| Many
Mini Residency
Berlin,
Germany
July 1 - 7, 2008
organized by Sarrita Hunn and Ryan Thayer
- - - - - -
Many Mini Residency was held during the first week of
July 2008 at The Berlin Office in the Kreuzberg/Neukölln district
of Berlin. Many Mini Residency was a one-room residency that was open
to applicants from all disciplines and encouraged participants to customize
their residency experience. There was no minimum time-limit for their
stay at the residency but the maximum stay allowed applicants to use this
space for half a day.
Many Mini Residency was conceived as one response to an ongoing conversation
about how artists organize to extend opportunities for making work and
about the relationship of artists to the artwork they produce. Currently,
the distinction between artist and curator, artist as curator, artist
as activist, restaurant as artwork (and an endless list of other pairings),
is more a matter of creating temporary alliances and strategies between
people and sites rather than strategies for questioning artistic production
itself. Additionally, artistic strategies for these sites have become
increasingly diverse and there is unprecedented fluidity between the various
roles artists inhabit as individuals, collaborators, collectives, and
cooperatives. The Berlin Office, a two-room-apartment-made-project-space
operated by a group of Danish artists, provided us an opportunity to explore
this conversation by opening up the project space to be used by others.
The name 'Many Mini' encompasses two main components of the project. The
'Many' describes the open call for proposals and the resulting multiplicity
of responses and participants. Over 7 days 24 participants from 7 countries
completed 18 residencies. The group of participants provided a portrait
of the current state of art(ists) in Berlin. While a handful were native
to Berlin, many came from other countries and were here only for a few
months...some for only a few days. The residency proposals ranged from
highly choreographed to entirely spontaneous and from participatory to
extremely personal. Many took this opportunity to work collaboratively
for the first time and one member of a collective took the opportunity
to work alone. The 'Mini' component of the residency describes the limited
amount of time available and the scale of the room. Some participants
defined their residencies by a scheduled block of time or divided their
time up over many days. Others responded to The Berlin Office space as
a site to be temporarily altered, converted to a stage or meeting point.
Additionally, some participants looked beyond The Berlin Office and engaged
geography in their residencies through interactions with the city of Berlin
or by establishing exchanges with other cities worldwide.
All of these participants, residencies, and related public events amounted
to a whirlwind week of constant production and interactivity. We have
asked all the participants to provide documentation and a short statement
about their time spent in the residency to serve as both a record and
a resource. This information is displayed here online as the final component
of this project. Please see the 'residencies' page for a timeline/catalog
of the residency projects and the 'participants' page for further biographical
information and website links.
-Sarrita Hunn and Ryan Thayer
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