residency.project overlaps with art.public.urban-space.
For 20 years since the beginning of freeDimensional, hosting and hospitality have been a part of my art practice. I’ve been hosted in places like No Lugar (Quito), Via Farina (Milan), The Flux Factory (NYC), Sante Fe Art Institute, Berlin Office and the HomeBase Project* (Berlin), Espira La Espora (Manágua), Winter Camp hosted by the Institute of Network Cultures (Amsterdam); Wasan Island (Ontario) for ten years of summer meetings on art and human rights; by a catholic priest in Enugu (Nigeria) in order to research a Nollywood production-center years ago and recently by artist Santidio Pereira as the first guest artist to his home residential project in the northeast of Brazil (Piauí); as well as The Sanctuary (on Short Mountain, Middle Tennessee by the Radical Faeries) and Tamara (Portugal) communes over the years...to name a few.
In these contexts experiments were often the goal, such as the building of Tadamon refugee council from a long-term residency with The Townhouse Gallery (Cairo); rapid-response critical dialogues with artists and activists at Art Omi (Hudson) with Ma Thida, Taslima Nasrin, Belarus Free Theatre, the National Coalition Against Censorship, etc; and a marathon residency alongside Dawn of the Anthropocene by LigoranoReese, a three-ton ice sculpture depicting THE FUTURE in Madison Square Park (NYC) on the occasion of the 2014 UN Climate Summit.
Over the years, I developed safety hosting guidelines** for art spaces around the world, and a special guide on practice, history and ethics for the NYC Artist Safety Prototype at the Historic Westbeth, as well as a Host-an-Occupier pamphlet for citizens hosting activists during Occupy Wall Street with the Danish collective Wooloo. I recently got to try out their new project Human Hotel for a stay in Venice; I wanted to test-run the process in order to incorporate its artist service into Luv 'til it Hurts, an intergalactic project on HIV & stigma. I live in the same neighborhood in São Paulo as Lanchonete.org, so it is much more than a ‘residency project’ and moreover, I'm lucky to feel apart of communities in both NYC and São Paulo.
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*Israeli artist, urbanist and founder of the HomeBase Project, Anat Litwin visited Lanchonete.org in São Paulo during for short research residency in 2019 to share her ‘artistic hosting’ concept, a unique bookend for my visit to her Berlin project a few years before.
**In addition to Host-an-Occupier and Artist Safety Hosting: A Guide to History, Ethics & Practice (linked above), see also:
Artist Residencies & Conflict Areas