Contemplating art workshops as a vehicle for border crossing and creative tourism

Abstract

This paper explores the history of artistic migrations, focusing specifically on art workshops and their capacity to facilitate African artists’ cross-border tourism. Drawing from constructivist approaches to border studies and a historical approach to qualitative enquiry, this paper identifies three pivotal events in history that led to the establishment and use of art workshops as tools to facilitate migration and cross-cultural engagements amongst artists. Colonisation in Africa is one of such events. The second is the creation of the Triangle Network of workshops in New York in 1982 by Sir Anthony Caro and Robert Loder. The third is the Grenzganger (Border Crossing) Initiative which came after the fall of the iron curtain in 1991. The paper argues that in addition to art workshops being a space for creative stimulation, art workshops can also facilitate legal cross-border tourism, migration and the exchange of ideas between artists through cross-cultural and transnational engagements. The paper established that as artists cross borders, their creative skills and cultural histories also relocate and intermingle with the cultures and histories of other artists and artistic productions across the world. This implies that art and artists serve as vehicles for the transference and cross-fertilisation of experiences, histories, creativities, ideas, and skills across borders.