A video that was sent to us in November 2021

Watch a video here of Calgary artist Caitlind Brown talking about her work as an artist and as a facilitator in her projects "Wreck City", "The Hibernation Project" and "The Wandering Island".

Caitlind recorded this video some days before our onAIRISM conference in November 2021. She was part of the opening workshop of the onAIRISM project in May 2021.

Caitlind sees herself as an artist-curator, working a.o. on "what it takes to run a [a residency] and what it takes to run them well."

The project "Wreck City", organized together with a collective of artists, focusses on pre-demolition spaces and on spaces in transition, such as empty office-buildings, vacant historical sites or empty homes. The team previously ran one international artist residency within this project, housing two artists in pre-demolition homes. But “maybe it was our first and maybe also our last [residency]...” says Caitlind, “we made many mistakes... but [we] also created moments of rare magic".

The "Hibernation Project" then again literally takes place in Caitlind’s and her partner’s own backyard, and came about as a reaction to, among other things, the frustration one can experience when working with large bureaucracies and official funding structures. The project partners wanted to work in a space "that we have control over". And even though the project is not an official residency, it literally is set "in the place where we reside".

Starting off with installations and performances in a private backyard, the project was hit quite hard by the Covid19-crisis. It was not safe anymore to invite a larger public into private environments, the partners switched to online events or radio performances, realized installations in trunks of cars… All of a sudden, it became a normal part of the project, to "house" artists from much further away, people the project partners never had met before. This reaction to a crisis however, as Caitlind says, may also "hold[s] the seeds for a future form or residencies"?

Finally, for the most current project, "The Wandering Island", the city of Calgary commissioned Caitlind and her partners to facilitate an on-going project on an island in a near-by river. Here, it is planned to create a mobile studio in a trailer parked near to the island. A place where artists can be invited on a seasonal basis to work on the island and in its habitat.

The video is (c) Caitlind Brown.

More information on Caitlind Brown and her work here.

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