RESIDENCY SUPPORT

Rejmyre Art Lab’s Center for Peripheral Studies is able to offer support to artists from all geographies. All artists participating in the residency will have shared use of the Refuging Pavilion and Engelska Magasinet exhibition spaces for public interactions, events, sharing, and research related practices. We have limited possibilities for tools and workshops on site but a strong network of collaborators both locally as well as regionally.

We look forward to have a diverse cohort of practitioners and thereby offer three types of support:

Artist Residency for international applicants beyond the Nordic and Baltic regions (funded by IASPIS): Participation stipend of 24 000 SEK, material/production stipend up to 12 500 SEK, travel stipend, housing in Rejmyre (individual bedrooms with shared bathroom and shared communal spaces), shared production space in historic early 20th century factory buildings with the possibility of individual (bookable) space + 1 communal lunch per week

Artist Residency for Nordic and Baltic artists (funded by Nordic Culture Point) : Participation stipend of 24 000 SEK, material/production stipend up to 12 500 SEK, travel stipend, housing in Rejmyre (individual bedrooms with shared bathroom and shared communal spaces), shared production space in historic early 20th century factory buildings with the possibility of individual (bookable) space + 1 communal lunch per week

Artist Residency for regional and local artists of Östergötland (funded by Kulturrådet, Region Östergötland, Finspångs kommun): We invite artists in the vicinity of Östergötland to participate in the Refuging Production Residency by offering studio space in the Refuging Pavilion in Rejmyre to compliment their practice. We seek artists who are able to be present for the Ensemble Residency week as well as at least 2 days/week during the residency period but who do not need overnight accommodations. Participation stipend of 10 000 SEK ex. VAT, material budget up to 5000 SEK, a travel budget of 1500 sek, studio space within the shared Refuging Pavilion, a conceptual art work created by artist Daniel Peltz in collaboration with Danish architect Atelier Kristoffer Tejlgaard + 1 communal lunch per week

Please note that all artists will be present during the same time in Rejmyre. In connection to this residency there will also be an autumn presentation in our exhibition space, Engelska Magasinet, in Rejmyre, of the individual and shared processes and practices produced during the residency: September 23 - November 5, 2023. Exhibition fees following the Swedish MU agreement will be applied.

ON THE RESIDENCY THEME ‘REFUGING’

One of the organisation’s primary research themes has, since 2018, been refuging: an exploration of how giving/taking refuge, as an act and practice, can be developed and facilitated through multiple artistic interactions and interventions. The theme has been developed by the project’s research leader Daniel Peltz, who, together with artistic director Sissi Westerberg, will introduce the theme and projects developed thus far during the ensemble residency week.

Refuging is a call to action for artists to develop the practice of giving/taking refuge. The initiator of this project, the U.S./Swedish artist Daniel Peltz, asks us to reconsider the notion of refuge, not as a noun (a refuge, a refugee, etc.) but as a verb, as a vital, inherently reciprocal set of actions. He asks us “how might we, as artists, use this thin sliver of time, while the worst impacts of climate change are still in the future, to develop our capacity as a society to give and to take refuge?” Refuging takes the form of a series of productions-in-residence, that will result in a broadly distributed refuging toolkit, a set of artist-shaped models for how to do this complicated work of refuging. Peltz writes, “perhaps in the not-to-distant future, people facing the need to refuge will pick up this toolkit and say, ‘I heard they tried it this way in Rejmyre.’”

One question that has become central to Peltz’ thinking around refuging is: How does a factory town that produces glass, become a factory town that produces refuge? Here Peltz references and is responding to the appropriation of small towns like Rejmyre as temporary refuges for newly arrived people, while ‘better housing’ was built for them in, implicitly, ‘better places’. Peltz, who has been investigating the town of Rejmyre for over 15 years, challenges the logic of this articulation. He asks, What if this was actually a better place than many to do this thing called refuging? Here he performs a shift on our usual association with the word ‘refuge’, moving it from a noun, referring to people and places, to a verb referring to a set of actions. In this shift refuging expands to become a practice that encompasses everyone. The subject positions of the refugee who comes seeking refuge and the one who gives refuge collapse and we are left with a reciprocal state that we all might learn to perform and inhabit better. Further, Peltz makes a claim that sites like Rejmyre, that have been used up in the cycle of extraction, depletion and abandonment, are not just good enough places to house refugees but places that are uniquely well suited to developing the practice of refuging because they themselves are in need of refuge.

ON THE RESIDENCY STRUCTURE

As an artist-run organisation, the purpose of our work together in Rejmyre has been to create a post-institutional teaching and learning space for ourselves, and others, to continue to grow, engage in sustained critique and explore topics of collective interest. Our research strands have emerged from our time together and thus follow a loose, associative line from one to the other. Rejmyre Art Lab’s programming is born of a long-term engagement with and commitment to the village of Rejmyre in the Östergötland region of Sweden.

Rejmyre Art Lab’s residency program is run and constructed by artists in response to our own needs and changing modes of production. Our residencies often consist of a mix of dedicated time for developing ideas and work, collaborative exercises, intensive peer critique, and co-hosting the group through cooking and caring for each other. In an effort to explore alternatives to the pervasive ideology of individualism in contemporary art practice, Rejmyre Art Lab has adopted a model we refer to as ensemble residencies, borrowing the notion of the ensemble that is far more common in performance practices. Within this model, we commit to explore topics together in a small group, at least at the outset of an investigation, and to welcome the members of the ensemble into the development process of the work. In this spirit, each member, of the selected refuging ensemble, will be asked to design an exercise, based on their own artistic practice, that engages the other members in their interests within the theme.

ABOUT REJMYRE ART LAB

Rejmyre Art LAB’s Center for Peripheral Studies is a long-term, place-based, artistic research project, co-founded by artists Daniel Peltz and Sissi Westerberg in 2009. We come together to explore issues of vital concern through and with our varied artistic practices. We utilize an ensemble residency model to conduct this research, coming together to collectively think about aspects of our complex existence in this place and time.

Our activities include a post-MFA fellowship program, an international artist residency program, a platform for experimental and conceptual glass projects in the Reijmyre Glass Factory, public seminars, our pedagogical program Konstlabbet, exhibitions in Konsthallen Engelska Magasinet and a program of installations in and around the town of Rejmyre. Our installation program attempts to re-radicalize the notion of site-specificity through a commitment to a philosophy of embedded installation in which there is an element of co-inhabitation and inseparable dependence at play in the relationship between an artwork and our site. In this place designed largely for export, of its forests, quartz and craft labor, we ask the question, what is not for export?

ABOUT REJMYRE

Rejmyre is located amongst the forests and lakes two hours southwest of Stockholm. With a population of approximately 1000, Rejmyre is a small factory town centred around the Reijmyre Glasbruk, a glass factory founded in 1810 and still in operation.

SELECTION PROCESS

Notifications of acceptance: notifications will be sent out by February 24, 2023.

The selection group for the production residency is: Louise Johansson Waite / Program Director Sissi Westerberg / Artistic Director Daniel Peltz / Refuging Project Research Leader Tracy Jonsson-Laboy / Executive Director

There is also a reference group for the production residency consisting of representatives from local and regional cultural institutions.

THE APPLICATION IS NOW CLOSED.

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The residency program is made possible through a collaboration with IASPIS, The Swedish Arts Grants Committees’ International Program for Visual and Applied Arts and funding from Nordic Culture Point, Kulturrådet, Region Östergötland and Finspångs kommun.

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