Artists residencies: which kind of institutions are they? A conversation with Laura Windagher. (part 2/2)
Angela Serino (AS): Residency programs are mostly described as spaces for freedom and experimentation, where there is an emphasis to support open and research-based processes that do not necessarily need to materialize into new finished works or projects. However, as you have noticed, this freedom and openness can also be 'limited' and 'deceptive'.
According to you what are the consequences of such relation between conceiving a residency as place for an open research and at the same time expecting that this process is somehow made public during its development?
Laura Windhager (LW): I believe that it is important to think about more sustainable programmes, to enable programmes, that are geared towards an ongoing dialogue and long-term cooperations, rather than reiterating precarious and project based working models. The potentiality of residency programmes lies in its ability to function as a missing link between art school and a more established career. With what I have described above as a post-institution, it also offers a platform to un-think the structures and mechanisms of the institutions that we have unconsciously internalised in so far. Long term production and cooperation entails a form of radical hospitality that foster social values like friendship, responsibility and wellbeing, a space for repose and regeneration.
“The promotion and adaption of wireless technologies, and their annihilation of the singularity of place and event, is simply an after-effect of new institutional requirements. In its despoliation of the rich textures and indeterminations of human time, 24/7 simultaneously incites and unsustainable and self-liquidating identification with its fantasmatic requirements; it solicits an open-ended but always unfinished investment in the many products for faciliating this identification. (…) In spite of the omnipresent proclamations of the compatibility, even harmonization, between human time and the temporalities of networked systems, the lived lives of this relationship are disjunctions, fractures, and continual disequilibrium.” (p. 31) When Jonathan Cracy talks about this hallucination of a permanent presence, it becomes understandable how a residency could undermine this constant drive for availablity, productivity, consumerability. Exploring social structures that are rather built on trust and friendship rather than the mimesis of precarious working conditions, the offer a space of privacy, that can is needed for the nurturing of a subjectivity. In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt elaborates a distinction between the exhausting resulting from labor, and the regeneration that occurs within the shielded domesticity.
AS: Which sort of 'Production' is in a residency?
Already in 2006, Hito Steyerl and Boris Buden described the work produced in a residency as very close to the contemporary conditions of the immaterial workers. They wrote: "The 'product' which is expected is performative, not object-based: it implies the creation of relations, of communication, of networks. Thus 'residency work' belongs to a type of affective and symbolic labour, which is becoming increasingly important today. It consists of meetings, greetings, small talk, exchange of e-mail addresses, networking, in short it is in a sense political work already without any other consequences then replicating itself. The relational 'product' is the creation of a networked space, which sustains, changes and enlarges itself gradually. It is created by a sort of labour, which is no longer separated from an autonomous sphere of politics but has pervaded it." ["The Artist as Res(den)t", Etcetera 104 (December 2006), Belgium]
In such situation, resident artists live in a condition of temporal and spatial fragmentation and extended temporariness that - according to Steyerl and Buden - weaken the impact of their work and their role in society.
After some years since their analysis what do you think is the current development of the residency programs? Do you see more awareness among artists, residencies operators, and art professionals of such risks?
LW: Buden and Steyerl critique is partly aimed at what I would advocate, in a more radical way. Instead of focusing on the actual materialisation of artistic labour, I believe that the potential of residencies lies in its ability to host, to nurture, to envision a social institution outside of a consumerist logic. When I look at spaces like Kunsthius SYB or Les laboratoires d’AUbervilliers, the focus there has already shifted to more sustainable practices, practices that embrace the communities they are embedded in and that are geared towards sustainability and ephemerality at the same time. If, as I have stated before, one characteristic of residencies is that they are rooted in an inexorable present, one way to alter residencies might be to stress their volatile character. In an age where the idea of constant labor, of working without a pause, of fluid economic cycles without disruptions, non-working is un uncompromised interuption of this need and urge to be productive. The fact that nothing is being produced - at least nothing that can be bought and sold - might be its most radical perspective.
Are there ways and new/other approaches to residency programmes that intentionally avoid these risks? or where the temporariness of such programs bring also positive effects both for the artists and for the hosting community?
I think BAU could be such a format. BAU was founded by Lisa Mazza, Simone Mair and Filipa Ramos, with the intention of establishing a biannual programme of residencies with invited artists, curators, researches and other cultural producers.
They challenge the classical model of a residency through different formats such as field trips, screenings, walks, eating together, working together, and creating dialogues with diverse and transversal audiences.
BAU stresses the “encounter as a privileged form of exchange, in which coexistence and cooperation are central factors for the definition of a common space”, without neglecting the communities and localities they are embedded in.
I like the idea that their name is derived from Bauhaus, with its focus on building, the aspect of living and working together, the state of permanent construction, that is not bound to a physical space but rather travels with the subjectivities that create these intimate encounters.
Laura Windhager is a theorist and art historian based in Vienna. She has previously worked at Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary and as a research assistant for Contemporary and Modern Art art the University of Vienna. She was a 2012 grant holder for the Steirischer Herbst festival in Graz Austria and is currently working on her PhD thesis at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.
