Contemporary Artist Residencies

Book excerpt: Artist residencies provide space, time, and concentration for making art, doing research and for reflection. Residencies are crucial nodes in international circulation and career development, but also invaluable infrastructures for critical thinking and artistic experimentation, cross-cultural collaboration, interdisciplinary knowledge production, and site-specific research. The globalization process and the demands of the creative economy have had an impact on artist residencies. Ecological and geopolitical urgencies are now also affecting them more and more. In response, many residencies today actively search for more sustainable alternatives than the current neoliberal condition allows for artistic practice. With a range of critical insights from the field of residencies, this book asks what the present role of artist residencies is in relation to artists and the art ecosystem amid transformations in society.