'Imagine a world without travel? Artist residencies in the future present' by Taru Elfving

The year 2020 marks the institute’s 30th anniversary. In conjunction with the article series highlighting the past three decades of our residency programs, we invited Finnish curator and researcher Taru Elfving to critically reflect on the significance and role of artist residencies today.

The pandemic has given us a glimpse of a world without travel. This world seems simultaneously extremely unusual and eerily familiar. Months without travel were pretty much the norm only a few decades ago, even for many professionals in the arts and the academia in Finland.

A world without travel is out of the ordinary, of course, only for a fraction of the Earth’s human population. Borders have never been open for everyone. Nor has everyone had the financial means or social status necessary for the privilege to travel. Very few, after all, have ever been able to aspire to become cosmopolitan world citizens - a mere one percent of people took half of all flights in the world pre-pandemic. While enforced migrations are accelerating in the present, due to climate change and its linked conflicts, these migrations largely occur regionally rather than across the oceans.

A return to some bygone world without travel is, however, frankly out of question. Prior to the virtual connections of today, the fates of the world’s populations - human and more-than-human - have already been intimately woven together prior to global capitalism by centuries of crusades, expeditions, colonialism, and slavery. Now both the extracted matter and data keeps on circulating, while the mobility of most humans has been dramatically restricted for a moment.

What kind of a journey is this momentary un-travelling in itself? What may be the transformations it spells for the arts? How to imagine the future of artist residencies if travel can no longer be taken for granted?

What?

The three decades of the Finnish Cultural Institute in New York offer a multifaceted prism to the changes in the circulation of creative professionals across the Global North. In the last thirty years, following the end of the Cold War, global connectivity has accelerated exponentially thanks to both affordable travel and online networks. During this time artist residencies have also become a key element of international career development in the arts. Whereas a residency in one of the cosmopolitan centres of the art world may have been a deeply transformative experience for many young creative professionals in the 1990’s, today artists arrive in a residency often already well-travelled and virtually connected across the globe.

Residencies may still offer a valuable break from the everyday - of other professional and personal commitments as well as the habitual patterns, familiar discourses, and established contexts of one’s practice. This potential for critical reflection and the opportunity to situate one’s practice anew remains at the heart of residencies. Similarly, the opportunity to take time to embed oneself in a place has generative potential way beyond fast-paced travel. The residency may also be the only space-time where the resident is considered solely an artist - rather than balancing the many hats of their myriad jobs and other everyday roles.

Residency programs have, however, professionalized and diversified, and so have the residents. Residency hopping has become a regular feature at a certain stage of international careerism in the arts. Residencies have been integrated into different institutional models, from artist studios to museums and universities. There is also plenty of criticism of artist residencies as a dubious financial model, more akin to airbnb than support structures for artistic work, and of residencies fuelling touristic or exoticizing approaches. Residencies are also increasingly expected, by artists and funders alike, to be effective and productive, with measurable impacts - whether through art works and exhibitions, professional contacts and media visibility, or work opportunities and income. Yet what kind of significant effects and potentialities might remain unrecognized, unarticulated, and undervalued? 

Why?

European artist colonies of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries have been identified as some of the many historical predecessors of contemporary artist residencies. The colonies were formed by artists who escaped the urban centres to the seaside villages in search of a change of scenery. Later on, the movements out of the cities were more programmatic, such as Black Mountain College in the US, which has served as an inspiration to many 21st Century artist residencies. In between these flights away from urban environments, there have been significant momentums of international artist gatherings in specific cosmopolitan cities, from Paris to New York.

The historical collective migrations of artists in Europe and North America have their roots in specific political moments and societal upheavals, such as industrialization and urbanization, or exiles during wars. These movements provide a useful backdrop for a reflection on the changing conditions that frame and ground international mobility in the arts today: Who has the privilege to choose to travel? Who funds artists’ travel and why? Where is travel oriented towards and which way does it mainly flow? What are the values associated with professional travel?

The pre-history of contemporary artist residencies also highlights the collective nature of mobility. Artists have not solely travelled, but also gathered together - in a more or less organized manner. These collective formations have always had an impact on the local and the international artistic developments. How do contemporary artist residencies appear against this background? The accelerated and expansive global circulation of artists and curators in residencies, alongside biennials and art fairs, has certainly played a significant part in the formation of a global community of peers. It is, however, arguable whether this circulation has been radically more inclusive than its historical precedents. 

While the reach and accessibility of international mobility has expanded, it has become increasingly competitive in openly neoliberal terms. CVs are pitted against each other in one open call after another. Networking has become a necessity for self-organized individuals. Financial precarity pushes the circulation ceaselessly forward, while residencies act as career stepping stones and, at times, pay the rent and even a fee in best cases. Residencies have also often become just another space-time filled endlessly with deadlines for further applications or other commitments, rather than a time and space reserved for the recalibration of one’s practice or experimentation without predefined outcomes. They have also become retreats for the exhausted, rather than retreats from the everyday. What kind of collectivity might be possible in these current conditions?

How?

The global pandemic has forced many, who have the privilege to do so, to withdraw to literal and metaphorical islands. Virtual connections have become indispensable, questioning the arts’ recent addiction to cheap flights across the globe. Feet firmly on the ground, yet our work mostly in the clouds, the question remains as to what exists in-between and beyond the nodes of connections in the ever-expanding networks. It is now necessary to reassess the circulations that make our work in the arts, and our very existence, possible.

While the pandemic has emphasized distancing in all of our everyday practices, it has likewise asserted the urgency to think and act away from detachment. It is the latest reminder of the more-than-human communities which our everyday practices both impact and depend upon. The entwined climate and biodiversity crises have similarly brought home the entanglement of the fates of all life forms. What does it mean to be mobile at this time, when global connections are accelerating the spread of disease and escalating the rampant exploitation of natural and human resources? 

Due to their tempo of months-long stays rather than brief touch-downs, residencies have been able to accommodate quarantine periods, when travel has been otherwise feasible for the residents. Those residencies with flexible enough funding bases have also been quick to adapt and engage more locally based artists or shift their activities online. This has spurred on the establishment of new models already in the making pre-pandemic - founded less on international travel and more on virtual connections.

These developments are simultaneously slowing down actual movements and speeding up online presence. While, on the one hand, locally embedded practices and community building are emphasised, on the other hand international careers require an active presence in virtual professional networks. The cogs do not stop turning, or the oil flowing, even if we stop moving. The ecological footprint of the internet and digital technologies already rivals that of global aviation.

Accelerated circulation, whether air miles or data flows, comes with more than ecological impacts. The transformations in our practices in the arts need to be assessed in terms of their social and cultural sustainability, as well as on their effects on equality and mental wellbeing, to name but a few areas of urgent concern. What kinds of mobility and connectedness could work towards socially just ecological transformations in the arts?

Who?

When everything came to a standstill in March 2020 due to the global pandemic, many colleagues in the arts not only shared a deep sense of uncertainty, but also a momentary feeling of relief. The clearing of calendars added considerably to the financial precariousness of many artists, art workers and organizations. Yet for others, the busyness-as-usual gave way for a desperately needed pause. As the state of exception has been extended for months on end, the pandemic has drawn unequal access to funds as well as time and space into ever sharper focus. Who has the support structures needed for adaptation, for professional reincarnation or amplification online, or for the balancing act of work and private duties of care? 

These challenges have hit not only individuals but also organizations. The financial precarity of many residency organisations has intensified and some long-term residency programs are now threatened with permanent closure. The situation sheds light onto the considerable differences in the funding structures of residencies. Who funds residencies also determines for whom they are. While residencies have in recent decades sprouted everywhere, the residents circulating between them have not equally represented all corners of the world, and even less so the diversity of local artist communities. Strong public and private funding has allowed artists and curators from the Global North access to nearly anywhere. Yet once their flights are halted, the funding streams accompanying the residents also dry up.

The current crisis has simply accentuated the imbalance of power and access that has been persistent, even foundational, in the field of artist residencies, despite all the outspoken ideals and aims of transnational dialogue and collaboration. It is now high time to thoroughly work out what the currently amplified calls for inclusivity and structural change in the arts mean for residencies. Who is not represented, or whose practices are not recognized and supported, and why? This is not a question solely of who travels and where to, but also about how residencies nurture transformative and reciprocal encounters: How could they offer platforms for persistent commitment to listening and hearing across cultural, disciplinary, and a myriad of other differences? How could they facilitate unpredictable trajectories of engagement rather than merely efficient exchanges with predetermined outcomes?

Where?

Could the pandemic be a rupture in the ceaseless, all-pervasive flow of fossil-fuel powered progress towards climate breakdown? What kind of an opening could the pandemic be for artist residencies? Rather than acting as a great leveller, the current state of exception, with all its creative experimentations as well as survival strategies, has shed unprecedented light onto structural inequalities, precarity, and unsustainability that haunt the present.

Many artist residencies have already been actively addressing these concerns in recent years. Some have identified their role as decidedly distinct from the commercial art world, while focusing attention on less market-friendly collective, performative, and interdisciplinary practices. As many cosmopolitan cities are becoming unaffordable for artists, residencies have become significant support structures for the diverse local arts communities. Increasing emphasis is also paid on regionality, as the euro-centric patterns of movement have become evident with all their problems. Funding is redirected more to allow artists in the Global South to travel between the neighboring countries rather than always to the Global North. 

This is just one aspect of the critical rethinking of financial models that is called for today as part of the changing values and practices in the arts. These structural reassessments are also already at the heart of many residencies: For example, residencies operating as collective platforms fostering skills and knowledge needed for ecological reconstruction, residencies with manifestly social agendas, and residencies that offer temporary asylum for artists threatened by political persecution. Residencies are increasingly working not solely across national borders, but also bridging the boundaries between art, science, and other fields of practice.

Through these recalibrated lenses, it is a high time to ask: What does it mean to gain or to grant temporary residence in a specific locality today? What kind of reciprocal promises and obligations come attached to it - for the artist and for the organization?

Now?

Artist residencies have not yet become fully institutionalized. Rather than fitting into a fixed model, they have proven to be agile and adaptable to diverse conditions and contexts, as witnessed also during the pandemic. Virtual and stay-at-home residencies are undoubtedly here to stay and may take myriad forms in the future. A return to accelerated international circulation is unlikely and increasingly undesirable as slower and longer-term commitments, grounded in specific communities and environments, are valued ever more. This paradigm shift might not be such an ill fit for residencies after all.

Time is of the essence here, as residencies work towards socially just and ecologically viable transformations. New support structures are certainly needed for lower-carbon travel options and longer lasting engagements. Yet this also calls for continuities beyond the model of a months-long residency stay, such as collaborations fostered perhaps even for years across distances and between disciplinary or other divides. The work of care and maintenance has to be also then recognized as the very core of residencies and their transformative potential. 

How can residencies of the future be homes away from home - both for those already at home and those for whom nowhere is quite home? How can residencies cultivate sustainable practices on these trembling fault lines of interdependency between home and work, here and elsewhere?

Some residencies will surely continue to follow a productivist logic of curating communities, while others are already working more towards nurturing communities of care and change, gathered around shared concerns. In response to the current planetary crises, a simultaneous emphasis on locally embedded and globally networked approaches is necessary. Residencies can offer safe spaces for this urgently needed hard labor of critically situating our practices in the continuous negotiations between divergent perspectives.

This is the time to take time for collective, embodied, multisensory, imaginative, experimental and immersive inquiries in the face of the many unknowns. What may be needed now, most of all, are residencies as radical space-times for reciprocity, rest, recuperation, and recalibration - as a refusal to return to the old normal and as rehearsals for alternative futures in the present.

*
This essay is indebted to my research for the anthology Contemporary Artist Residencies. Reclaiming Time and Space (Valiz, 2019) and the work of its contributors, but most of all the in-depth knowledge of my co-editor, residency expert Irmeli Kokko.

Taru Elfving is Helsinki-based curator and researcher with a practice focused on site-sensitive investigations at the intersections of ecological and feminist thought. Elfving is currently developing a multidisciplinary platform for artistic research in collaboration with the Archipelago Sea Research Institute of Turku University. Her curatorial projects include Frontiers in Retreat (HIAP 2013-18), Hours, Years, Aeons (Finnish Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2015), Contemporary Art Archipelago CAA (Turku 2011), and Towards a Future Present (LIAF 2008). She has published an extensive body of writing internationally and co-edited publications such as Contemporary Artist Residencies. Reclaiming Time and Space(Valiz, 2019), and Altern Ecologies. Emergent Perspectives on the Ecological Threshold at the 55th Venice Biennale (Frame, 2016). Elfving has a PhD from Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths London (2009).