21 Mar 2011

Ecole cantonale d'art du Valais/Wallis - Sierre - Switzerland MA Program in Fine Arts: Call for Applications

The MAPS – Arts in Public Spheres Master program is a 2-year degree in the visual arts, addressing artists and professionals wishing to question the contemporary artist's relation to the public sphere.

The course offers both practical and theoretical platforms for considering the public sphere in a pluri-disciplinary perspective. It combines a focus on the students' artistic practice and research projects, workshops offering practical experience in realising projects and interventions in the public sphere, yearly seminars contextualising the students' participation in group and solo exhibitions, and study trips. The objective is to consider how art addresses different publics, the nature of public participation and collaborative production, approaching a critical analysis of space, and finally the role of the exhibition and curating in the above questions.

Located in the Valais region of Switzerland, the striking natural environment and its location, away from the country's major urban centres, provide an ideal site for detailed on-the-ground studies in the following areas: environmental and land art, socially-engaged and community projects, site-specific artistic and curatorial interventions in the public space, art and the natural sciences, artistic research practice, and work on the dialectic between periphery and centre.


MAPS - Arts in Public Spheres is part of Master of Arts HES-SO in Fine Arts, a program that has been designed around three sites: the Haute Ecole d'Art du Valais (ECAV) in Sierre, the Haute Ecole d'Art et de Design in Geneva (HEAD) and the Ecole Cantonale d'Art in Lausanne (ECAL) and is an integral part of the 'Swiss Master in Fine Arts Platform', a national collaborative programme involving all the Swiss art schools.

Teaching
The MAPS – Arts in Public Spheres program offers 120 ECTS credits. It is a two-year course with classes two days a week. MAPS faculty comes from a multidisciplinary and international background.

The structure of the program is organised to combine seminars and workshops led by artists, theoreticians and curators, with visits to exhibitions and events of interest, and the development of individual and collective exhibition projects. Students thus devote 60 – 70% of their formation time to their own work and are supervised by two tutors throughout their course. The final stage of the program is focused on the Masters Thesis and Exhibition.

Individual work, meetings and exchanges with artists and professionals from the art world constitute an important part of the course. Workshops equipped with computers and other technical equipment are available, as well as exhibition spaces.

Professors
Hannes Brunner, Carla Demierre, Barnaby Drabble, Robert Ireland, François Kohler, Eric Maeder, Federica Martini, Sibylle Omlin, Anne-Julie Raccoursier, Gregg Smith