Dream Grants:
Application Process, Stories and Deadlines.

How Dreamers made their Dream come true, and how you can do the same.

There is a dream inside every Borderling. Dreams can be big or small and realising the dream can change the person, the community or even the whole space-time- continuum of the universe. Borderland supports dreams with art grants and deadline is 29 April. We pay money to cover expenses for materials, equipment and transport so your dream can come true.

This newsletter tells the story of how some Borderlings gave birth to their dream and how the community helped with dream grants, enthusiasm and personal support.
 

Annie-Locke Scherer received a Dream grant to pay for one of last years largest art projects, called Kinetikami, an installation with Interactive LED shaped as an arch with miuri-ori origami pattern. Even though she got injured with carpal tunnel during the building, and having too few people to work with her, she fulfilled her dream. 


“Of course the project contributed to my personal growth! Large scale projects are always a huge learning process. I’m getting better at remembering the "little details" and thinking ahead of what could be problems going from idea to actual built project,” states Annie-Locke Scherer.

Umfi Umfi was the largest sound stage at Borderland in 2017 pumping out EDM from early evening till after sunrise in a setting that actually set the DJ in the centre of the dance floor. Creators Morten Ipsen, Jo Hanna Gertz Andersson and Malene Brøchner wanted to create a DJ scene where anyone could play with minimal management from the organizing trio.  Morten Ipsen wanted to see harmony come out of the chaos of not being the boss.

“A natural balance happens when you are not afraid of losing control,” says Morten Ipsen.

Morten and partner Jo Hanna needed the art grant money to not be put financially back to they would have to work more paid jobs to support their life and their newborn baby,

“The grant allows us to live the life we’ve been inspired to at Borderland without having to work to make the dream come true,” he says.

The chaos of Umfi Umfi made Johan L. Heinstedt panic as he unwillingly was signed up as DJ. He is a lover of Big Sound that throbs merciless through the lower body intestines with 20-50 Hz. but going outside your experience can make you panic. Good friends trusted him the challenge to be healthy and educating. Borderland is a space to be pushed outside the daily routine of acquired skills and jobs. They had signed him up to play a set even that he had never DJ’ed before to push him out of his comfort zone. Johan L. Heinstedt had two days to learn the DJ when he saw his name on the DJ list.

“Actually conducting a dancing audience, let alone manoeuvring the knobs, levers and turntables was new territory for me. I had yet to learn how to actually DJ. And as the big day approached, I started to seriously panic. I borrowed headphones from another DJ, was introduced to the gear, and finally got private lessons from the pros,” Johan L. Heinstedt states.

“The Borderland is more than just a party. The people, the art, the workshops, the atmosphere, etc. all contributes to this medley of experiences that makes up our shared exploring of dreams and reality”, Johan L. Heinstedt states.

Deadline for Dream grants is 29 April

The Borderland organisation supports creative contributions of participants in the form of Dream grants. Anyone can apply and anyone can vote on what dreams get fundet. Only dreams with enought votes are covered. Those grants reimburse dream expenses after the event.

Applying for a Dream grant is done by creating an account, and writing a description of your dream on the Dreams Platform. The application deadline is 29 April 2018. Don’t miss it!

By Editor

History of Dream Grants

The history of The Borderland Dream grants starts back in 2002, when a few of us who have been involved in Borderland since the beginning were involved in co-creating Futuredrome. Futuredrome was a-burner-like-live-action-role playing-event about a fictional party city in a dessert. All citizens in Drome-city had to party, all days, all years, the whole life. If you didn’t party you was caught by the Clown Police and they forced you to party, and if you were partying very hard the evolution started to backwards and you become a party animal; monkeys, beavers, cats, rabbits, foxes, badgers. 1,500 people were living in this city for almost a week built in a lime-stone quarry and It Was Awesome! But it was also a big event-production of months of preparations. So we decided that next time we did something similar we will either have a big budget or go self-organized. 

Since 2010 we have co-created The Borderland in self-organized way. The initial idea to Borderland was to create a new nation, a nation for all it citizens to explore and prototype on the border between dreams and realities. From the beginning the vision to enable a year around both a digital and physical tribal platform for mutual self exploration and creation. The vision was a bigger one week festival and then 51 weeks of smaller events both on-line and off-line. 

At 2011 Borderland received a public grant on 100,000 SEK that we used for to produced the first Dream grant platform and for the first Dream grants Fund. The idea behind self organized is radical cocreation and inclusion, because cocreators knows best whats needed and how to explore the borderland between dreams and realities in collaboration with others. Network is simply stronger and more efficient than hierarchy. And to organize this we need digital platforms.

2013 the Dream Grant Guides came up with the principle ”Everything can be Art”. By treating everything, even classic festival infrastructures for example toilets (Shitopia) and entrance (The Port), as art The Borderland could become even a more fantastic and meaningful place. A space where everything we co-create become Art, and all of us become Artists. 

The Borderland have a history of giving away 60-80% of it’s total budget to Dream Grants and we are proud to announce that 1.5 Million SEK will be put into the Dream Grant Fund and Fund 51 this year. 

To quote Friedensreich Hundertwasser ” If one person dreams alone... It is only a dream. When many people dream together... It is the beginning of a new reality.”

Dream big, folks!
 
By Mathias Gullbrandson
 

Making Dreams Happen

...or "how to not kill those in charge of paperwork out of sheer lust."

(From editor: Dear reader, please feel free to skip this section and scroll to the next "How-To" if you don't want to read our angry and furious introduction)

I am always angry. Most of the time I am also Fucking Furious… 

Moreover, I hate all aspects of bureaucracy: the paperwork, the endless backs and forths, and the tendency of fund givers to always fund you just below what you need to make the project happen . Even more, I hate to wait for a “greenlight" in order to start a project that I know will be a huge success as long as I’m handed the money and everyone just have an ounce of trust in me and a bagful of shut the fuck up…

But I digress. My shortcomings as a human being to control and temper my rage nonetheless, I actually happen to be an excellent dream producer!
Back in the muggle world I created an open air music festival that ran for three days in the summer for six years  and right now I’m launching a cross media empire with the intention to infiltrate pop music and Hollywood and discretely make the world kinder (if you do music, comics, video games or animations and want in, hit me up!).

Within the Borderland community I’ve helped create The Dreamers Passage in 2015 (an open space to contemplate, discuss and experience dreams), the Original Dojo in 2016 (a temple for the angry body and a space, intended for meditation, though it was mainly used as a fuck-tent by drugged up hippies…) and in 2017 I helped the Monster Battle Arena by creating a SFX-library and a groovy soundtrack to fight to . I’ve also produced anthems for burns and burners: my song ‘Starshine’ is an ode to everything that went down (or up) at the Malmö Urban Burn, aka The Devolution; and such radical people as Jorinda Dangerzone and Doctor Rave now have their very own theme songs… 
I’ve hosted talks at the Space (helping it stay alive and vibrant) and done some web awareness campaigning for The Probability Probe (which was a Burning Man project in 2017) and I try to whip up the occasional shit storm in the local community helping happy burner cultist become aware of the fact that they’re creating the same society they are trying to escape…

And I have digressed even more! This was supposed to be an article on How to Make a Dream at the Borderland, not on me being angry and plugging my self to an unknowing herd of sheep!
So here we go: 

How to Make a Dream at the Borderland

A step by step guide.

How to Make a DREAM™ Happen at the Borderland

The radical business venture way

How to Survive the Borderland