Independent Curators International supports the work of curators to help create stronger art communities through experimentation, collaboration, and international engagement.

Independent Curators International supports the work of curators to help create stronger art communities through experimentation, collaboration, and international engagement.

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Unstructured Residencies

Curator Grace Samboh developed this proposal during the 2013 Curatorial Intensive in Tokyo. 


To many people Indonesia is equivalent to the image of a paradisiacal landscape. Bali is Indonesia’s number one tourist destination. Today, not only brochures and pamphlets use or misuse the word ‘paradise’ to sell Bali, but also even the Balinese people consider themselves as the citizens of paradise. Life is an everlasting performance for them. The government, state, and nation are the production team. This Dutch-built paradise is their long-lived, dynamic, organic stage. Everyone else is the audience, viewers, visitors, readers, or public.

Yogyakarta, the place that I live in now, is one of the oldest cities of Javanese culture. The city is run by a Sultan, who is officially and legally our governor, and it is a special region because the Sultan will always be in that position. Nationally, Yogyakarta is known as the students’ city. In the contemporary art scene now, Yogyakarta is known for its vibrancy and openness.

In the mid 1980s, our education minister formed an international platform for students to take part in exchanges, which made it easier for foreigners to come to Indonesia. That also marks the beginning of various kinds of residency programs around the country and in Yogyakarta.

I have been living in the city since 2007, and I have seen, met, and conversed with quite a lot of interesting people that come and go. Foreign people, or I might say ‘tourists.’ I want to create a loose-structure to somehow facilitate this cultural ‘tourism.’ I want to try to convert the random exchange of information into a form of knowledge. I aim to make a sharing platform that generates knowledge dynamically, organically, and of course, openly.

I am thinking of setting up a host for unstructured forms of ‘residencies’ for artists, curators, researchers, and writers. By unstructured forms, I mean it as a non-exhibition or non-production oriented type of residency. The forms of each residency will depend on the visiting party and their discussions with us as the main host. Other than me (or us, as I will be running this with my colleagues) as the main host, each resident will also be hosted by another party that we curate. Visiting residents will be paired with local counterparts.

The expectation of residencies has always been surrounding cultural exchange and on how the ‘tourist’ can ‘teach’ or bring something new to the visited site or vice versa. What we expect out of this unstructured form of residency is to be able to facilitate ‘random’ information from contemporary practitioners from other parts of the world that are interested in being with us––and convert this information and these experiences into a form of knowledge in open sharing sessions. We believe that by setting up another local practitioner as host, that at the very least, there will be intimate dialogues between the two parties and hopefully the dialogue will extend into the community surrounding them.

 

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To learn more about this proposal please email Grace Samboh at sambohgrace@gmail.com. To learn more about the Curatorial Intensive email info@curatorsintl.org.