Jeanne van Heeswijk Public Art and Social Practice Presentation February 23, 2017

How can an artist be an instrument for the collective reimagining of daily environments, given the complexity of our societies? This is the question that artist Jeanne van Heeswijk, of the Netherlands, considers when deciding how to employ her work to improve communities. Van Heeswijk believes communities need to co-produce their own futures. That’s why she embeds herself, for years at a time, in communities from Rotterdam to Liverpool, working with them to improve their neighbourhoods and empowering them to design their own futures-not wait for local authorities to foist upon them urban planning schemes which rarely take embedded culture into account. Her work often attempts to unravel invisible legislation, governmental codes, and social institutions, gradually preparing areas for their predictive futures. She calls it “radicalising the local” by empowering communities to become their own antidote. Van Heeswijk’s work has been featured in numerous books and publications worldwide, as well as internationally renowned biennials such as those of Liverpool, Busan, Taipei, Shanghai and Venice. She has received international for her work, including most recently the 2012 Curry Stone Prize for Social Design Pioneers and the 2011 Leonore Annenberg Prize for Art and Social Change.