Tell me what you think about my work and I’ll pay you £30

The open mentoring sessions are an experimental attempt to think about value creation in the arts. Even if you’re not a normal artist, you have to spend so much time on framing your work in the accepted formats: you write catchy statements, you sit in symposiums until your arse hurts, you try to meet up with people who will be “useful” to you at some time in a speculative future. I’ve always been in love with and wanted to be one of those artists who destablise their own practices, and by that I don’t just mean people who sometimes publicly bitch about institutions, but people (and most of them seem to be women) who set up their own structures for publicising, distributing and making their work. People who don’t rely on reviews, sales or the gallery circuit to add value to their work. Anyhow, so when it came to deciding what I am going to do with this great privilege of having money to spend on mentoring, I thought I’d like to attract some different people to this process, people I don’t know yet and people who might not usually get paid to give feedback. I was also struck by the fact that these mentoring processes still remain very private and wanted to see what happens if you decide on a more public consultation.

Rosalie Schweiker