Lxs académicxs Lara García Díaz y Pascal Gielen argumentan que la condición de precariedad que aqueja a lxs emprendedorxs culturales podría ser el fértil aunque oscuro semillero de nuevas formas de "comunar", capaces de exceder la trágica falta de recursos estables en el campo cultural.
Artists residencies: which kind of institutions are they? A conversation with Laura Windagher. (part 1/2)
What kind of Institution is an artist-in-residency? Why does it have an ambiguous and hybrid status? How can we rethink the artistic production taking place in such programs today? I talked of these and other questions with Vienna-based art historian and theorist Laura Windhager. Read our conversation here.
Angela Serino (AS) : You have talked of residencies as 'post-institutions', which main focus is only on the time of the present and historicity is splintered up.
Could you elaborate more about this definition?
Laura Windhager (LW): To get an understanding or approximation of what residencies are, it is helpful to develop an apprehension of their relationship towards the process of institutionalisation and the ambivalent and unstable relationship towards institutions. This approach seems to be especially relevant to conceptualise them, given the residencies’ precarious existence and their obscure relationship towards production and the visibility of production. Using the word 'institution', following Pascal Gielen’s understanding as being a space where hegemonic discourses are being produced, reproduced, altered and discarded, to describe or talk about residencies becomes perhaps a little ambiguous. By now, residency programmes are definitely an integral part of the art world at large, they have become integral for artists, curators and theorists to have at least one in their curriculum vitae. Yet, they are not exhibition spaces per definition. Residencies are sites or spaces of production, they are process oriented, open ended, they require no final product – at least in most programmes. But this openness and freedom for creativity and production is also limited and deceptive: whilst no actual artwork or finished text might be expected, it is common practice that the residents give public talks, have an open studio day or even finish with a solo or group exhibition. Residencies may not be public spaces by definition, in the sense that museums are, nonetheless they have a certain degree of visibility: they have their open studio days or even an exposé of artistic practices in an exhibition format. Yet if one approaches them functionally, they are sites of production rather than exhibition spaces. They are a post-institution in so far, as there is a collapse of art production and art presentation.
AS: 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?
LW: Residencies offer a space where life and work collide. They are sites of production and sites for temporary inhabitation. They allow for the production of art, theory, ideas and concepts. But they also function as exhibition sites with a certain degree of public visibility. Most residency programmes are neither a private and secluded retreat, nor are they a constantly and publicly accessible exhibition site, but a compound. Even though these residencies are defined as sites of production and spaces for artistic freedom, they all have a certain institutionalised exhibition format nevertheless, be it as open studio days or a final curated exhibition. As radical as the residencies position themselves, the moment of exhibition always harbours a danger of relapsing into the ossifying moment of institutionalisation. The artists and theorists within the residency programme cannot choose between privacy and publicness, the opening of their studio is not their decision but mostly the institution’s. Despite the fact that the main focus of these presentations and institutional representations is not geared towards the exhibition of finished objects, the stress is rather on the open-endedness and processuality of artistic practices, residencies exemplify a certain post-studio problematic in so far as they embody the movement or shift from exhibiting the finished art object or commodity to exhibiting the actual artistic process. By exhibiting and making the process of artistic production publicly accessible, the attention and interest has shifted from the self-contained artwork to the process of production, so that the site of production becomes a kind of “shop window” of artistic labour, which functions as an exhibition programme.
But by making a more or less invisible process the object of reception, this links residencies to the practices of immaterial labour and the post-Fordist working conditions with their flexible working hours, immaterial labour, the dissolution of routinisation, and the drill to excessive individualisation.
AS: How this affect the work of the resident artists, and of the residency curators and directors according to your experience, and what you have researched so far?
LW: I am not sure if I can answer this question in general. Most of my research has its origin in a collaborative research project with Lisa Mazza. We had a look into different categories of residencies, from ephemeral residencies such as the Caribic residency, as well as very institutionalised sormats like Delphina foundation or Gasworks in London. So I don’t think it would be possible to deduct a general effect, as the artists vary as much as the residency programmes. If you apply, say, for Kunsthuis SYB or Büchsenhausen in Innsbruck, your artistic practice and/or research focus is most likely different to an artist who applies to “factory residencies” like Gasworks or Solitude.
