The Saturday Afternoon Show

The Saturday Afternoon Show was a community art project for the neighborhood Veendam Noord in the city of Veendam. It took place between march and december of 2005. Considering that this project has not met with our expectations, we have decided to deviate from our usual practice of providing information about the why, what, where and how of the project.

Instead we have decided to present this project on our website as a case study of what can go wrong during the execution of community art projects. As a rule, artists are very hush hush about projects that aren't as successful as they hoped. We felt that it could be rather instructive for our colleagues in the field to take note of the obstacles and pitfalls one can encounter as a community artist.

We are not offering advice or solutions to problems of the community art practice. We only wish to name and describe some of the problems. Perhaps our experiences can aid others in recognizing in an early phase similar obstacles in their own projects. Let it be clear that by putting our experiences online we have absolutely no intention of damaging our commissioners, nor do we want to write a sob story about pitiful artists caught up in things. Presenting a case study is our only aim. Since this case is too complex to render in a short space in English, we have provided two downloads in Dutch. One is the project description as prepared for funding bodies, the other is our evaluation of the project.

Project description (PDF/95KB)
Project evaluation (PDF/899KB)

Perhaps the most remarkable and ironic part of it all is that this project obtained substantial funding from the Province of Groningen on the basis of our project proposal. In addition it also won a prize at a conference on community art organized by the cultural foundation of the united municipalities bank (Cultuurfonds Bank Nederlandse Gemeenten). Would the project have run a different course, it would have been more than the potential success it was deemed to be by many.