Who Pays for the Residency
Time to make work is the most valuable thing a programme can give. It is also the thing most often paid for by the artist.
The open call says fully funded. The small print says flights, materials and the last two weeks of rent are yours.
I have sat on both sides of that small print. I have written it, in a budget meeting where the stipend line was the only one that could still move. And I have read it as an applicant, working out whether three months away was something my rent could survive.
Time is the thing being given. Somebody is always paying for it.
The numbers are not complicated. A stipend that covers food but not the lease at home is a subsidy for artists who do not have a lease at home, or who have someone else paying it. Everyone else is being offered an honour they would have to pay for.
What makes it hard to say is that the people running these programmes are almost never the villains. They are three staff and a borrowed building. They are giving away the one thing they have, which is space, and hoping the rest works itself out.
It does not work itself out. It works itself out for some people, the same people, and the list of alumni starts to look like a list of who could afford to say yes.
None of this makes residencies bad. It makes them a filter, and it is worth saying out loud who gets through it.
Denzo Nyathi Curator.