Our 2023 residency brought together six artists or a two-month engagement in Rejmyre to explore the theme of Refuging: an investigation of how giving/taking refuge, as an act and practice, can be developed and facilitated through multiple artistic interactions and interventions. The artists were selected based on an open call, reviewed by a selection committee and a local/regional reference group, that received 164 diverse applications. Based on this process, the following artists were invited to join the project:
Nordic/Baltic artists: Beatrice Alvestad Lopez (NO) and Ilze Mazpane (LV) International artists: Sam Grabowska (US) and Katarzyna Pagowska (PL)
Local Artists: Samin Asri (SE) and Anx Kupiainen (SE)
The Refuging Residency was made possible by support from the Swedish Arts Grants Committee, Nordic Culture Point and the Swedish Arts Council.
ABOUT THE RESIDENCY
The residency began with a joint “ensemble residency” from April 24-30, followed by an intensive production and reflection period in Rejmyre. At the end of the residency, the artists each presented an artwork created within the theme of “refuging - giving and taking”.
ON THE RESIDENCY THEME ‘REFUGING’
One of the organization’s primary research themes has, since 2018, been refuging: an exploration of how giving/taking refuge, as an act and practice, can be developed and facilitated through multiple artistic interactions and interventions. The theme has been developed by the project’s research leader Daniel Peltz, who introduced the theme and projects developed thus far during the ensemble residency week.
Refuging is a call to action for artists to develop the practice of giving/taking refuge. The initiator of this project, the U.S./Swedish artist Daniel Peltz, asks us to reconsider the notion of refuge, not as a noun (a refuge, a refugee, etc.) but as a verb, as a vital, inherently reciprocal set of actions. He asks us “how might we, as artists, use this thin sliver of time, while the worst impacts of climate change are still in the future, to develop our capacity as a society to give and to take refuge?” Refuging takes the form of a series of productions-in-residence, that will result in a broadly distributed refuging toolkit, a set of artist-shaped models for how to do this complicated work of refuging. Peltz writes, “perhaps in the not-to-distant future, people facing the need to refuge will pick up this toolkit and say, ‘I heard they tried it this way in Rejmyre.’”
One question that has become central to Peltz’ thinking around refuging is: How does a factory town that produces glass, become a factory town that produces refuge? Here Peltz references and is responding to the appropriation of small towns like Rejmyre as temporary refuges for newly arrived people, while ‘better housing’ was built for them in, implicitly, ‘better places’. Peltz, who has been investigating the town of Rejmyre for over 15 years, challenges the logic of this articulation. He asks, What if this was actually a better place than many to do this thing called refuging? Here he performs a shift on our usual association with the word ‘refuge’, moving it from a noun, referring to people and places, to a verb referring to a set of actions. In this shift refuging expands to become a practice that encompasses everyone. The subject positions of the refugee who comes seeking refuge and the one who gives refuge collapse and we are left with a reciprocal state that we all might learn to perform and inhabit better. Further, Peltz makes a claim that sites like Rejmyre, that have been used up in the cycle of extraction, depletion and abandonment, are not just good enough places to house refugees but places that are uniquely well suited to developing the practice of refuging because they themselves are in need of refuge.
ON THE RESIDENCY STRUCTURE
As an artist-run organisation, the purpose of our work together in Rejmyre has been to create a post-institutional teaching and learning space for ourselves, and others, to continue to grow, engage in sustained critique and explore topics of collective interest. Our research strands have emerged from our time together and thus follow a loose, associative line from one to the other. Rejmyre Art Lab’s programming is born of a long-term engagement with and commitment to the village of Rejmyre in the Östergötland region of Sweden.
Rejmyre Art Lab’s residency program is run and constructed by artists in response to our own needs and changing modes of production. Our residencies often consist of a mix of dedicated time for developing ideas and work, collaborative exercises, intensive peer critique, and co-hosting the group through cooking and caring for each other. In an effort to explore alternatives to the pervasive ideology of individualism in contemporary art practice, Rejmyre Art Lab has adopted a model we refer to as ensemble residencies, borrowing the notion of the ensemble that is far more common in performance practices. Within this model, we commit to explore topics together in a small group, at least at the outset of an investigation, and to welcome the members of the ensemble into the development process of the work. In this spirit, each member, of the selected refuging ensemble, will be asked to design an exercise, based on their own artistic practice, that engages the other members in their interests within the theme.