What makes a residency different than but complementary to other existing support structures for art such as galleries, museums, artists’ studios, academies, or project rooms? Is a residency a place to rest or to produce? Does this precious time, rescued, or even stolen from the daily tasks and obligations at home and in one’s studio, offer artists and curators a renewed concentration useful to develop their practice in an open, unpredictable manner? Or, in opposition, are artists and curators submitted to the fate of migration from one residency to another to secure support for their work and thus go in residency simply to be able to produce, as Dieter Lesage provocatively suggests?
my desk (Fall 2014)
Jean-Baptist Joly, director and founder of Schloss Solitude – one of the first residency fellowships in Europe – once stated that “residencies are not museums, since they do not preserve collections”, neither schools “since there are no teachers”, but rather “forums of affinities”. For Joly, what makes a residency unique is the possibility of bringing together a group of talented people in a place imbued with a special history or spirit. “Over the time – he continues – residents develop a sense of closeness, a lasting relationship – in some cases even friendship”. As a research project in its initial phase, “ON Residencies” wants to search for experiences that are in between these opposite positions or trajectories: namely between the understanding of a residency as an idyllic refuge or shelter in the company of peers on the one hand, and the residency as the experience of a solitary mobile worker with no public voice or place in a community on the other.
Stemming from inspiring encounters and thoughtful conversations with resident artists and professionals accumulated over the years at Kunsthuis SYB, together with an expanding body of research gathered from several residency programs in and beyond Europe, “ON Residencies” is at this stage an online collection of texts, documents, images, and experiences poignantly in relation to, but also loosely connected to those questions. Rather than finding plausible answers, “ON Residencies” currently aims at generating concrete occasions and imaginative mechanisms to share – and eventually even multiply – these questions together with guests and other organizations and institutions, both online and on site.
