One day there’ ll be a place for us
for
the days of garage bands are back
A story about a tuna fish
Once upon a time, there was a joyful Tuna fish with big dreams and hopes. Tuna, the artist, wanted to present its artistic work at the Tuna Arts Center and, in order to make it happen, Tuna needed funding. To get the support Tuna had to work every night guarding the bottom of the ocean, delivering messages and reporting. At first, Tuna had no problem with this work as it had to swim all the time anyway to get oxygen. Therefore, sleeping was out of the question. For a while, Tuna was motivated until one night it realized that it was tired of the same endless rhythm. Tuna started to become emotionally exhausted. All the daily work of guarding the bottom of the ocean gave Tuna time to reflect upon the bureaucracy around art in the fish society. Tuna realized that it never actually had the possibility to spend time delving into its artistic work and questioning the concept of work. Tuna was confused by the endless work it was doing in order to be able to engage with its art, and it started to question if the work it was doing would ever be recognized.
About the text
This text is co-authored by us (Stella Kruuasamagi, Andrea Diaz and Nefeli Gioti), three choreographers based in Stockholm. It is a collective testimony and a way of reflecting together on our common experience of trying to find ways to travel our artwork from Stockholm to Tallinn.
We met and started working, thinking and doing things together while studying at the Ma in Choreography in SKH(Stockholm University of the Arts), during the period 2020-2022. During our studies, we started collaborating in various ways in each other's works.
In addition, we have been developing an artistic research project around the concept, the practices and the labor of (c)leaning*. We started it with a soft temporal quality as a response to the fast paced rhythm of art making nowadays. This research started during the summer of 2021, when we were working together in a restaurant in the Swedish Archipelago.
(c)leaning will be the main focus of an artistic residency period in spring 2023 in Massia, Estonia.
We are curious about sharing collaborative and supportive ways of togetherness.
In spring 2022 we decided to organize a trip to Tallinn as one of us (Stella) originates from Estonia. Stella, driven from a desire to create ways of supporting each other and keep on doing things together, contacted Kanuti Gildi SAAL (https://saal.ee/) and proposed to host a co-curated event by the three of us in December 2022. In that way, we could introduce our work in Tallin's performing arts scene by sharing the art processes that have been in our backpacks. In addition, this event would allow people to come together and experience art with free admission.
But….in order to make it happen, we need to arrive there, eat there, sleep there, pay the rent for the venue and pay for our labor.
Within three months we wrote seven applications for funding, to support and make this event happen for real. Two of these applications has already been rejected and now we are waiting for 1 more answers. Who knows, who knows….
Whatever will be, will be…
Another story, our story…
Nostalgia abound, doubt abound, desire and form abound.
Rejections abound, volunteer jobs abound.
Uncertainty, insecurity, restlessness and comparison abound.
Imagination and segregation abound.
Half done jobs abound.
And around this round we chase tails, we find a getaway, we slide and bounce back.
Studying for an MA in Choreography is one thing, and then graduating it is something else. While kicking oneself to return from the academy back to the freelance scene, one starts to wonder…
Again? Alone? Is there another way?
Creating opportunities. Inventing survival strategies.
Trying to make it.
Make what?
Doing things…
Creating affiliations
Doing things…
How to create the conditions for doing things?
What things?
These days, whatever endeavor one sets out to pursue in the
economic, political or cultural field, one first has to formulate a fitting project in order to apply for official approval or funding of the project from one or several public authorities. Should this project in its original form be rejected, it is then modified in an attempt to improve its chances of being accepted. If the revised project is dismissed out of hand, one has no alternative but to propose an entirely new one in its place. In this manner, all members of our society are constantly preoccupied with devising, discussing and dismissing an endless series of projects. Appraisals are written, budgets meticulously calculated, commissions assembled, committees appointed and resolutions tabled.
(Boris Groys, « THE LONELINESS OF THE PROJECT », New York Magazine of Contemporary Art and Theory, Issue 1.1, 2002)
For an artwork to exist, it has to meet an audience. Precisely in the field of performing arts, in order to meet an audience, a performance needs to be held under specific economic and infrastructural conditions that would allow the visibility that is required and needed. If the artists themselves cannot provide the conditions for staging a performance (meaning having access to a big enough capital) they need to find the resources elsewhere, either in private or in the state's economic cultural funding programs and grants.
Then, the artists need to match the performance work with the context and requirements of each specific application in order to meet the support needed. If the artist is not financially supported, the performance, as it is imagined to be, cannot take place.
In order to create an art project , we need money, and if we don't have the money, then we need funding. If the latter doesn't arrive, like a house of cards, the project falls apart.
Is there another way?
As the basic production model, the project is interesting because it provides an insight into the fact that, today, the way of working includes all the areas of our lives; the project no longer knows a border between professional and personal investment – in other words, between life and work. The project not only entails work, but also self-realization, on the level of one's life and sometimes deeply personal. The nature of this self-realization is contradictory, however. We work so much that we never again have time for ourselves and others; due to the amount of work and the intensity of our self-realization, we can actually burn out in life. (Bojana Kunst, The Project at Work, Conference The Public Commons and
the Undercommons of Art, Education, and Labor, 2014)
Is there another way?
The potentiality of sharing our work in Estonia started enthusiastically and with a sensation of both fulfillment and hope. By that time, we still had not graduated.
We were trying to find ways to make it happen.
We were not thinking much about the implications of making art, all the work we have to do to make things under these particular funding-based conditions.
(And) we have been doing things all these years.
We have been inventing ways over and over again.
So, we immersed ourselves one more time
Finding ways for doing things
Maybe together…
We felt nice of having a future
We felt nice of having visibility
We felt nice trying it out together.
Once we understand that we can access an economy for investing (money) in an art project, it becomes difficult to think, include and recognize other forms of investments. Once the money exists, the money is needed. Because, if there is an economy for art, then the artist could invest in, for example, renting a studio, a venue, a space, having collaborators, etc.
The circulation of the financial capital in arts is enhanced by the circulation of the cultural capital. If we do not deny the fact of contributing to this circulation (maybe we cannot do it either way. As we ask for it, we need it and create it as well) then maybe it is more about how to arrive at it, what does this arrival do to the work and to the ethics that we might embrace?
Maybe the question is how this circulation exists rather than if it should really exist or not.
We started working on the applications from May till mid September. We wrote several applications which had to be individually submitted each time. In other words, we pressed the submit button 10 times in total for a one-day event.
“-…Well, that's how it goes!. Well, that is how things are!”
Nevertheless, we still feel the need to talk about it. To talk in-between us and in public about the things that, quote… “this is how they go!...”.
Thinking about state funding. It feels frustrating.
The possibility of being able to access an economy that allows for art to happen is great, it is quite bright to feel that the state puts energy for investing in cultural activities. Investing, partially from a percentage of paid social taxes.
Art becomes very dependent, though, and that is what makes it frustrating, the idea of becoming reliant on the answer from an organization in order to know whether to start a project or not. Moreover,the thought of artistic expressions, which are leaning towards senses and emotions, having to fit into systems that are concrete and impersonal, brings up the question of whether we are doing the right thing by accepting this as the dominant way to support our work.
“But, this is how it goes…”
Is there another way?
Can we imagine otherwise?
What happens to our social imagination, today here and now?
Why is it so difficult, though, to think of a society that is not neoliberal-capitalist? London-based designers Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby have attempted to reply to this question in an insightful way. Our dreams today, they have argued “have been downgraded to hopes''. {Today we hope that}...we will not allow ourselves to become extinct, hope that we can feed the starving, hope that there will be room for us all on this tiny planet”.... But there are no more visions. We do not know how to fix the planet, we do not know how to dream collectively about changing things, we are just hopeful. Since the 1970’s, according to Dune and Raby, a series of key changes in the world… have made imaginative , social and political speculation more difficult or less likely…we now seem unable to imagine and produce visions for our present and future; to create new dreams for the twenty-first century
(Danae Theodoridou, Curation as Construction Site for Artificial Social Imaginaries, Curating in Context, 2022)
Maybe it goes around this ....
Time, commitment, purchase of goods, traveling, thinking, crafting …
Knowing that there is an amount of labor that will happen and that cannot be taken into account as an hourly salary, how can we define an artistic economical system?
Even though we cannot officially start our project before knowing if we will receive the funding, we have already started.
How much of this economy covers up for the labor required for crafting an art piece?
Could we, as artists, propose respectful alternatives ways that can balance, and respond to the main role money has taken in art making?
What happens with the artist's identity when it doesn't receive the feedback meal from meeting an audience?
Does It starves?
It seems that it is easier to continue our artistic processes in our homes, basements, and outdoors spaces… Because it seems the days of garage bands are back. We can admit that the idea of finding new solutions opens our appetite, and it feels exciting, because art does not stop due to lack of money and, at the same time, we are not willing to follow the poor and lonely artist paradigm.
There are alternatives, if we can imagine them and if we overcome our fear of trying them out. Together. If we remain sensitive to what is there, to what we know, to what we don't know and to each other.
We can become aware of what we can explore where we are currently nesting. Even more, we try to remind ourselves and to each other about what brings us joy and we devise ways on how to take that as a starting point and explore art-making with the ones that we share all those questions with.
Sometimes we just have to start regardless of the obstacles on our way, to allow for unknown alternatives to unravel paths and solutions.