IF Innovation Foundation

Fund: $45,000

IF Innovation Foundation is a Los Angeles-based platform for the production of works in experimental contexts and in the public realm, with a particular commitment to artists working in new media, film, and technology. The organization will be collaborating with artist Sharon Lockhart, who has worked for several years with a group of young women from the Youth Sociotherapy Center in Rudzienko, Poland. Lockhart’s engagement with them over the years produced a body of work including films, photography, and publications, which forms a portrait of her collaborators and addresses topics of children’s agency, freedom, and subjectivity. In 2018, Lockhart organized The Gotland Summer Residency, which was hosted by the Baltic Art Center (BAC), and invited some of the women who had recently aged-out of the Center to travel to Sweden for a three-week residency that explored the history of collective living. Lockhart and her team lived together with the young women, forming a communal household. Together they read Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, the story of a girl’s resilience in a dystopian Los Angeles and her struggle to create a new utopian community. The group observed the night sky with astronomer Gunnar Wilen, who taught them about the stars and constellations. Swedish artist Matts Leiderstam discussed his experience in a gay collective household as a young adult in the 70s and 80s, and Gunilla Lundahl and Kerstin Kärnekull presented a history of collective living experiments in Sweden and reflected on their personal experiences raising families in collectives. Lockhart is now creating a film developed from the group’s experiences together in Gotland and centered on the theme of looking into the unknown and having the tenacity to imagine a better future. The film will be screened at local children’s advocacy organizations and juvenile centers, where Lockhart will also organize educational workshops for youths, aimed at empowering their voices.