Building on models of collective living and engagement, Lockhart and BAC is hosting a three-week summer residency for six girls on a farm on northern Gotland August 6-26th, 2018. During this time, Lockhart and her team will be living together with the young women, forming a collective household where they are creating a community based on trust and respect in the shared duties, joys, and responsibilities of creating a home and new collaborative works of art in the form of film, photos and textile.

Once they age out of the Youth Sociotherapy Centre, the girls are separated from friends with whom they spent most of their young lives. At the residency on Gotland the girls are focussing on working towards their own imagined futures. They are participating in a program of workshops that will teach them skills they will need to navigate adult life: cooking, organizing a home and developing their speaking and writing – also in English. Activities include workshops with local artists, architects, and designers. The girls are working with architect Jenny Lundahl, textile designer Gunila Axén, potter Eva-Marie Kothe, as well as choreographer Camilla Båge, to learn how to create scale models for collective living, mathematics furniture restoring, pottery and movement.

At group dinners hosted by the collective, visiting lecturers like the architect Kerstin Kärnekull and artist Matts Leiderstam are presenting informal talks centered on Sweden’s unique history of alternative living. The young women have taken a short course with the astronomer Gunnar Welin to gain new tools to observe and absorb the landscape and sky in a new environment. Lena Pasternak, director Baltic Centre for Writers and Translators, organized a discussion on the daily life of a writer and poetry reading with the polish resident writers Krystyna Dąbrowska and Pawel Śpiewak.