The discussion about creative residencies can be structured assessing three main topics:
- The role of cultural institutions (cultural organisations and NGOs).
What is their role nowadays considering the challenges we are witnessing? - Cultural mobility
What does it mean to move and how much creative and cultural residencies are spaces from which to start and where to come back? - The meaning of “advocate for
What is our role in this specific context? What do we need to ask for in order to work in these specific elements?
Somehow, to answer to those questions, we can re-connect with the concept of democracy and its basic principles: respect for people’s rights, fair application of norms and laws, active participation.
Speaking about cultural democracy we will think about cultural accessibility, at the valorisation of diversity and even on the experimenting different forms of decision-making.
When we mention cultural institutions, we also mean residences because they are part of this bigger ecosystem that does not exist in vacuum and it’s multifaced.
Culture is the arena in which we can experiment and in which we can experience.
Residencies are the place where we are called to collaborate and nurture new democratic imaginaries.
Being a coordinator over residency, feeling the change
You cannot just be coordinator over residency, you need to be an accountant and to be the cleaner, you need to be a shoulder to cry on, you need to be everything for the artist of your team. The time in which we live in is very challenging but also very good, in the sense that we can feel the change.
The change is somewhere here lingering around us; things are moving, things are starting to roll and so a cross sectoral collaboration is always more important.
Of course, it’s a double-edged sword because that also requires so much more from people who are working, and it requires so many different skills.
Porosity
Residences for their inner nature must be porous: this means that they must be open to the broader civil society while simultaneously catch and tackle democratic and social challenges, which is always a complex task.
The society is changing so fast. After the pandemic, for example, the emergency regards also mental health, we speak of a sort of global burnout meaning that there are many ingredients in the air, but we all feel the pressure of genocide that we are witnessing to, persecutions for political behaviours and freedom of speech.
Furthermore, what is becoming quite crucial nowadays is the fact that mainstream institutions need to have a constant open dialogue with the independent sector.
If we don’t support these places – and these places will disappear – the market will lose the novelties, the ideas that generally are nourishing the mainstream market from the ground, from the grassroots experiences.
Let’s think about all the processes of gamification now applied to cultural heritage.
These were huge experimentations that were taking place in grassroots or independent spaces and became mainstream only in a second moment.
Any subculture in the end becomes mainstream culture. That’s how the circle gets round. The challenge again lies in supporting these ideas and we know a lot of residences are giving the space for more experimental and radical ideas that can bring some kind of change.
Providing spaces for creativity,
experimenting more horizontal decision-making mechanisms
Let’s go back to the 90s in the UK, where the first forms of co-programming were born and are now very diffused. The Commons were more radical, in the sense that they were questioning power relations within the organisations.
And then let’s go forward, until the Pandemic: all the spaces that were common based were serving the lack in the system. In many occasions, to fill the lack of spaces for doing rehearsals, for elaborating new ideas, for experimenting with different interlocutors, Common Places were offering themselves and their time for creating this kind of supports.
Another layer is related to elaborating norms, so elaborating juridical frameworks in different areas. Italy was of course one of the cases in which legal norms were applied and designed for transforming public properties in places for a civic use. That was quite an important change. Again, in the idea of reformulating the relation between public and private in a third way.
Finally, I would like to focus on how top-down cultural policy making and the cultural realm were creating a new space for elaborating, negotiating and creating a set. I would say that the impact of the Commons has been quite important for the residences but as well for this idea of porosity for cultural institutions because this kind of circularity coming from the bottom-up experiences and then becoming mainstream has been the same for the Commons. Commons are entering in what is known as participatory governance and The European Commission was using a lot this idea of participatory governance.
So, again, there is this huge question mark: where is the independency? Where is the the fight? Where is the market? And this is what we’re learning nowadays post Pandemic.
We’re surfing there and maybe the creative residencies and the cultural residencies are really playing their game in this kind of in-between that we really need to be aware of more and more.
Power
We need to distribute the power we have, but we also need to get some power back.
It is something we need to reclaim even more; there’s a dependency on the funders, on so many external factors, on the political situation, on the democratic process of who are we voting to be our leaders but we do have some power in there, maybe it’s miniscule, maybe it’s very unnoticeable, but we have it and we need to reclaim it to be stronger as a sector and to work together internationally.
A very crucial point is the one concerning residencies as places for research.
We see more and more residencies happening without expectation of results or presentation from the artists. The core idea is practise of non-productive practises.
Giving the space to not do anything: walking, cooking, just sitting together in a room.
All those activities that help to give more freedom of thoughts and that will give you a different way of expressing and doing what you are trying to do.
We are so stuck in this vicious circle of writing applications, waiting for the applications to be approved, raising funding, welcoming artists, seeing which column got burned out.
So many questions that are constantly going through our head and care is also collective care and individual care because it cannot exist one without the other.
They have to co-exist.