The Temporary Resident, a sequel…

The Temporary Resident, a sequel…

This text is composed of fragments of conversations with the visual artists Saddie Choua, Ella De Burca, Koba De Meutter, Breyner Huertas, Ria Pacquée, Ryan Siegan-Smith, Amir Farsijani and Babak Afrassiabi in residencies in Mexico City, Ramallah, Teheran, Cali, Antwerp and other cities, organized by AIR Antwerp and assembled by Alan Quireyns.

A residency is not a journey. It is not casual. I am facing the challenge of living my life somewhere else for a couple of months. My work is the constant. It survives all places, each new experience. It changes, but it always builds on what is already there. The exchange with the foreign environment, new people, and myself lends an edge to my work. I gain new insights, I see other possibilities and I unravel knots that for a long time I had felt could not be disentangled. A friend once said to me that whenever he had to take an important decision he went somewhere he had never been before. Then, upon his return, he knew what to do. A residency may look like an escape but it is much more of a confrontation.

My head is always lagging a bit. During the first days I stubbornly hold onto the things I brought with me from home. Mundane objects obtain a new glow. Before putting my feet into my slippers, I pick them up. I turn them around and see where the relief has been worn out by my heels. The sole is thinner there too. In my thoughts I list the places where the slippers have taken me. The soles of my feet relax when they recognize the familiar profile. With the swiftness of a magic trick my new place of residence becomes recognizable. Only now do I dare to move about here. I walk around, shift a table, a chair, the lamp on the bedstand. Adapting means work.

Change breaks habits, as if they have to make room for new ones. I look for this situation. It makes me very receptive to impressions. My senses reach out like antennae. They feel, smell, and taste. I dwell in a labyrinth of streets I’ve never walked before. Time and time again I get lost, as I refuse to take the same route twice. My body registers the city. After a few days, certain routes emerge and I notice how new habits establish themselves. Before long they may change into routines.

Each place is unique. I know this but nonetheless I have to suppress the urge to compare. Nobody likes to hear that their situation is similar to others. That’s why I listen. I collect the stories of the people I meet. I embody a paradox: the stranger who arrives today and stays tomorrow. I am not just passing through. People find it reassuring that I will stay for a while but that one day I will leave again. They provide me with stories and opinions, and even unburden themselves sometimes. They change my ideas, crush preconceived notions, sharpen perspectives. They ease me away from the person who I was.

Time is solidarity. I take the time to get to know a situation from the inside. To quietly look at all its aspects. I take the time to be a witness, a sponge, a fly on the wall, hearing and seeing everything. Sometimes the others take up my time unsolicited. I don’t mind, quite the contrary, but I also like to remain in control. Because I like giving my time to somebody. I look people up, I talk, I hang about, apparently aimless but always alert. Taking one’s time consciously also slows down the time of others. People like it when you say that you have time. I practice time.

When I’m listening, I remain silent. I am aware of my privileged position. I can travel anywhere without having to think about my origins. And yet I can’t help drawing parallels now and then. The attacks restore the balance between the continents in a morbid way. Old borders are given new life. Soldiers have been patrolling the streets for so long now that they have become invisible. They are now part of the grey façades of my hometown. I’m not looking for a contest about which country is in worse shape. Sometimes, reality is too real and people need a utopia. I too need a utopia. Like the town hall I found here. On the ground floor double wooden doors lead to an auditorium. With the new building an open-air theatre was created at the back, with stands made of stone. As I entered the hall, I heard children laughing. There was a school theatre competition going on. This town hall employs a sound and light technician, and festivals, and theatre and singing competitions are held here, introducing culture right at the heart of society.

Every morning I buy fresh bread at the baker’s. At first, he was surly, almost rude even. A tourist, I saw him thinking, who will be gone again tomorrow. But when I appeared for the fourth time he made an effort to chat, with the five words of English that he knows. His reserve is now gone. Each day he is a little bit more curious. I am waiting for the question of what I’m actually doing here, and for how long.

I am the stranger who arrives today and stays tomorrow. I answer questions posed to me, but not all of them. My origins are not important. When I say where I come from I am treated to pity or I see the twinkling in the eye of the person I’m talking with. What’s it like to grow up there? Now I have become someone that can be shaped from the here and now. I try to stay formless as long as I can, just as I postpone adopting new habits as long as possible. Here, people don’t know where I grew up. Whether I am rich or poor. Here, the only thing that counts is what I’m doing now. I see this as a form of deliberate statelessness. In the residency I can evoke illusions. Of not having any relatives, no brothers or sisters, mother or father. That there is an indeterminate force, which has driven me to this place. And that that same force will one day take me somewhere else. I do not enter into long-term relationships. My main goal is to live in between everything. Between worker and intellectual. Between activist and lazy bum. Involved and anti-social. I try to unite as many contradictions as I can in myself.

I base my wanderings on self-made sketches. The busiest traffic arteries form the spine of my map. This map is a negative: the places I know best are least indicated on it. They are blind spots as I can find my way there with my eyes closed. Sometimes my plan says ‘watch out!’, with an exclamation mark. Those are places where the air is thicker and I become aware of every slowing movement. Actually, I shouldn’t mark them, as my body immediately feels I mustn’t stay there. The rhythm of my steps is somewhere between purposeful and purposeless. It becomes more difficult to remain committed to something. I have gotten used to the luxury of following no one but myself. A thought comes into my head and before I know it, I am executing it. Doing rather than thinking.

Every once in a while, I meet someone. I make an effort to open up. I decide not to wear sunglasses even though the sun hurts my eyes. When my gaze crosses that of someone else I do not avert it. My path changes. Instead of living in evasive curves I step right up to people, nod to them, talk to them. I look for quiet cafés where I can work on my drawings without being disturbed. Before long, however, someone will look over my shoulder, asking me where I’m from, wishing me welcome. Sometimes I make a drawing of them, but mostly of fictional characters in the form of a cartoon. They function as a diary. Such a character experiences the same things that I experience. I make him dream and long for things that I long for myself. One of the men to whom I show my drawings introduces himself as Huertas. He talks to me about his work: minuscule booklets that he leaves everywhere in the city, in open spaces, windowsills, and footpaths. They are his gifts to incidental passers-by, so they can read them. He cuts out the five-centimetre pages himself and staples them together. One of these booklets is made from an old school atlas. Each page is a fragment of a world map with figures on it and letters composed of small red bars of equal length. He explains to me that the length of such a red bar is equal to that of the Berlin Wall. He lets the wall travel, places it in China, Mexico. It is shocking how much space the wall occupies. He gives me a copy to take home with me. So far, he has made about twenty of them.

There are other artists in the residency too. I am not alone. They have all found their own ways of communicating with the city, to create their work in response to the lack of direct communication, to having to adapt to different habits and different rules. Ella asked people to take her to a place in the city that they find special. There they pick out a spot where Ella then paints a tiny piece black, with Chinese ink. Sometimes in plain sight, but just as well under a rock or a loosened tile. Despite the fact that the action takes place in public space it is an intimate, shared moment between Ella and her guide. In all, she does so eight times. She enjoys the thought that the black spots will remain and that her guides will still sometimes go there. I think that with this action Ella has created a memory that will live on long after the black has faded. With her work she finds a way to communicate beyond language.

Patterns begin to emerge in my observations. I frequently see the same clothes pop up and the same people doing exercises in the park. A fountain tries to spout its water high up, as steadily as possible. Its effort is inspiring as on the grass of the water’s edge a man is looking at the fountain, sitting in lotus position. A few days later there’s four of them. I look for groups of people and how they move through the streets. I watch their behaviour, their choreography, how they try to stay together. How the roles are divided. Or elderly men staring at a construction site, with concentration, their hands on their backs. Constructions are sights in any city. They provide an opportunity to look inside, to get to know the construction, and the bigger the site the more euphoric its progress.

The most suspicious people are people like me, roaming the streets alone and in silence. Watching, taking notes and photographs and taking this material back home, as if conducting anthropological research. As if I’m not really a human being but someone on the outside studying the behaviour of mankind. I fantasize about where my subjects will go later. I imagine the houses where they come from.

Dark clouds are gathering, I notice, on the top deck of the bus. The bus drives on, relentlessly. It doesn’t look like I’ll be getting back soon. ‘I’ve left my raincoat’, I realize with a start. Then my panic reaction dissolves into a smile. Now I will have to come back.

published in ‘Contemporary Artist Residencies, Reclaiming Time and Space, Taru Elfving, Irmeli Kokko, Pascal Gielen (eds), Valiz, Amsterdam, 2019, p31-38