Made possible with the assistance of: Aram Lee, Quenton Miller, Eva Mahhov, Ola Korbanska, Johan Brink, Jelle Baars.
One of the associated groups which use WSLP is The Second Thoughts collective and they decided to open the WSLP project space on Westerdok, Amsterdam, for people to stay the night, and participate in the exhibit. The participant-resident could stay there free of charge, 24hours, on the condition that they would engage with the content placed in the space - the participant would encounter a curated domestic space with research materials and objects of significance.
For the documentation of the residency, a white tablecloth/cover/paper was covering the kitchen table. That would be renewed with each new resident. The residues, marks, writings, scrapings, drawings on the kitchen table would serve as the representation of what happened in the space.
The outcomes of the residencies would be presented in the gallery during Amsterdam Art Week, 17.-25. June, 2021.
The following email reached my inbox on June 2nd, 2021 after a swift online form application that I had filled the week before:
Dear Alina,
We are super happy that you showed interest in attending our experimental residency- we got quite a few more applicants than expected. Thus we had to make a lottery of which 7 people we could host (since we really did not want to choose, to be as fair as possible)- and the luck was on your side! We are happy to invite you to stay over at when site lost the plot as a resident for 24 hours.
Our idea is to have a possibility of staying over in 2 different time gaps- either from evening to evening, or morning to morning.
In your application, you noted the dates that you prefer-- so would 6th of June evening- 7th of June evening suit you? If so, let us know what time you could start on Sunday eve.As for the space, right now we can tell you as much.
the space will provide with you:
- a double bed at a mezzanine, accessible by stairs
- a staircase
- a kitchen corner equipped in: fridge, sink, stove, small oven
- a kitchen table and chairs
- a bookshelf
- typewriter & paper
- tablecloth
- wc (no shower)In addition to that, there will be some food(mostly raw materials)stuffs, tea coffee etc. You are welcome to use all the tools in your space. Let us know if there is something that we should definitely keep in mind when hosting you!
Further info will follow soon!
Looking forward,
Eva and Ola and The Second Thoughts
I shot over a response:
Dear Eva and Ola, and team,
Fantastic!
I think June 6th to June 7th - eve to eve - would be perfect.
June 6th is my birthday. My 36th. So I take it as a nice turning point and gift from which I can start working.
Should we also say 6PM to 6PM to be extra?
And THANK YOU!
Alina
What was playing at the time of my stay at WSLP was Letters to Max, a feature-length film by Eric Baudelaire and reproductions of letters to Maxim Gvinjia, former Foreign Minister of the largely unrecognized state of Abkhazia. The letters were visible from the street, anytime, and the film was viewable when space is open. But, on the 6th of June, at around 6PM, I got the key to the space and was kindly given access to the beamer. I could play Letters to Max for 24h, to my own liking. Which I proceeded to do, without ever quite managing to sit through an entire viewing, catching only fragments, as I tried to also travel the city from center-west to north, to center-east and back.
I found myself puzzled by the concept of a 24h stay in a city that I already lived in, yet in another neighborhood, far-east.
I stretched time, on a bit of an ominous bend, having just celebrated my 36th birthday in the place, with my alarm clock admonishing me for not putting in enough sleep hours which would find me groggy, biking through the city at random, at a certain point losing one part of my headset - the left one - on a street in de Pijp, and then subsequently losing time the hour after simply staring at the street and retracing my steps - so much for stretching the day!
I spent 24h traveling the city, sharing time with friends, visiting another art space, all the while Letters to Max was playing in the background at WSLP without me being able to watch it. I felt like I was accelerating. June 5th had marked the opening of art spaces after 6 months, which seemed like a "return to normal" in post-COVID times, though I wondered what this "return to normal" would mean for smaller art spaces that had been functioning at limited capacity, on appointment, even before the official opening up.
In between my rush through the city and the documentary that I didn't manage to see I wrote a piece about my reluctance in the face of the opening of the cultural season which will eventually see the light in print on Metropolis M [to be linked here].
24h are never quite enough to tie up all the loose strands.
So halfway through that time, which added yet another degree of speed and complication to my schedule, I decided I knew what my contribution to the 24h residency would be.
I duplicated WSLP's entrance key.