Imagine an old lady working out on her balcony in a small town of Montenegro. It is an early morning and her granddaughter, a contemporary artist, is amazed by what she sees. This was the first time that she came to visit at such an early hour, and the ritual that she sees looks very peculiar and strange to her, as it were from another world.
Later on, in a conversation she discovered its origins. More than sixty years ago, German soldiers had their base camp in this town. Stripped down to their waist , they would practice the same exercise routine every morning. Grandmother, who was a young girl at the time, looked at them from a distance. She feared and admired them simultaneously. She fantasised about them. They left, but her daily routine was changed forever. Her fantasy set the coordinates for her desire. The result was to her unique morning ritual, even though she was never able to attain the exact posture nor perform exactly same exercises.
An insight into this cross-cultural encounter inspired me to reflect on epistemological accounts of Residency Unlimited. As the title already announced, Residency Unlimited is driven by a need to constantly deconstruct the finitude of one’s artistic/human experience. As if it was inspired by Derridian deconstruction as ‘philosophy of the limit’, Residency Unlimited provides artworld insiders with the opportunity to let the Other change their desires and vice -versa.
Residency Unlimited allows an immersion in the otherwise distant artworlds. If we draw an analogy between the ethnographic and residential experience, this unique fieldworks can be labeled as the rites of passage. The artists and curators who become residents of a community come closer to information, confidences, intimacies and develop an ability to gain more multi-dimensional knowledge. They are also at the distance from their familiar routines and face previously unexamined assumptions.
However, the direct fieldwork, a process of learning through direct experience, just as the distancing and objectivity of the scientific model, is based on the lack. Experiencing-near and experiencing-far both posses an eluding character.
To be a resident in the frame of the Residency Unlimited has more positive implications than participating from a distance and through a scientific model. Especially if we recall Lévinas who did emphasized the sovereign inaccessibility of the Other, but did have faith in the concepts such as trace and exteriority.
Every new context implies a specific cultural ideology in which the desire is caught up. To experience an artworld from close up leads towards the transfer of desire on a new set of social/cultural/artistic structures. These structures are never fulfilling in terms that there is always a lack at the heart of the desire that ensures we continue to desire and aspire. But, traces that remain are powerful. Being exposed to another social context does change the way in which we construct our fantasy version of reality and establish coordinates for our desire. Without being exposed, one would never put a different spot light at “the existing body” and create a unique hybrid.
Residency Unlimited stands for specific counter hegemonic processes, as it takes a mutual correction of understanding by each party in a dialogue on a different level. To go native in the unfamiliar artworld is to construct new fantasy-version of reality and establish unpredictable coordinates for one’s desire. The result is an experimental and refreshing experience. Contexts can be changed but the alterity and a misrecognition of fullness remain. Having this in mind Residency Unlimited took the ethical responsibility not to focus only on the phenomenological metaphysics of presence, but to to allow artist with as many fantasies as possible.
