Eris Bushati: DFEWA residence in Mallnitz was for sure a big good surprise for me

1.      Dear Eris Bushati, you/we have just returned from the DFEWA residency at Mallnitz in Austria. Please tell us more about your involvement in this residency. What made you join it and how would you describe the whole experience now that it's over?

 Eris Bushati: Ohhh, I can’t start my answer without a sigh because I am not sure if I can fully articulate verbally this experience. I have joined this art residency through the invitation of the curator of this organization, an outstanding painter Dorothea Fleiss that I was lucky enough to meet in another art residency that I was coordinating in Albania. Having had a lot of experience on these activities doesn’t stop me from admitting that DFEWA residence in Mallnitz was for sure a big good surprise for me. The intercultural and interpersonal exchange was above and beyond the artistic exchange that art residencies aim to succeed. It was a week full of discovering I might say. Discovering new artists, new artist’s techniques and experience, discovering myself, discovering of new ways of adapting in a social environment through and artistic tool, in a habitat full of beauty and inspiring nature.

 

2.      What is the present role of art residencies in the contemporary art ecosystem?

Eris Bushati: Daniel, I think the role by now is a crucial one. It determines your stance as an artist in the role you have in society. 

As everyone within their professions obtain mastery in the best language they can better communicate their ideas to the world, either verbal, body language or through art, it has become a must to have the possibility to experience an opportunity where you can fully exchange this artistic language. 

That being said, art residencies in this case are now a must to facilitate this communication process. 

Many might underline the social media platforms as facilitating tool that can do that somehow but we shouldn’t forget that we as human beings we exchange and blossom using our senses, touch, hearing, tasting, ect, that can only be evolved during a physical encounter that can happen only during an art residency.

 

3.      How do art residencies meet the changing needs of individual artists?

Eris Bushati: As a continuum of what I mentioned above I can mention the opportunity that I as an artist have to closely see another artist’s way of relating to his/her art piece, how they communicate with a canvass or any other surface, material they use. How they get happy or angry during their process with an art piece in the process, how do they resolve the “problematic” with their art piece? And this gives me as an artist an opportunity to see, explore myself and try a different approach to my art piece. The communication on the spot with other fellow artist in regards to opinions and feedback regarding my artistic process is a feature that you cannot have at this extent within your studio, even if you can have a few people over at your studio. Usually I don’t tend to invite people in my studio when I am actually painting, while in an art residency being “forced” to coexist and display this intimate artistic process of mine, I become an open book for an international input of comments and feedback bringing an international input of cultures too, which if someone hasn’t discovered it yet, I can surely admit it is a must, it is an actual need in my growth. 

 

4.      How can residencies provide alternative openings and infrastructures to nurture artistic work in the midst of current societal transformations and environmental crisis?

Eris Bushati:

The residencies are a canal of communication to these mental, artistic openings. You basically not only learning to accept new techniques and ideas or forms of expression through art in the different environments where you are executing your art in the residency, but also having had that openness to the artistic world of another fellow artist, you start being open to their way to say “good morning” or “goodnight” their way to share the food on the table, to be patient in a common activity you will be sharing during your stay, understanding and accepting other’s timings for a process that might be totally different from yours. You access someone else’s joy and sadness within the residency, understanding that regardless the fact that an art residency can be also a beautiful “escape” from our reality back home, we still not fully detach. And bringing things with us sometimes leads to sharing of our emotions and experiences, worries and personal stories as normal human beings that sometimes we find it easier to share with these new people instead of someone we have known for a long time. The connection then goes to another level, and the openness becomes an important feature on a social level, rather than just artistic.

 

5. The practices and models of residencies are focused on cultural and societal

development, rather than on that of the artists' careers. They are forging new connections and pathways between various regimes of society. As in the case of ecological biodiversity, at present, it is necessary to resist the homogenization of intellectual, aesthetic and cultural knowledge. Are residencies reinforcing the process of cultural homogenization, or are they supporting cultural diversity?

Eris Bushati: Daniel allow me to reply to this, with a strong admitting answer, kind of an mathematic axiom that can be taken as true without need to prove it: Residencies are indeed supporting cultural diversity! I might have directly or tangentially mentioned above many logical reasons to support my belief as an artist and individual human being.

The analogy I am going to use is: if I am going to see and apply a kind of color or a brushstroke I’ve seen in another artists tableau, it will never give me the same result of what I’ve witnessed, because we cannot exclude from the equation the biological difference we have as individual that determines everything different till the way we 

hold a paintbrush, but also the personal emotional weight we put into a technique we borrowing to apply. So in social level, regardless if we are “borrowing” a different cultural attitude and bringing it back home in our country it will be absolutely blended with our individual factor x, which lead probably to a total new cultural attitude that is not the same as the one we had, nor like the one we “borrowed”, becoming a new entity itself, which leads to more diversity, new “branches” of the big world’s cultural tree. 

The only homogenization that might happen, actually that I wish it continues happen, would be the more open, less aggressive, more kind and caring approach that people worldwide should have to DIFFERENCE.