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Some have stopped making pieces at all, and jump from residency to residency, from lab to lab, project to project.
co-productions and commissions to support their artistic work. Each project brings a new set of institutional collaborators and in a sense determines where they will live and create for the duration of the project’s creation cycle. In Rabih’s case, he is a completely ‘solo’, creating, producing, administrating, promoting, and touring his work with no outside help or support.
Issues What sadly matters today is not pieces or premieres, but activity and mobility.
So are there issues in any of the above examples, or is everything going according to plan? And if so, whose plan is it? Artists’? Policy makers’? Programmers and curators? While writing this text I realized that it is impossible, for me, to discuss very pragmatic issues such as structural funding, transnational vs. local producing and creation models, mobility funding – without delving into existing discourse of institutional critique, market driven economics, and accepted precarity. For issues surrounding hypermobility or precarity within our field are not insular. Most national funding is decreasing and becoming more and more restrictive and ‘needy’ in its policy aims, while the mobility/transnational infrastructure that was put in place by the EU to allow for more flexible working conditions for artists, has also ceased to be responsive to the needs of the artists. I believe there exists a tension and contradiction between national funding priorities and transnational/mobility funding. Another way to say this is that most national funding is decreasing and becoming more and more restrictive and ‘needy’ in its policy aims, while the mobility/transnational infrastructure that was put in place by the EU to allow for more flexible working conditions for artists, has also ceased to be responsive to the needs of the artists. I also question whether indeed the impetus for EU mobility funding had artists’ well being as a priority or if the ‘new Europe’ of 90’s simply found the artistic community as a willing vehicle through which to push its new agenda about the unification of Europe? And as a result of all the mobility funding strands (starting with Culture 2000) the notion of a national artist (Belgian artist, Dutch artist, French artist) has become more and more irrelevant. It seems that now there are international artists and local artists. Marten Spangberg metaphor rings close to truth, when he says that “networks are for dance and performance what natural reserve is for animals, a restrictive babysitter that places the poor animal in a restricted area. Here you go, play here but not too loud.”