Artist Home Swap 2017: ethical and ethnic gaze; how art-making process take part?
I am thinking about this project for years, but this summer I finally made my first step: bringing some UK performance artists to Taiwan and making works. AHS (Artists Home Swap) is an international professional development section for performance artists. Unlike typical residency, AHS aims to stage artist in the very centre, shaping the format by what artists need, what they hope to experience/learn/be inspired. Therefore, flexibility is the key factor in AHS; it makes this section able to provide and support artists and their project in terms of what they need, which, however, bring the main difficulty when I conduct this merit; I cannot aspire any support or resource if the plan of AHS itself isn’t specific enough. To overcome this drawback, I start with the place I come from and the place I currently base: Taiwan and UK, ally to established organizations in both countries, this strategy can keep AHS flexible, open and practical. The question is: is there any organization in Taiwan open their door for AHS and its demand?
Lucky enough, I found Taroko Arts Residency Project II. Taroko is a name of the area on the east coast of Taiwan, with the spectacular gorge, a national park, ancient Truku indigenous tribes and a cement factory. The relations among indigenous tribes, national park, and cement factory are tense and complicated regarding culture, economy, and politics. Sitting in this context, Taroko Arts Residency Project questioning the meaning of public space by comparing the relationship between human and nature creatures. Following its framework of the pseudo-art institution and brave question “What happens if there’s an art centre in National Park?” Taroko Arts Residency Project II invites artists to live and work with indigenous peoples while developing their own practices and projects during the residency period.
Therefore, I invited four UK-based performance artists, Ania Varez, Hannah Sullivan, and Sheaf+Barley, to spend an intense but inspiring summer in Taroko. As the organizer of AHS, I have this privilege to witness the difficulty they faced in such intimate distance. I conclude, as the title reveals, the struggle they encounter is the trauma witness ethical and ethnic perspectives, both of them interwoven with the process of developing the practice and how it presented.
Despite the challenge of developing practice and showcasing in different culture context, artists realized that more facts and truths of current situation about Truku tribes they discovered, more interrogations of art-making propose come to their own practice. Ethical issue inevitably gets involved, the balance of artistry and representation of truth become the struggle for every artist. What we make art for? Especially when postmodern genocide happens in front of our eyes. The statement from Sheaf+Barley reveals this obfuscation. (https://www.facebook.com/sheafandbarley/posts/1168941376544611)
Moreover, when it comes to presenting practices, artists become very careful not to take those experiences they spent with Truku people unilaterally, or, in another phrase, avoiding consuming those experiences. Making art in different cultural context is vulnerable and easy to fall into certain exotic cliché, not mention to convey the rigid message to the audience as well as Truku people, which also confound artists.
In the sharing event afterword, Hannah Sullivan, one of artist took part of AHS this summer; conclude the whole experience with the word “confront.” Artists brought their initiative idea, came to an unfamiliar country, confronted different culture context, confronted limited time and format, confronted the suffer and dispute Truku people be in, confronted ownership and projection of nature, confronted the connotation of action, and, most importantly, confronted those challenges of their practice and identity of being artist.
Within those difficulties and struggles, I really appreciate how brave and honest artists face and deal with those ‘confronting.' With their participatory and striving, the connotation of this residency is capable of exploring the relationship between human and (nature) place as well as challenging the relationship between human and the (nature) place human projected, which intrinsically responds the stand of AHS as an artist development platform, and, though I believe it still remains its dispute, accordingly nourish the content and perspective of nature, art, and anything get involved.
