Both Hats On: Meetup for Artist-Parents & Workshop: Creating a Working Conditions Rider for Artist-Parents

Language: English
Fee: Free

Facilities
A quiet space for breastfeeding is available during the event, and a changing table is provided in the Garage toilet. Coffee, tea, and small snacks & fruit will be available throughout.
Wheel-access location. 

Artist-Parents Meet-Up & Workshop

Becoming a parent while sustaining a life as an artist raises questions that are rarely addressed in the spaces where we usually talk about artistic practice, labour, or care. How do you keep working when the structures around you — studios, residencies, funding schemes, rehearsal spaces — were not built with parenthood in mind, as Lucy Jones addresses in her book Matrescence. What do fair working conditions even mean, when unpaid care work is so often invisible in the way we plan, budget, and negotiate the conditions needed to keep developing our practice? How do you manage to wear two hats on one head?

This meet-up is specifically planned to bring artist-parents in The Netherlands together to talk about their current challenges, share best practices, and find a supportive community.

We will also have a hands-on working session. We’ll start by looking at the current working conditions for artists and the resources already available in the Netherlands and across Europe, then move into something more concrete: mapping our collective needs, sharing what we already know, and starting to draft a rider — a shared document naming the working conditions artist-parents need to do their work and raise their children.

Bring your questions, your experience, and, if needed, your child. This is the beginning of a conversation we hope continues well beyond this one morning.

Agenda

9:30 – 9:45  Walk-in and welcome drinks
9:45 – 10:00 Welcome and overview of the session
10:00 – 10:30 Introduction of who is in the room & presentation on current working conditions for artist-parents 
10:30 – 11:30 Mapping needs and resources in the room, and presentation of available resources in NL & EU for artist-parents
11:30 – 12:00 Break
12:00 – 13:00 Collective working session: drafting the template rider
13:00 – 13:30 Round-up and next steps

It will be a great pleasure to have you join us — to meet other artists facing the same challenge of juggling two hats, family and professional practice, to connect with like-minded people who want to create better conditions for artist-parents, and to start building a supportive network around your practice.

This project is made possible thanks to the financial support of the Mondriaan Fonds, het Cultuurfonds, and Garage Rotterdam, born from a collaborative idea and shared interest between Platform BK & The Artist and the Others.