Four books on artist residencies

‘Residencies Reflected’ examines international artist residencies through a societal and ecological lens, highlighting the experimental and creative freedom they foster and their roles in addressing ecological crises. It explores the information residencies generate about places, environments, and communities, alongside their artistic, poetic, psychological, and social significance. A key aim of this book is to reveal the often-invisible creative processes behind artworks born during residencies. Through nine essays and one interview, curators, artists, and academics delve into the potential of residencies as spaces for community and artistic development. Edited by Irmeli Kokko, the publication is produced by Saari Residence in collaboration with Mousse Publishing.

This book offers an alternate lens to rethink how we process art—and life—inside residency time. If you have done a residency, or are going to take part in one; if you are passionate about supporting artists’ processes in the best possible ways; or if you are fascinated by theories of time and how artists have worked with time, then this project amalgamates many threads to help you arrive at possible future ways of thinking.

Looking beyond the conventional and managerial, Angela Serino sets out in search of what is put in motion by the experience of being “in residence” that is not instantly visible or quantifiable. In a culture where the pressure to produce tangible results is paramount, Configurations of Time holds space for an environment that values process in its own right, unlearning and research. Finding inspiration from a wide range of artists’ works and conceptualisations of time in science and cultural theory, such as Carlo Rovelli, Lisa Baraitser, and María Puig de la Bellacasa, Serino looks at how time is spent in residencies through the different and overlapping concepts of space time, care time, and soil time.

Through speculative storytelling and fostered by analytical hypotheses and first-hand experiences, this book offers an alternative reference guide. It creates a highly poetic space, providing insights into the ethics of the residency field in today’s accelerated and contested times.

In a house where several people live and work together, the kitchen is the hub: it is the meeting place where people engage in informal discourse. This is also the case with the Arc Artist Residency in Romainmôtier: the kitchen was the beating heart of the institution. It was a place where artists gathered when they took a break from their research, where they cooked and ate together, where other guests joined them. This book is inspired by the kitchen, by its conviviality, the sharing of food and knowledge, the experiments that took place there.

This book covers a period of four years in the life of the Arc Artist Residency – a institution of the Migros Culture Percentage – from January 2015 to December 2018, under the direction of Sally De Kunst. During this time, Arc continually reinvented itself, constantly questioning the idea of a residency as an arts institution from the inside and out, challenging values, experimenting with new ways of working together and questioning socio-cultural ecology. The Arc was more than just a chronology of artists in residence, projects or research pathways – it was a breathing organism, an experience of living and working together, a community of plural practice created by artists, experts and other guests, an ecosystem in which the sharing of research was an integral part of the research itself. The editors would like this book to pass on the experience and knowledge gained during this time to a wider audience.

This publication is a handbook for artistic collaboration. It is neither a retrospective of Arc nor a documentation of the artistic projects that took place there.

Artist residencies provide space, time, and concentration for making art, doing research and for reflection. Residencies are crucial nodes in international circulation and career development but also invaluable infrastructures for critical thinking and artistic experimentation, cross-cultural collaboration, interdisciplinary knowledge production, and site-specific research. The globalization process and the demands of the creative economy have had an impact on artist residencies. Ecological and geopolitical urgencies are now also affecting them more and more. In response, many residencies today actively search for more sustainable alternatives than the current neoliberal condition allows for artistic practice. With a range of critical insights from the field of residencies, this book asks what the present role of artist residencies is in relation to artists and the art ecosystem amid transformations in society.