- previous work presentations by each participant
- time for project development
- a final temporary public project accompanied by a work-in-progress presentation
- two proposals for a larger project at the site, one developed prior to arriving and the site and another as as a reflection after the conclusion of the in-person component of the course

NOTE: While participants are encouraged to respond to the context of the active glass factory town of Rejmyre, the course does not have or provide any access to facilities for physically making works in glass.

PRACTICAL ARRANGEMENTS
For students from the host and partner academies, as well as other academies in the KUNO network, international travel and local travel to and from the site are covered through the KUNO intensive course support. Each student will be given a travel stipend to manage their own travel arrangements. Housing and some meals during the workshop are covered for all participants and there is no course fee. Housing will be in double or triple rooms with shared kitchen and bathrooms. Studio and meeting spaces will be in historic buildings formerly used by the glass factory and in “the Refuge” - Rejmyre Art Lab’s new pavilion/dome.

FACILITATORS