SEED Residency 2020

What Came Before is a movement and writing project that looks at the intersections of industry, specifically the arts and building sector. The work questions where labour exists within each of these fields, the slippages and contradictions of how that labour is valued as perceived by the individual doing the work, by the society it is in and the politics it is governed by.

Direction and Performance: Serena Chalker and Emma Fishwick

Mentorship: Jo Pollitt and Sam Fox

Thanks to STRUT Dance and HotHouse Company at All Saints College.

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Methods of Exchange

view the digital archive: https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/1260165/1260166

Between April and June 2020, Serena Chalker and Emma Fishwick undertook a virtual residency with Gong-Won supported by Seoul Dance Centre and Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries. Using What Came Before as a resource for creative peer-mentorship and exchange, Serena and Emma built a digital archive of the process.

Developing creative relationships during these uncertain times, this digital canvas captures process as product and is part of a broader program of international engagement through dialogue, documentation and artistic sharing. This website attempts to capture our artist-led peer-to-peer mentorship, cultural & skills exchange, facilitated by this virtual residency.

Things that we have talked about: labour, process as the artwork, language across form and geographies, mapping of place and self, virtual vs physical, place vs placelessness and asking ‘what is a digital residency’? We have been finding connection between the seemingly disconnected threads in our works and in turn our worlds. We landed on ways of expressing space and time that is not linear or hierarchical through layering of memory, ideas, form and so on.

The work is doing the work of figuring out what the work is. The labour of being an artist is made visible: always questioning, reformulating, reworking.