Independent People curated by Jonatan Habib Engqvist, Reykjavík Art Festival 2012

The participating artists sent simple instructions to each other via email. They began in early March and continued until May 2012 by sending one assignment to solve per week. The assignments were based up on their own system. This ”system” was used as the grounds for all their assignments.

The idea behind the workshop came from Erla and was aimed at casting light on the emergence of new work by using unfamiliar methods. The project was collaborative and emphasized the idea of creating through restraints and restrictions by means of invented ”systems”. The purpose was to make the participants develop an arsenal of tools in order to actively choose different creative approaches rather than passively wait for inspiration. By participating in this workshop an artist dedicates him/her self to the task of investigating the difficulty of freedom and the freedom of difficulty, and in the words of Raymond Queneau: “Become a rat who yourself builds the maze from which you set to escape”.