First Glance
Last month I got the opportunity to participate in a music residency at the Gaudeamus festival in Utrecht. I want to spend this column unpacking that sentence, particularly the words opportunity and residency. But first, the bare-bones details about what this opportunity entailed:
I was given €800 to make a piece of music with two other artists over four days (not including the pre-residency meetings and post-residency work to translate the piece to the internet). This chunk of cash was supposed to pay for travel, housing, almost all of my food, and whatever equipment we needed to buy. That’s a fairly tight budget, but luckily I have a friend I could stay with in Utrecht, and kept equipment expenses to a minimum.
Double Take
I’m so grateful for the opportunity to participate in the program. It really is true, I’m very proud of the work we made (hopefully be online soon) and appreciative of the relationships I built with the artists in the program and at the festival. But still that sentence sticks in my mouth like I’m reading it from a script: I’m grateful for the opportunity.
The word opportunity does something to the labor of these four days; it flips the position of who gave and who took. Like when you finish a seven hour shift at a cafe you don’t say that you’re grateful for the opportunity to make so many flat whites because that was work, that was labor. But when you spend four days building a computer program and a soundscape and a reactive fountain to archive people’s memories of lost climates that was an opportunity—the laborer is indebted to the institution for the work they made.
Don’t get me wrong. Creative work, whether making music or writing this column, is fun and engaging. But unlike carpentry, or baking pastries, or climate modeling, which can also be fun and engaging, you don’t just do creative work because that’s what you found a job in. You have to be invited in, given an opportunity. This systematically devalues creative labor, forcing creators into positions where they have to accept and be grateful for whatever opportunities come along, no matter how temporary, ill-paid, and poorly organized they may be.
This brings us to the second word: residency. I salivate when I think about creative residency. I picture standing in the sunny window of a warm bedroom with a mug of herbal tea before shuffling downstairs to an upright piano or a worn writing desk to just create until I need to eat again or go to bed. To reside creatively, to live in the work. But this idea of residency also flips and devalues our relationship to creative labor. Often in a creative residency everything is provided: a bed and amenities, food, and space to work. Seen the other way round, all that a creative residency provides is a bed, amenities, food, and space to work. There is often little to no additional compensation, no opportunity to negotiate a contract extension or security between the end of the residency and what comes next. The expectation is that if you are living in the work, you must be okay living to work.
Thinking this way, my PhD program is this same kind of residency. I’m in residence at Trinity College Dublin, I’ve been given a computer and a desk, a stipend of €17,900/year to pay for my housing and food, and some professional development funds if I ask nicely. But there is no room to negotiate a raise, even to compensate for inflation, or to extend my contract if the research takes a new turn. I am grateful for the opportunity to research and write but I also know that my work is essential to the university, the country, and the planet, that’s it’s worth a lot more than what Eric and Barbara Kinsella are paying for it.
Hindsight
Digestable is, like all the work we do, implicated in this. Lena and I have different experiences of how we contribute to this newsletter, and its relationship to the constellation of other things we each do. And I’m sure all the past and present Digestable contributors would agree that it’s an enjoyable process, it’s helpful in our thinking, and that it is work. It would be more work, of course, for us to try to find grant funding or to put together a crowdfunding system. It would also change the relationship between writer and reader. But I’m also curious about what that relationship means in its current form, since I’ve been given the opportunity to share my thoughts and take up residence in your inbox.
For more on creative labor and financial insecurity, listen to Earlobe Calming.