Petra Martinez

I'm a visual artist graduated from Art School MAA (2012) and have a Master of Arts degree from Aalto-university Visual Culture and Contemporary Art program (2018). In my MA thesis "SUBURB seedlings" I studied possibilities of socially engaged and environmental art located in city-space. I have experience in art education, youth-work and working with different minorities. Since 2013 I've been a board member and worked as a teacher in Art School MAA.

Lately I've been working mostly with community art projects on environmental basis. Large scale of different crafting skills allow me use many kinds of mediums but last couple of years I've been working mostly with urban gardening and nearby forests as a methods with various groups.

Through process-based works and projects I'm always aiming for social justice and environmental understanding. I'm interested about identities, social behaviour, nature-relation, learning by doing, public space, wastelands, forests and communities.

My socially engaged environmental art project "Pajupalatsi" (2014-2017) was an experience from where I gained a lot of knowledge on how to connect local institutions, organisations and dwellers and work together so that everyone received their valuable goals. We collaborated for example with library, youth-house, art school, cultural centrum and of course local inhabitants. Link to the page. Pajupalatsi-project led to participate an EU Erasmus+ project "Concrete Jungle - Urban Gardening, a youth work tool for social inclusion" in Berlin (2016) with organisations from over 10 different countries. Link to the project blog.

I believe that there is a lot of potential for finding a tools for the topic with non-formal education, horizontal learning and collective knowledge. But for me, I think, the most fruitful learning lessons have come outside of the artist circles or, at least, mixed groups.