Raquel Sakristán is a multidisciplinary artist whose projects erase the limits between aesthetic codes, techniques and artistic languages. She works in public spaces, exploring collective creative processes and the possibilities of connecting radically different social contexts and realities through art. She developed projects with adolescents, worked with elderly populations in rural areas, and also collaborated with people with intellectual disabilities to create spaces for sharing ideas and knowledge through means of artistic expression.
Floating Structure is a collaborative art project, which was developed together with Startti residential home inhabitants, and continued with the residents of the Myötätuuli mental health rehabilitation centre. Floating Structure places special relevance on the sharing and exhibiting the participants’ creative skills and concerns. The project waters dormant seeds of creativity by stimulating the residents to express and visualize aspects of their inner world. The Floating Structure created for Art Ii Biennial revealed and shaped the results of these processes.
The project deals with the materiality of water, utilizing a communal and socially engaged participatory process. In the form of a workshop, the artwork gives a voice to ‘the other’. It draws our attention to the symbolic nature of water: the river and the flowing stream as notions of the inner world. The project was carried out as part of the social art residency programme in KulttuuriKauppila and produced together with Lähde! Empowering daily life with art project (ESF) and THE HUG Platform for Cultural Cooperation.
