Recently I went to a talk by Emilia Telese about working abroad – really wish I had access to this prior to the Résider:Reside project in 2009.
Emilia highlighted the difference between working in countries with a strong heritage based culture like Italy, Spain and to some extent France – where they lean towards a more academic and clearly defined art object experience. Whereas countries with strong arts infrastructure and public funding like Uk and Northern Europe – support more experimental and conceptual based work.
Coming form a conceptual/experimental background and landing somewhere where there was an expectation of working tightly to the brief meant that I made fundamental errors in meeting the expectations of the French director who was a partner in this joint Kent/Côte d’Opale venture. I had worked hard on improving my french, mapping out the territory I was working in, and researching basic historical material but it didn’t occur to me to research working with European partners !
The project based in St.Omer was well supported by press ad TV coverage and the location and accompanying staff were very agreeable. Although I was about 90 % sure about how my piece would work in the space the remaining 10% proved problematic. And it was this level of uncertainty and experimentation that led to difficulties with the french Director. I knew I could solve the problem but it meant that the work would appear on a different wall to the one I had originally intended.
The key was that I didn’t do exactly what I said I would do and from that point our relationship unravelled – I could have done several things to perhaps prevent this – tried out different solutions before putting anything into writing and written the brief more loosely with an either /or contingent statement. It is a shame the project ended on a sour note but everything we do entails making some mistakes and the key is to make sure we learn from them !
