English | Indonesia

Location: Cemeti – Institute for Art and Society
Date: 24 – 25 February 2017
Time: 09:30 – 18:00

Assembly #1:

Forms of Exchange: (Re)producing Residencies

Two-day public symposium

Friday and Saturday, 24-25 February 2017, 9.30–17.30 hrs

On Friday 24th and Saturday 25th February, we are organizing our first Maintenance Works Assembly, entitled Forms of Exchange: (Re)producing Residencies, the first in a series of Assemblies taking place throughout our current year-long programme Maintenance Works. Each Assembly will take the form of a two or three day symposium focusing on specific issues arising from Maintenance Works. This will range from “making public(s)”; exploring how we connect to local constituencies, to artists engaging with parliamentary politics, to land rights issues, to alternative educational formats.

In this first Assembly we will question the model of the artist residency, an increasingly important form of production in the Indonesian art context. Whether working with international or Indonesian artists, residencies have become almost ubiquitous across art spaces in Yogyakarta. At the same time it is becoming increasingly important for Indonesian artists and art workers to travel internationally in order to expand their perspectives and network, as well as gain international recognition for their practice.

For the most part, residencies aim to provide artists and art workers with valuable time and space for reflection, often combined with an ambition for cultural exchange through immersion in a new context and new networks. The model of the residency, however, is not unproblematic and can become a site of exoticism, art tourism, the instrumentalisation of culture by diplomacy, or simply a service model in which the host organization and the local arts community have to represent themselves and their city to a continual stream of guests. In this Assembly, we will explore the potentials, problems and inherent power relations of the residency format, while envisioning alternative models.

The Assembly will explore topics such as the pre-history of the artist residency in Indonesia, the financing of residencies and the strings that come attached, the care work it takes to maintain and host residency programmes, as well as issues of art tourism and internationalism in postcolonial contexts. Lastly we will explore alternative models, asking: what else could a residency be?

Preceding the public days, we will host a closed group discussion for residency workers from the 20 organizations currently running residencies in Yogyakarta. The aim of this internal meeting is to map different residency forms and their functions; from founding ideologies to funding streams to daily management. We furthermore aim to collectively produce a “Residency Artists Users Manual for Yogyakarta”, a free .pdf publication for visiting artists and art workers that will use humour to share the pitfalls and common exoticisms to be avoided in the local context.

Details of the program are listed below. Speakers will be announced soon.

DETAILED PROGRAM

DAY 1: Friday 24th February 2017: Public symposium

DAY 2: Sabtu, 25 Februari 2017: Public symposium