The Visiting Artists’ Studio in the Summer Semester 2026/2027 will be led by George Finlay Ramsay
Titled The Most Perfect Crab Anyone Has Ever Seen, the programme for the Visiting Artists’ Studio (VAS) during the Summer Semester 2026/2027 is inspired by Six Memos for the Next Millennium by Italo Calvino. The semester will consist of five intensive sessions, each beginning with a short talk, followed by a workshop and a series of one-to-one sessions. The course is ideal for those interested in writing, performance, or analogue filmmaking. However, participants with no prior experience in these fields are also very welcome.
The Most Perfect Crab Anyone Has Ever Seen
‘Among Zhuangzi's many skills, he was an expert draftsman. The king asked him to draw a crab. Zhuangzi replied that he needed five years, a villa, and twelve servants. Five years later he hadn’t begun the drawing. "I need another five years," said Zhuangzi. The king granted them. At the end of the ten years, Zhuangzi took up his brush and, in an instant, with a single stroke, he drew a crab, the most perfect crab ever seen.’
Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility, Multiplicity and Consistency: using Italo Calvino’s ‘Six Memos for the Next Millennium’ as a structuring principle, we will work and rework a project 5 times before arriving at a form to be presented.
Participants will be asked to bring a project at any stage of development.
Each month will begin with a short talk from George, in which the memo of the month will be discussed with examples of artists and works that exemplify it. This will then be followed by a workshop that draws on the themes of the talk, and we will rework your project with the memo as a guiding principle. One-to-one sessions will allow participants to discuss their projects and get mentorship in order to challenge and support the development of their work. Workshops will draw on writing, performance and 16mm filmmaking, but participants with no experience in these fields are most welcome. The course aims to help participants to hone their ideas into something clear and eloquent, where form and content are intertwined, with storytelling at the centre. The semester will end with a presentation of the projects, with the idea that completion is only ever partial, and perfect crabs don’t exist.
George Finlay Ramsay (b. Dundee, 1988) is an artist using poetry, performance and analogue filmmaking.
His projects to date have involved inventing a service to burn people’s regrets inside volcanoes; his own family enacting a medieval morality play; an interview with Mt. Stromboli; beavers rebuilding the world after a cataclysm; the role of a southern Italian flagellant procession in a family’s process of mourning; and a sixteenth-century manor house falling asleep. He was shortlisted for the Jarman Award 2025 & the Margaret Tait Award in 2023. His work has been presented at PAF Olomouc, Barbican, The Whitechapel Gallery, Rupert Residency and elsewhere.
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| Short URL | https://www.favu.vut.cz/en//f26745/d341063 |