Artists and researchers participating in ISEAS need the ability to navigate the space of not-yet-knowing. In order for the planned projects to be successful, the commitment of all artists and the will to make themselves available to the community are needed. We need to agree together and commit to being equal. There is a need to break away from established connotations, which are related to e.g. established premises. It is necessary to understand that the power of art is its foreignness: the value of outsideness, otherness, strangeness and disturbance in artistic interventions is central. Precisely because of these important goals, the ISEAS concept has included the presence of a mentor from the beginning. In mentoring, making processes are supported, details are clarified, and new directions are sought.
After the community art event, ISEAS continues artistic work in the form of a museum exhibition. The Lapua Art Museum acts as one of the art educators in its region.
SMARANDA SABINA MOLDOVAN
Smaranda Moldovan (1986 Ph.D) is a visual artist and assistant professor, and doctor in visual arts at the West University of Timisoara, Faculty of Arts and Design, Painting Department. Her research is focused both on the artistic field and on the pedagogical domain. Meeting the curator Katja Juhola at Garnic, Romania in 2017, led to several socially engaged art projects in Poland, Turkey and Finland. She joined ISEAS for the first time in 2018 as an artist guest. She continued since then to take part in the ISEAS research programme and was part of the ISEAS Lapland 2020-2021. She has written two research articles about ISEAS together with Katja Juhola. That means that she has a knowledge of the process of ISEAS and also what socially engaged art is. This time Moldovan is taking part in ISEAS as a mentor and she will be helping each of the teams in the process of the socially engaged art. Due to her Ph.D research on blurring borders between traditional art and new media she has a wide approach to the artistic field of research.
She also understands that ISEAS has the power of doing together and as well that when people who do not know each other and come from different cultural backgrounds, a mentor is needed and has the duty to guide the path of the art.
MIRKA SULANDER
Mirka Sulander (1991, Finland) works as a project manager and an acting museum director at the Cultural Services of Lapua. Sulander has a background in literature and acting and she holds an MA from Aalto University where she studied various practices and theories related to visual culture, curating and contemporary art. Sulander has worked as an interdisciplinary artist combining different art forms from music and text to theatrical and visual elements and she has exhibited her art, for example, in USA, Russia and Italy.
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