Landscapes of Daring Political Dreams

Create and Fire Station Artists’ Studios present

Landscapes of Daring Political Dreams

A Masterclass series with Jeanne van Heeswijk and Phoebe Bachman

This is a Masterclass series focused on community dreamscaping. In this time, we need to bring forth new ways of working across physical and digital divides. Artists can work as facilitators bridging knowledge and experience to amplify community resilience. Drawing on Training for the Not Yet BAK (2018–2020) and methodologies developed through Philadelphia Assembled (2014 -2017), Jeanne and Phoebe are inviting artists who work with the community and community activists to join them for three modules that investigate and embody different methodologies of becoming collective.

Jeanne Van Heeswijk is an artist who facilitates the creation of dynamic and diversified public spaces in order to “radicalise the local”. She works on long term community embedded projects that question arts autonomy by combining performative action, discussions and other forms of organising and pedagogy in order to assist communities to take control of their own futures.

Recent Projects include Philadelphia Assembled (2014 – 2017), a collaborative endeavour with The Philadelphia Museum of Art and collaborators across the city, and Trainings for the Not-Yet (2018 – 2020); an exhibition as a series of trainings in in civic engagement, radical collectivity, and active empowerment, the project brings together collaborators from various fields and communities to create and practice alternative imaginings of being together in the face of the pressing emergencies that shape the world today.

Other notable projects include The Blue House (2005-2010) and Homebaked (2010 – ongoing) commissioned by the Liverpool Biennial. Awards include the inaugural Keith Haring Fellowship in Art and Activism at Bard College in 2014 and the Annenberg Prize for Art and Social Change, 2011.

Phoebe Bachman (she/they) is an artist, facilitator and project manager whose practice is rooted in traditional and community-based research methodologies, organizational form, collage, performance, and mapping. At the core of Bachman’s practice, they work to amplify on-going acts of resistance and build reciprocal relationships with particular attention paid to economic, gender, and racial justice.

Bachman is completing a Masters at the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths University of London. Their research centres on building a supportive infrastructure for household debt abolition. They are a member of Urban Front, a transnational cooperative consultancy, and the Pennsylvania chapter of the Debt Collective.

In the past, she has worked as a project manager for numerous arts based organizations including Mural Arts Philadelphia, Philadelphia Museum of Art (Philadelphia Assembled) and Creative Time.