The Art Residency Research Network (ARRN): Our journey coming together as group
Date: 19 August 2021
2020 has been a year of disruption, one in which we have been forced to stand still, hold our breath and experience forced closures and sudden and painful losses. The global pandemic has obstructed human life and suspended our day-to-day routines but it has also generated space for other forms to thrive. Indeed, it has been through our active engagement with the non-human (i.e. the land, the animals and our surroundings) that virtuality and ecology have acquired new meanings, enhancing the need to get together, share and care, to think and be otherwise. In this context, a small group of researchers and practitioners studying artists’ residencies (Pau Cata, Morag Iles, Miriam La Rosa, Patricia Healy McMeans and Angela Serino) have come together to share research, pique imagination, reflect on how residencies have been affected by the current zeitgeist, look at today’s challenges and importantly define new possible findings to keep with us for the next future. Our gatherings have initially taken the form of virtual meetings, through which we have explored creative online tools that enable us to support and exchange with one another. The invitation to participate at the Saari Summer Well in Finland has made this process of exchange even more relevant, prompting us to turn our working condition into an occasion, a ‘space’, for production and self-reflection. As a constellation of moments and spaces where we get to know each other better, share our artistic and curatorial practices and create in collaboration, we asked ourselves: can our process, based on periodic virtual meetings and the sharing of ideas and resources, be considered an extended hybrid residency? What if we understand our collaborative efforts as a long term virtual-analog opportunity to speculate on a yet-to-become artists’ residency model? We are exploring – in theory and practice, as well as virtually and analogically – the meaning of presenciliality (the condition of 'being present’) and its others, chronodiversity, radical hospitality and cross-cultural resonances, the disruption of habitus, the perception of space and the creative act as embedded in wider ecologies. Keywords: chronodiversity, radical hospitality, emergence, ecologies, residential practice.