Organizing and managing the project The Missing Link was a very new type of curatorial experience for me. This would not have been possible without the extraordinary commitment of the RU staff during my 6 months residency. Since each artist had exactly three weeks to contribute to the project before passing it on to the next one, the challenge for me was to create and impose rules on the artists (a disciplined time constraint), while offering them total freedom in their contributions.
The second difficulty was the whole project’s chance factor: I had no idea what the project would look like after six months of collaboration. This specificity made The Missing Link as unexpected as it was fascinating to observe: each contribution was giving me, the curator, the opportunity to re-adapt and rethink my original aspect. It was like a perpetual challenging and questioning of my original concept and idea, a way of curating that I have previously never experienced. The end result was a 3 days exhibition of the process at the Residency Unlimited event space in December 2010..
What remains of this project in terms of my personal experience and curatorial practice is the discovery of a new type of collaboration, which doesn’t need to be physical, but can exist within constraints of time and space. This immaterial link, created between the artists and between each artist and myself, turned out to be the essence of the project. Once again the support provided by the RU staff was essential.
