£1000 award to convert the first COVID lockdown in 2020 into a ‘work from home’ residency
Responding to a collapse in work opportunities during the first COVID lockdown, the WFH Residency paid artists to conduct a ‘working from home’ residency. Aimed at artists who had arts projects cancelled or who were made unemployed as result of the COVID lockdown, it supported co-operative or communal projects that connected people while social distancing.
There were 4 rounds between April and July 2020, with one artist each selected for April, May, June and July. We also paid artists to be selectors for the award.
Reliant on the gig economy for income as technicians, visiting tutors, and in jobs outside of the arts, this residency provided financial support for artists and encouraged digital, community-focussed activity while following government guidelines around social distancing.
Selected artists received £1000 to spend on a project, and promotion of any shareable content through our networks.
April 2020 – Daniella Valz Gen
Daniella Valz Gen is an artist and a poet born in Lima and living in London, with an ongoing practice of tarot and ritual. Recent projects include (Be)longing, a series of ritualised landscape interventions. Valz Gen is the author of the poetry collection Subversive Economies (PSS, 2018), has published in various journals, and teaches creative writing workshops.
Her project Warping Symbols Finding Meanings was selected for the award. Selection was by freelance curators Helen Nisbet and Louise Shelley.
Warping Symbols Finding Meanings was a series of 5 weekly online gatherings to collectively reinterpret, divine, rewrite and prescribe alternative actions to cope with uncertain times. It looked at ways of reading symbols, images and gestures, and explore writing and performative acts in response to them.
Artists participating included Isobel Atacus, Beth Bramich, Rabindranath Bose, Amanda Camenisch, Sophie Chapman, Angie Farfan, Annabelle Fenn, Bettina Fung, Andrea Garcia, Roberta Gotti, Frauke Huhn, June Lam, Alicia Reyes McNamara, Natalie Marr, Aurelie Meriel, Juliana Moreno, Katharine Platts, Amy Pennington, Szilvia Ponyiczki, Tal Regev, Carlos Mauricio Rojas, Oren Shoesmith, Holly Slingsby, Eva Terzoni, Daniella Valz Gen, Samantha S Whetton, Zoe Williams, Jessica Worden.
May 2020 – Sop
The second WFH residency was awarded to Sop for their project The Den 1 and co-commissioned by Unlimited, celebrating the work of disabled artists. Selection was by artists Katriona Beales and Karolina Magnusson Murray.
Sop is a London based artist and musician making film, performance, sound, writing, and workshops often in collaboration. They come from the queer, DIY punk scene, and their work centres modes of sociality rather than dominant notions of productivity and wellness. They are one half of Rita Munus, a collective whose most recent project Write It Speak It Move It took place in Cubitt Gallery in 2019. They sing in Child’s Pose, drum in Woolf and their solo project is called dmf.
As someone in the “extremely vulnerable category” for coronavirus, Sop has been shielding. During lockdown they take solitary walks at dawn in a nearby wood and cemetery, socially distancing from all but the buried, rediscovering the healing power of nature. In response to circumstances, Sop has made a den, which has become a calm, nature refuge where they can hide and go ‘off grid’.
Gathering material from their regular trips to their den, Sop will produce a series of new meditative works in sound and other media to reach and collaborate with the chronically ill, queer, sex worker and other vulnerable communities, encouraging them to construct and share their own refuges and connect in and through isolation.
June 2020 – Leonie Rousham and Ishwari Bhalerao
The third WFH residency was awarded to Leonie Rousham and Ishwari Bhalerao for their project Kneed. It was selected by artist Alex Julyan and curator & writer Holly Willats, director of Art Licks.
Kneed is a resource made by artists Leonie Rousham and Ishwari Bhalerao for artists and cultural workers who are trying to work collectively, sustainably and with accountability. They call this ‘Collective Sustenance’. Kneed explores and questions forms of ‘kneading’; as process, labour, physicality and time and ‘needing’; as nourishment, sustenance or an expression of obligation, in order to try and imagine an alternative. Nancy Fraser reminds us that ‘Capitalist economic production is not self-sustaining, but relies on social reproduction [care]. However, its drive to unlimited accumulation threatens to destabilize the very reproductive processes and capacities that capital and the rest of us – need’. On temporary billboards, dissolvable tablecloths, picket-lines and protest banners. Kneed focuses on an alternative trajectory of making that supplements with Rousham and Bhalero with what they need. Creating a space which prioritises care, conversations, friendship and process, as forms of resistance.
During this residency, Rousham and Bhalerao recorded a series of conversations with three different artist/cultural workers’ collectives, talking about their approach to ‘sustainable collaborative practices’, covering how they manage resources like time, spaces and systems of care, to make their practice and life as an artist less exhaustive. These interviews will reflect upon ways in which culture is being sustained, what it is that is being exhausted, and how collaboration can provide a form of resistance to this.
Interviews were with the band Shovel Dance Collective, curatorial research platform Performingborders, and T A P E Collective, founded to champion film by women of colour both behind and in front of the camera.
July 2020 – Whiskey Chow
The fourth and final WFH residency was awarded to Whiskey Chow for her project A Sky Full of Stars. It was selected by artists Sophia Kosmaoglou and Jane Wildgoose.
Whiskey Chow is a London-based performance artist and Chinese drag king. Whiskey’s art practice engages with broadly defined political issues, covering a range of related topics: from female and queer masculinity, problematizing the nation-state across geographic boundaries, to stereotypical projections of Chinese/Asian identity. Her performance is interdisciplinary, combining embodied performance with moving image and experimental sound pieces.
A Sky Full of Stars was an online body-positive workshop aiming to reset a sense of acceptance, self-appreciation, healing and love. This digital workshop aimed to create a safe space for all types of bodies and genders to collectively build up a self-adoring narrative via presentation and representation of one’s body. Chow invited UK-based migrant cultural workers to participate and explore the relationship between one’s body and oneself; embracing vulnerability and intimacy. It was a group experiment to self-curate a bodyscape that stands for unapologetic queer path to alternative beauty.
During the Covid-19 pandemic in the UK, migrant’s voices and rights are often overlooked by the governmental support system. As one of the precarious migrant cultural workers herself, Whiskey worked to create a vital space for these unseen bodies, providing a channel for them to deal with memories, trauma, cultural heritage, marginalized live experiences as well as collectively exploring the notion of a“home for soul”, given their bodies are not in their home countries. With this ethos and participants’ consent, a new video work will be created: a collective bodyscape of UK migrant cultural workers. Interrogating where ‘home’ is and where the soul can be safely placed as a precarious individual during an unprecedented crisis in a foreign country.
For this project, Chow worked with Queer Art Projects, a London based, artist-led production company specialising in the organisation of art events with a queer and/or migrant content. Founded by the artist, curator and producer duo Tuna Erdem and Seda Ergul recent projects include: House of Wisdom Nottingham, Staying Out and Turkish Delight, a queer festival consisting of screenings, workshops and an art party with live performances and an exhibition, scheduled for September 2020.
The first iteration of this workshop was part of the Returning to Home series of workshops curated by Annie Jael Kwan for performingbordersLIVE20.