FLAG-A Shared Horizon

The Flag workshop opens up visual and multisensory thinking as an internal process for University of Lapland´s fashion, textile art and material study students and artist-researchers (authors). Students verbalized and visualised the ideas, thoughts and feelings that led to the initial ideas and material experiments being transformed into sketches and eventually from Flag to Fishnet - The Outlet for Youths installation. The colourful and kinetic installation Net, forthcoming from Flag, represents and mirrors shared horizons of youths during and after the COVID-19 pandemic and its extended global lockdowns. The installation came about in the Agora Hall in the F-Wing of the University of Lapland. Both Flag and Nets are metaphors that look beyond the obvious challenges youths faced during the pandemic, redefining their diverse understandings of hope, fear, needs, and what constitutes novel ideas for the future. Thinking towards the unknown can reveal insights into in the underlying narratives, while arts-based methods can open up new approaches to different challenges faced by society. Net will represent the portrait of the participating youth during December 2021 – February 2022.