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Artist Residencies as Creative Ecologies: Proposing a New Framework for Twenty-First-Century Cultural Production

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The Cultural Sociology of Art and Music

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Abstract

Artist residencies are key sites of artistic practice today, which open up processes of creation and career development to sociological study. Since the 1990s, these sites have proliferated globally, but have attracted no systematic research. Beginning from classic approaches to the sociology of cultural production, this chapter demonstrates the residency’s role as a site of creative autonomy, and one where social conventions are negotiated. Yet these approaches tend to neglect questions of what is made, as well as the hyper-mobility and technological mediation of art production today. Based on two interviews with young artists, we introduce “creative ecologies” as a term that captures the unstable and porous features of art production today, and the role that art objects play in stabilizing artistic careers.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank University of Groningen Research Master’s students Lucia Affaticati, Agnes Bruinsma, Nora Leidinger, Chiara Serio, Louise Vanhee, and Chunzi Wu, who participated in a tutorial on Creative Work and Residencies, and among other important contributions, compiled a multilingual literature review that expanded the vision of this research. In addition, we are grateful to all participants in “My Journey, Knowledge and Exchange,” the 2021 Saari Well Assembly of Residency Researchers in Hietamäki, Finland, organized by the Kone Foundation. This gathering opened our eyes to the diversity of residency practices and the dynamism of current residencies research.

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  1. University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands

    Kathryn S. Roberts & Sara Malou Strandvad

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  1. Kathryn S. Roberts
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Correspondence to Sara Malou Strandvad .

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    Lisa McCormick

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Roberts, K.S., Strandvad, S.M. (2022). Artist Residencies as Creative Ecologies: Proposing a New Framework for Twenty-First-Century Cultural Production. In: McCormick, L. (eds) The Cultural Sociology of Art and Music. Cultural Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11420-5_3

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