FFR meets DIMORE artist residency
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DIMORE is an experimental art residency organized by the Municipality of Padua (Ufficio Progetto Giovani) and curated by Stefania Schiavon, Elena Squizzato and Caterina Benvegnù, with the collaboration of Elisa Pregnolato. The residency brings together a group of young artists (Daniele Costa, Nicolò Masiero Sgrinzatto, Alessio Mazzaro, Eleonora Reffo, Gianna Rubini, Annalisa Zegna) to understand how it might be possible to reconfigure artistic practices and cultural professions during the peak of the Covid-19 lockdown in Italy, considered as a critical moment that unveiled existing precarities.
DIMORE intends to support and sustain the research and education of the invited artists by providing a space for confrontation where time is slow and expanded and it is alright to not make something new, to produce or to hurry in order to create a finite artwork. The restrictions of the initial lockdown allowed for the term 'residency' to be deconstructed, bypassing the physical cohabitation of artists in a common physical space. The purpose was to recreate a dimension of exchange, reflection and discussion, in which practices and visions are investigated hic et nunc, in an uncertain era that no one can yet define and perceive.
The interview occurred on the 23rd of June 2020, during the first period of the remote residency.
After the first period, the curators and practitioners decided to meet and work in a common physical space in Padua at the end of October 2020. DIMORE OFF - from remote to presence encountered new hindrances because of the second lockdown phase in Italy and reformatted. Instead of a short moment when everyone would be in the same place, the artists share the space by individually spending time working there and exchanging with the group by leaving traces, carrying out interventions,fabricating narratives and passing them on to each other. The shared space is a former shop located near the railway station. The focus of the following phase of the project will still orbit around the notion of “dwelling” as conceived and formulated in the previous phases.
Since its start, DIMORE adapted to circumstances. It absorbed obstacles, included layers, took care of distances and complexities in its becoming.
DIMORE intends to support and sustain the research and education of the invited artists by providing a space for confrontation where time is slow and expanded and it is alright to not make something new, to produce or to hurry in order to create a finite artwork. The restrictions of the initial lockdown allowed for the term 'residency' to be deconstructed, bypassing the physical cohabitation of artists in a common physical space. The purpose was to recreate a dimension of exchange, reflection and discussion, in which practices and visions are investigated hic et nunc, in an uncertain era that no one can yet define and perceive.
The interview occurred on the 23rd of June 2020, during the first period of the remote residency.
After the first period, the curators and practitioners decided to meet and work in a common physical space in Padua at the end of October 2020. DIMORE OFF - from remote to presence encountered new hindrances because of the second lockdown phase in Italy and reformatted. Instead of a short moment when everyone would be in the same place, the artists share the space by individually spending time working there and exchanging with the group by leaving traces, carrying out interventions,fabricating narratives and passing them on to each other. The shared space is a former shop located near the railway station. The focus of the following phase of the project will still orbit around the notion of “dwelling” as conceived and formulated in the previous phases.
Since its start, DIMORE adapted to circumstances. It absorbed obstacles, included layers, took care of distances and complexities in its becoming.
FFR: First of all, I would like to ask you to briefly present yourself so the readers can situate us. All the questions have been thought of by a person that positions himself as an artist, who co-organises sloth-like residencies (which is the first reason why I contacted you), who grew up in southern Italy, but lives in France. But while I’m speaking I’m back in Sicily where I got stuck because of the pandemic.
Stefania: We are three cultural operators that work mainly with young artists in collaboration with the Progetto Giovani (project Young People) of Padua city hall. We do not depend directly on the city hall but are subcontracted through a cooperative. Progetto giovani is largely social services for young people in the city, not exclusively art.
About this specific residency, the financing of this project comes from the Veneto Region and its project Piani Giovani: a yearly call for local projects, and there’s a section for creatives. It was a call to which we applied with another project with another residency project and had to change because of the lockdown. And we have been lucky to be able to relocate the sums to this other needed project. We also have the financial support of the Padua municipality. We work in the arts and culture section that has evolved since the 1980s, now we work on the professionalization of young art professionals. We built an archive during these years and we’re also part of GAI (Giovani Artisti Italiani) and BJCEM. As for my personal path, I studied at DAMS in Bologna, graduated in Theatrical Iconography and Directing Institution. I had various experiences with contemporary art galleries and independent artistic projects but for several years I have been dealing with cultural and creative planning in connection with public policies, focusing on emerging artists in the cultural scene in Padua through Progetto Giovani. |
Caterina: For me it’s a shorter time that I’m part of the cooperative, 4-5 years. I’m a curator, always worked as an independent curator, I did study art history in Padua and on top of that I made a residency for curators in Berlin. I worked on many curatorial projects in Venice, Berlin, Padua and then I decided to stop here, in my city, because I feel like there’s a need here to make contemporary practices exist.
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Elena: I will be even shorter: I graduated in Art History in Padua and then a Masters in Bologna. I interned in various non-profit institutions like Bevilacqua La Masa foundation in Venice because I am more interested in these institutions than commercial galleries. In 2016 I met Stefania and Caterina in the framework of a project for young curators linked with Progetto Giovani and then I received the nice proposal to join Progetto giovani and here I am.
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FFR: Six people in a residency: how and how much is the collective aspect important in DIMORE?
Caterina: The collective dimension was a fundamental point of the two months discussion that led us to invent DIMORE. The idea of collectivity emerged as necessary — even more necessary — during the lockdown period. This necessity has been signaled to us by the artists and practitioners around us as much as from ourselves. A common space, in which we can discuss, talk, think, was needed in the complexity, confusion, suspension of the lockdown. It was important for us to allow a place of exchange and collectivity. Maybe to create a micro-community in the secluded and individualized conditions of the confinement.
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Stefania: We were trying to understand what we would be able to do with the artists and for the artists from that isolation. This was not an already made project: it emerged from the urgency of the lockdown, first from our own isolation. It was a moment in which some people were more at ease with digital tools and many others were just starting to learn them. Also because in the beginning of confinement, flourishing online were all sorts of “going digital” demands from institutions to artists: they were considered “entertainers”. And if that “going digital” was emerging from the will of the practitioner that felt like playing with that common predicament, it is very different from some senseless demands we witnessed artists receiving. Our focal point is the practitioners and we thought of something that would be functional for practitioners. The attempt of a common (digital) space was weird for us also, video chats like this one were totally new (for work or leisure) for the three of us. The necessity of activating and creating relationships, a sense of humanity, brought us to the point of thinking up DIMORE, to bridge a distance.
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Elena: Our projects in general are based on territory, on physical presence, on commons. The creation of a digital community was interesting for us and for the artists. Why six? Six is the magic number! It is a very handy amount for a group. From our previous experiences, we noticed that six works very well to build a collective. Not too big (you get subgroups) not too small (you go towards forms of intimacy we weren’t interested in). From 5 to 8 is ideal.
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Caterina: Yes, there were already too many unknown elements in the equation of this experimental online residency to risk also having a too large number, but sufficient enough to allow for a dynamic discussion, a collective one.
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Stefania: And on top of that we ended up by thinking of specifically who to invite.
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FFR: Yes, what was the criteria used for selecting participants
Caterina: We had to make a choice between issuing an open call or directly inviting artists. Usually we do open calls to allow more inclusion. But to write and articulate the project, it took almost two months: We were approaching a possible end of the lockdown, the urgency that provoked the project was shifting and if we issued an open call we would have diluted the time to the point of losing momentum.
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FFR: And then “being late” in the urgency of supporting artists at that very moment…
Caterina: Exactly. Well, supporting artists is something we should always do, but at that moment it was even more pressing. This is one of the reasons we decided to invite practitioners we already knew and with whom we collaborated quite recently, so there was reciprocal trust in the working environment. That helped to contact them more informally at first and hear from their perspective while we were drafting the project. We also knew that these individual artists would allow us to create a collective and a pleasant atmosphere.
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Stefania: Also at that stage we were being careful and having doubts about the core idea of an online residency. We were trying to understand if that was a meaningful idea or just an impulsive reaction to the context.
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FFR: And in this sense the positive answers from the artists helped you confirm the first intuition?
Stefania: Yes, and also, the tool of the GAI archive I spoke about at the beginning, in that isolation moment, revealed itself as very handy to bypass the open call but still stay open and plural in terms of accessibility. The archive, in this sense, is a long term tool to map people and be connected. So in the newness of a digital residency and the newness of its context, the advantage of having a network, knowing the artists and trusting them helped us a lot. Especially because some of the six practitioners did not know each other at all, so we were about to put together a group of almost total strangers. We didn’t want to increase the strangeness of the medium and the strangeness of the situation, the possible strangeness of working with persons we did not know.
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FFR: So trusting the artists, eliminated at least one of the “risk factors”?
Stefania: Yes, putting strangers together in physical space is great – we know tools and can create situations that make it extremely pleasant, but it did not feel right to do this in the digital realm in that context. So we did not want to add an unforeseeable aspect to a project that already had too many unforeseen aspects.
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Caterina: We needed at least some reference points. I mean especially about the people who are the fundamental element of the project!
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Stefania: Because we were constantly thinking of a group residency, fantasizing about the group that would form. And it is forming. But at that moment we were not able to know if they would “amalgamate”.
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Elena: And these specific artists allowed us to think that that would work. We know they are quite active, they have a political dimension in their practices...
Caterina: Yes, none of them have a self-referential practice, they are all open to an “outside”. Which is one of the criteria in the selection process, making us think that they would be interested in such an interactive proposal. Stefania: In the same moment when we were thinking of a residency that put the artists in its centre, we were thinking more and more of how to share “outside” what would happen in such a residency. Usually residencies have a final restitution, or a final presentation, and that’s the only public moment in the residency. Since one of our guidelines in the context of Padua is to try to create a form of acquaintance with the contemporary besides the focus on providing support to artists, we were looking at practitioners that already had a leaning towards this “outside” in their work. |
FFR: The three of you stressed the importance of a public or “open to the outside” dimension. But as you also said, usually residencies are most of the time associated with what is called “private.” And I would like to stress that I believe that the so-called “private sphere” is the one in which a political practice is the most fragile but the most needed. Was there any interest in this other end of the private-public continuum? The idea of the home, of the dwelling, of the residency, how do you approach it? I understand that being linked to a public institution you have some commitments towards “public space”, but in the moment of the lockdown, was there an interest in bringing artistic and political discourse to the “private space”?
Caterina: Not really… It is true that at that moment these two poles of a binary were sort of fusing, because there has been a lot of visual access to private spaces. Which was also part of that insatiable hunger for images in that moment. But our interest wasn’t in giving attention to a private and intimate dimension. The idea of the live video streamings was an attempt to share the residency process. In all our projects we attempted to reach out to a larger public though various solutions that at the same time would not “lower” the quality of the artistic proposal. The live streamings, which are tiny fragments in the overall duration of the project, try to work in this way. However, for us, the main tool to communicate and share the process is the website, especially through the diary section.
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Elena: It’s almost the other way around: how to create a public space in the moment when it is not possible to go to an open square or the (socially) designated spaces of a community? How to create community differently during the confinement?
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Stefania: And I would add that to this question there are different levels. During the whole residency there are private moments, especially all the encounters between the tutors of the residency and the artists which are not “exposed” to the outside. What is shared is the account of what happens during the residency, because we were asking ourselves “do people know what a residency is?” This account is what is consciously given and shared, there’s no “big brother” permanently watching the residents.
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FFR: I had no doubts about that : )
Stefania: And then there is an additional level that has been lived by the participants. And this is something that came up recently in an informal meeting: we are not sure if it’s linked to the lockdown situation or not but almost each participant at some point wanted to share a very personal side of themselves. And also the process of what was shared, what corner of the house you would put behind you during a video call, all these elements had an influence on the process that has been activated in the group. We did not foresee this, and this is a reflection I am having right now, so I am not sure if Caterina and Elena agree on it. Even in traditional residencies you always choose what to bring with you, what to share. And in our case — maybe indirectly — people get to show things, like right now I can see that Venetian mask or the paintings on the wall behind you at your place... |
FFR: Well… it’s my aunt’s place...
Stefania: Right! But even knowing that you are at your aunt’s is very interesting information. Or knowing if a person is in the woods or in an isolated house, all these elements add something to the personal stories and storytelling even if they were often only implicitly there. And doubting the possibility of whether a collective can be created at that (digital) distance, actually these humanizing elements -- I think it helped in creating relations. I don’t know if “humanizing” is the right word... |
Caterina: Yes, and knowing that all these elements stay private, and the public streaming attempts to share some little fragments of what the residency is. The fact that each person was connecting from different contexts (a countryside family house, the woods, the Veneto deep province...) is a contribution to the residency. And of course they are free to share what they want. We have the impression that they feel the necessity to share such private things in this dire context. The necessity to bring together these personal reflections and “predicaments” as a basis on which to develop a collective thinking that can start from personal elements but inevitably infiltrate the art practice. |
Stefania: And it is above all a matter of contingency. We all shared weird or uncomfortable situations during the lockdown, and this dimension in many different individual ways entered the discussion.
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FFR: And about this “public place” you wanted to create, you said that for you it is the website. Have you thought of using social media as another of these “public spaces” in which the residency could be “exposed”?
Caterina: Not really… we thought of it at the beginning. The “automatic” thinking was “OK, let’s make a website, an Instagram and a Facebook account.” But we thought the best thing to do was to concentrate on the website only. At the beginning of the lockdown, social media was over flooded with “going digital” exhibitions and content. We had the impression that a lot of digital and Instagram projects were just superficial and hasty reactions, in which artists were often exploited and not paid for their work (digital work is work!). Moreover, for DIMORE, we do not work on “artworks,” so why do a virtual exhibition? |
Elena: And also we did not want to participate and feed mechanisms of over production of “content.” We did not want to seek “content” for the sake of it. And every person involved in the residency has their own social media account to share and tell about the residency the way they want, but we didn’t want to create an official “communication channel” for it.
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Stefania: We only use social media to let people know that there’s the website and if they are interested they can go browse it. Also because the speed of social media is totally different than the pace we wanted for DIMORE. If you’re really interested, you have to dedicate a fair amount of time in order to understand.
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Elena: Also, since the “actual public place” is the website, there’s no need to use social media like when you have to share a physical exhibition in a place where not everyone can go. There’s no need for such a filter because people can directly access the actual place, which in this case is the website.
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Stefania: Which is a metaphor, a symbol. This website has various values, it is the account of the residency to the “outside”, it is a place of sharing materials, collected fragments, traces that can be intercepted by anyone passing by.
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Caterina: The “fast” aspect did not interest us at all: sharing content every two hours, every day something “new.” Catching attention was not our focus.
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FFR: Yes, a peculiar aspect of the residency is to avoid production or try to challenge the idea of production in art residencies. How do you achieve that? Can you program un-productivity? How to create conditions that allow it? How to invite it?
Stefania: We declared the residency unproductive. We explicitly said so and addressed the artists on the matter first. For us it was essential to make the residency a research space of encounter and reflection on a series of themes or keywords that we found interesting. Not really “themes,” actually “words.” We worked a lot on the dimension of the words themselves. So first of all, the act of declaring is significant. Previously, we have done other residencies mostly with individual artists in which the structure of the call was fabricating a behaviour: the artist applies for a specific call, they come, they carry out a project. Sometimes this happens almost mechanically. But starting from the meaning of DIMORE: it is a dwelling, it is a place where you can indulge, a place in which you can disperse… We were also foreseeing failure, also the failure of the whole project...Having a horizontal relationship with the artists allowed us to share with them all the variables and “risk elements”.
Caterina: Un-productivity yields from a will. And it is also a position and a will in relation to the over-productivity that we were witnessing online with digital content or events coming from everywhere. Which is something that is not exclusively linked with the confinement: the situation only exacerbated a behaviour that is quite common. And in response to this behaviour we already wanted to slow down and the lockdown appeared as a chance to stop for a moment and indulge in research. Participant artists told us “for us it is a luxury to not have to produce.” It has been nice to hear that even though we knew that this sort of need existed already. So the proposal has been very well welcomed. |
FFR: Do you think that in order to allow this “luxury” financial support is the crucial element or are there maybe other aspects or forms of support that allow this hiatus from production and a plunge into research?
Caterina: Specifically about DIMORE, we offer financial support (a fee for the research), but it is also pedagogical support, I guess. For us, it was fundamental to support the research by adding the involvement of tutors, building up a dialogue also with them to avoid circular or self-referential discussions among us (artists and curators) on the focus words we picked. We wanted some external input from professionals that we deem interesting and with whom we also wanted to start a dialogue. The presence of Elena Mazzi, Pietro Gaglianò, Babilonia Teatri and Emanuele Coccia is also a form of support for the research of each artist. We have noted that they all have rather different approaches and each artist will be able to absorb and reflect on some aspect of it. Of course we do not expect that each artist appreciates what is offered to them completely but undoubtedly what every tutor can bring in terms of questions and articulation of the selected themes is important for their training.
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Stefania: The support of the residency is the fact of putting together six artists in this common space, putting them in dialogue with four tutors. They listened, discussed things, and maybe in some future some elements of the residency will be part of a work, but we cannot say now. We will maybe see work in the future that may or may not be linked with us. So yes, there’s a pedagogical dimension in this path.
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FFR: Personally I always thought that one element of a residency is displacement. At least for my personal experience, all but one residency I did were not located where I was living, but I always connected ‘residency’ with ‘displacement’. In this case the residents did not displace themselves. What meaning can this bring? A tentative change in the common meaning of ‘art residency’? Or the term ‘residency’ was used for lack of a more fitting word?
Caterina: It is true that one of the first things that you think about when you hear ‘residency’ is a displacement elsewhere. But the ‘residency’, at least the collective ones, is also a common place that gathers collective thought, a place of exchange. The physical ones are also characterized by all these informal moments, having a coffee or a drink after dinner : ) when often the most important things are shared. So our idea was to attempt, through digital means, to provide such a common ground. When we say residency, we think of a common place for exchange. Otherwise it could have been a sort of ‘container’ or ‘frame’ that would facilitate exchange. The fact that the meaning of the term residency can change in time is a very broad and open question. What we can say is that physical presence is fundamental: the more we advance, the more we live these video chats, the more we realize that the need to touch each other grows. That’s for sure. Lately we’re thinking of hybrid forms of residencies: a virtual part online and a physical one could be mixed up. And this is also for practical reasons: by the virtual you can invite tutors who live far away, easily finding a common time slot to invite them, also financially speaking.
So the virtual dimension could make some things possible that are too difficult to realize in physical space. However, personally I think that these virtual solutions cannot wholly substitute a residency: we see how much we need to meet. You lose so many things, it goes without saying… |
FFR: And in your intention was there a will to reconnect the meaning of ‘residency’ to the significance that the word has outside of the art field? Which is a meaning that does not include the notion of displacement, but is rather related to the notion of home?
Caterina: Yes, yes, for sure, the word DIMORE (dwellings) provides a connection to home, residency, refuge, which is given by the different house from which everyone connects to the others. But in Italian DIMORE carries also the notions of doubt, an indulgence that is able to open up the meaning.
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Elena: the choice of the term DIMORE, linked to residency is maybe in opposition to the term “domicile” that has a more contingent and temporary flavor. Now you’re at your Aunt’s, one of the artists was a guest of their partner. This fact reconnects the intimate and private aspect of the residency that actually is also present in the title itself.
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Stefania: When the project was already taking shape, we started thinking of a title and we analyzed its components and potentiality and we felt like this word was able to express most of them. About the displacement, it is true that in this case there’s no physical displacement but in every residency there’s an emotional displacement, a knowledge displacement of shared lore. I have to say that I thought of it when I read your question. We did not really take into consideration that displacement was lacking from what a usual art residency is. What we realized is that this situation of video chats, in the repeated exercise of group work, allows a different quality of listening (to the other) compared to when in each other's presence. It opens up a different dimension, sometimes more attentive, less distracted by what’s happening around. Also the artists had their own beer-video-chats to have an informal moment without our presence.
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Caterina: These informal moments I was talking about before that are a real necessity in residencies.
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FFR: Totally.
Stefania: Also because they did not know each other. Something we gave a try in the very first week, was a session with a colleague that is a professional group facilitator. He used some group techniques to try to have a softer start for a residency among strangers. So we had a session that is normally used in social facilitation tweaked for artists on video chat.
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FFR: Oh I would like to know more about it…
Stefania: Yes because we said to ourselves: “Are we going to start an online residency with a bunch of strangers directly with a meeting with the first tutor?” “No.” So the first week we had three session with the three of us with the group ranging from practical info to various amenities. And then we had this facilitation session — which was also experimental and could fail. That was appreciated by the artists.
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FFR: To go back to my previous question, what I was also aiming at is your intention to open up beyond the usual audiences of the contemporary. Usually when I say “I’m going to a residency” people look at me as if I was a weirdo and say “what’s that?” Especially if I go elsewhere, people think more of vacation. But then you have to explain that being an artist is work, which is even more difficult! But yes, the idea was that maybe doing a residency without displacement could at least reconcile the common meaning and the artistic meaning and operate a displacement, but a semantic one. I’m losing myself in divagation…
Stefania: Yes, there’s one thing I’m becoming sure about – that it is important to make the right questions. Open questions, and questions that are still alive after the meetings and stay in the mind and don’t find a straight answer. Like in every chapter of the residency, with different tutors, it opens up questions and activates everyone’s mind: us, the artists and the tutors. We are in a very horizontal situation, there’s no one giving a lesson about “relation” or “identity”. It is a reciprocal exchange: very intimate, private, close. Lately we started other training projects that had a precise goal and a deadline and these elements caused a loss of other possibilities to enrich ourselves or exchange, because in three months it was mandatory to realize a public art intervention, let’s say. So everyone was too focussed on the goal. Here the goal is to give ourselves the opportunity to have practical, theoretical and critical reflections on questions that touch us as people, not only as artists. |
FFR: And the residency lasts 10 weeks, right?
Caterina: Yes, we thought it could be enough time to build a slow dimension and at the same time not too long or scattered.
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FFR: How did you select the tutors and the keywords?
Caterina: After long reflections, we felt the necessity to work on some words that were losing or shifting meaning during the pandemic. So we started to write to each other…
Elena: Also because at the very beginning there was a general sensation of “the world will never be the same again”, the feeling of urgency was quite strong. Already now everything has changed (interview on the 23rd of June 2020). Caterina: Yes, because almost everything reopened already, that feeling evaporated. But in that moment this “apocalyptic vision” was rather present. And it was quite real, everyone was in shock, well you know. |
FFR: Thousands of people were dying…
Caterina: We were utterly upset by the situation. We wanted to work on terms, very dense terms, that we wanted to explore at that time. First individually and then we focused on overlapping ideas, and at the same time we started a list of persons interesting for us to be in communication with the artists. It was a long list. We mixed up these lists of words and people at the same time and things matched quite spontaneously between some themes and the research that the tutors already carried out. It felt almost natural.
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FFR: I have the impression that in your work at large you aim at some sort of professionalization. I feel it is an ambivalent element: on the one hand it is important to affirm that art workers are professional, therefore their labour must be respected as such, but on the other hand in my personal experience that professionalization often means that an artist goes for a three month residency, at the end of which they realize an artwork and that’s it, this sort of “being professional.” What do you think of this?
Caterina: It is a delicate matter. What is important for us is to side with the artists, to give them support which is also performative sometimes. First of all, realizing that they are professional art workers and being recognized as such. But this recognition cannot be measured by any sort of outcome, some sort of final test. Something like DIMORE tries to unmount such a mechanism and it is not an easy task.
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Elena: If you make a comparison to art academies, here there’s not a mechanical transmission of ready-made knowledge that the artist must absorb and execute. There’s no final evaluation. It is a softer path in which each person takes what they wish. It is a generous path! Working for the public institution gives us this kind of freedom in order to plan and structure these "generous paths."
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Stefania: When we worked with artists in a production-oriented framework, both in visual arts and performative arts, we always thought that artists had to be recognized as workers (in connection with the budget limits we have). Beyond that, we also work with emerging artists, often people that are still enrolled in art schools or even just finished high school, and in these cases the support we offer is different than financial. For example, years ago we were working on this Quotidiana project, in which young artists were not remunerated but we were providing a thorough work of scouting, curatorial labour, networking, bridging, publishing for artists. And in an experimental phase of an emerging artist, all this work provided was useful, probably this amount and quality of work that today a commercial gallery cannot offer, even if they were not receiving a fee.
Professionalization has several steps, it is true that we propose a soft path, but it is also true that we ask for a real engagement. For us professionalization is acquired throughout a series of practices that are often lacking in school training. Or if they exist, they only exist as a final exam and it is prone to judgement. The way we work, besides the selection process in the open call, is that we put in place a dialogue, a pedagogical aspect in our work that builds a constant connection among the art workers and the curators for which and with whom we work. That is probably what makes us different from other pedagogical and training offers. It is also true that we have a limited reach, we are a sort of layered gym in which artists train themselves and then they are able to leave with some knowledge. But this training is often not recognized, and this is because we are a public institution. |
FFR: About this dimension of being a public institution. Elena was saying before that the freedom you have is given by the fact that you’re a public institution rather than a commercial one. Public institutions very often ask for an outcome, an artwork, an event… How to balance these requests with the unproductive attitude?
Caterina: Speaking specifically of DIMORE, we’ve been extremely lucky because we are allowed a great freedom: there was no request for an outcome as there usually is. And linking this issue to the question of professionalization, I don’t think that the delivery of an artwork or an outcome is the “proof” that you’re a professional, and this is also what we try to put in place: offer paths to build a professional status not passing by this narrow outcome view. For DIMORE, the public institution does not need a final event nor an outcome, which is great. And if we had such an obligation, DIMORE would not exist.
Stefania: There’s been a flip. We thought of this idea and it’s not that we just did whatever we wanted. We went to speak with our supervisor and explained the situation, the idea, the financial aspect and how the previous project was re-oriented. We also explained that the added value of the project in this context is that most of the public administration is totally absorbed by something else (the covid-19 emergency) and we as a public administration -- we can give a tiny, tiny response in our field: “we are there for you, we are not absent,” and this message has been very well received. In our case we directly depend on the mayor and he understood perfectly , there was no need to explain that much. |
FFR: You’re lucky!
Stefania: Yes, now we’re lucky. If it was three years ago it would have been a different story.
Caterina: And that is not obvious. |
FFR: Unfortunately not : /
Caterina: And about the “outcomes”, we ask for them every 15 days, and they are definitely not artworks. It is very important that the artists don’t feel pressured to realize works, even micro-works. They are research steps, suggestions that they want to share spontaneously. They also don’t have to share their work but rather, if they prefer, share things made by others (quotations, links) that would resonate with them and the keyword of the week.
Everyone is aware that in 15 days it’s impossible to achieve something, to reach refined answers: such themes need at least months to unfold. And also the “I want to do well,” “I have a responsibility towards the public” feeling that some artists can have, yes, it exists. |
Stefania: And we did not foresee it.
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Caterina: ...and we didn’t foresee it because we were keen to pass the anti-authoritarian message “you are free to not work, to not produce” and also be free to take inspiration and quote others without artwork production. But it is true, we noticed especially at the beginning that even if they were really happy about this given freedom, there were some traces of “duty”, the duty to produce something, something well done, well formalized. Which is fine, if it’s a serene process, but it should not lead to a form of performance anxiety.
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FFR: Yes, but I noticed that there’s a difference between the first outcome and the second,
it looks more relaxed now, no?
it looks more relaxed now, no?
Caterina: Indeed. So we discussed this element a lot in various meetings we had. Because we don’t want it to feel like “homework” for them like in any art school or uni. But that is the kind of system we are all in that pushes us towards this outcome, production thinking.
Stefania: Often we become the jailers of ourselves: the dimension of freedom and total autonomy we can address is not automatic: social structures are so strong (especially in the art profession in Italy) that it is very hard to free oneself. It is something that is often professed and repeated, but when you’re put in the condition to actually be free the most difficult thing is to free yourself. It is not easy. So let’s not call them “outcomes” let’s say “indications”. These “indications” were thought to share an impression of the keyword on which they focussed with each tutor. And one thing that is maybe difficult to grasp is that the main audience—through the website--for these “indications” are not the big private art foundations but the more broad and not necessarily field-related people that found themselves on the website almost by chance. And for this we aimed at an accessible language not a language that excludes you, an elite language, as it is considered by stereotypical point of view on contemporary art. But it is easier to say than to practice all this… |
FFR: Oh yes, there’s a big difference, to practice is a very different level…
Stefania: Yes because you keep on taking out, taking out, taking out, and at some point you fear to be too superficial, too simplistic… But it always depends on what intentions you have while you’re doing something.
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FFR: And connecting with what Stefania was saying about random people passing by the website, I’d like to avoid the idea of the audience as a vague monolithic bloc. Do you have a precise idea of what sort of audiences you’re addressing with this work?
Elena: I think that DIMORE, in comparison with the audiences that we usually reach through Progetto Giovani in Padua, has a different, broader scope which we’re opening up right now.
Caterina: Yes, for sure we have at least two different types of audience: there’s an art field audience, and an audience that follows Progetto Giovani on a broad scale, which also operates outside of the contemporary art field, and that could be intercepted just out of curiosity. Elena: About the field audience, especially other public institutions, starting from this “privileged position” we have here in Padua and the freedom we dispose of, something we are interested in is sharing with other institutions the possible practices and maybe “enlightening” them, of course without the pretension to school anyone but only to make visible this possibility. Instead of making the usual bronze statue in a park, with the same budget you can be more “effective” in terms of training, to actually help artists work on the(ir) future, not only on the past. |
FFR: And with people!
Stefania: And there’s also another audience category, that is policy makers that usually would not be able to come here and witness the event or intervention. So politicians and public servants that are part of the GAI association, which is a network of 40 public administrations in Italy. We usually have an assembly with mixed components (politicians and public servants) and we have reflections on a national level more. It is rare that we witness initiatives in other cities. We cannot just decide to take two-three days to go to another city and see that. In this case, the digital dimension makes it potentially accessible from a distance. And I am sure that there are other audiences we’re not thinking about, and I think that besides the field audience, I personally think—maybe I am naïve—that each of us have personal contacts outside of this field that we can reach. A friend that usually doesn't care about contemporary art could maybe be intrigued and go navigate a website because in the evening she has nothing to do and has time to look at the website. There are many audiences, for now it is very difficult for us to read them or quantify them. I mean I can know how many hundreds of people connected to the live streaming sessions but I have no idea who these people are.
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FFR: But beyond the quantity, I am personally interested in the quality of the audiences. I understand that a politician could be more interested in knowing how many people watched the live streaming, but if out of a hundred people you actually got six interested, I’d be more interested in understanding those six people, because this is what creates something, is “effective” in a social way.
Caterina: Sure!
Stefania: Yes, but with this you have to negotiate a bit. It is true that often a politician does not look at the process but rather… Caterina: ...at the result. Stefania: Quality versus quantity is an open discussion. Caterina: Let’s say that usually we try to mediate, like we did in this case, and to explain how the process is important and why we decided to work this way. It is not easy, especially when we have to work in “real life” in so-called “normal times”, it is even more difficult: because we were in an exceptional situation and “everything is valid”. We cannot say whether we gave real input and created an important precedent for the public administration, we’ll see. Elena: By working every day with artists, to quantify the effects in time of such activity needs a lot of energy and resources, it is not easy. For us it is very valuable to see that an artist afterwards did so-and-so and went to so-and-so, but to whom do we explain this? You need to have an interlocutor that “speaks the same language” otherwise it’s hard… otherwise the top you can go for is “such artist now has a VAT registration number...” |
FFR: LOL
Stefania: About numbers… What is important for us is more how many people we reached out to, than how many people became famous, how many people we did work with. It could be useful for us to hear from artists where such paths we offered brought them, but they tell us in informal ways, when we meet them. We understand how valuable our work has been. And to measure this in a report for administration is difficult, we don’t have the tools for that at the moment. More specifically about this project, we will have to have some sort of conclusion for DIMORE, for the moment we made a proposal to the artists, but it is open to any form. Maybe in autumn, we imagined a publication that could counter the volatile aspect of the residency with a material trace of what happened, but it could be something else, it’s also up to the artists… |
DIMORE still unfold in a multiform way, its threads can be found on DIMORE.
Interview with the DIMORE curatorial team (Stefania Schiavon, Caterina Benvegnù and Elena Squizzato) by Enrico Floriddia on behalf of FFR and edited by Rebecca A. Layton.