Oslo | PRAKSIS residency call - Live or Buy

Open call for PRAKSIS residency in Oslo in March 2020. Residency 16: Live or Buy will look at present-day systems of consumption. What functions do art, fashion and design serve beyond consumerism?

PRAKSIS residencies are intensive and structured around the interests and needs of their participants. The particular form that each residency takes is developed collectively through discussion once the group comes together.

This residency is free of charge and offers comfortable accommodation for non-Oslo based residents in central Oslo. Local residents will continue to live at their usual address. The residency community will regularly come together at the residency studio space, and at organised events and meals.

International participants receive a stipend of 3000 NOK (approximately 300 euros) towards additional costs.

Two places are available for international residents. Places may be offered subject to securing support. Approximately four spaces are available to local residents.

There is an application fee.

Present-day systems of consumption emphasise the construction of the sense of self through acquisition – having. They present the act of buying a house or upgrading to the latest tech innovation as a kind of “self-improvement”; and in some ways, it may be simpler and easier to have than to be or become. However, satisfying the individual desire to have drives ever-increasing wealth inequality, labour exploitation and environmental devastation, and within all this, “cultural producers” play a precarious and contradictory role.

What functions do art, fashion and design serve beyond consumerism? Perhaps we can loosen capitalism’s ideological hold on the concept of exchange? Human beings intrinsically have much more than their accumulations of objects: ideas, bodies, and ways of relating to both human and non-human others that are not predetermined by economic transactionality. On both a macro- and a micro-scale, there is great scope for cultural producers to re-think ecologies of consumption.

Residency 16: Live or Buy has been developed with artist Nina Sarnelle, clothing designer Ida Falck Øien and clothing label HAiKw/. It will offer participants the opportunity to explore these critical questions in intimate, personal and physical ways. Sarnelle and Falck Øien plan to test the potential of dematerialised, interactive techniques (borrowed from areas such as live action role play, therapy, improvisation and social practice), to escape the pervasive logic of the free market and – through fantasy, allegory or live experiment – propose alternative forms of social or economic organization. Their goal is not to arrive at a grand solution but rather (in Donna Haraway’s phrase) to stay with the trouble, embracing doubt and working with failure and intuition to develop new practices of research, inquiry and “dirty hybrids” of resistance.

Residents are warmly encouraged to bring their own specialisms to bear in the course of the residency. When applying, please articulate (a) the relevant background knowledge and experience you will bring to the residency, (b) the particular interests or topic you plan to explore during your stay, and (c) its relationship to the agendas above. Applications are welcomed from cultural producers working at any point along the theory-practice spectrum.

Nina Sarnelle and Ida Falck Øien use both theory and art/design practice to look at issues of consumer power and sustainability. Their work has focused on the clothing industry; on- and offline scams; the politics of “economic development”, and labour infrastructures in the digital economy.

RESIDENCY DATES // 1 MARCH - 31 MARCH 2020

OPEN CALL DEADLINE // 18 DECEMBER 2019