Residencies as Thresholds between Art, Place and People

Artist residencies as site-symbiotic frameworks

The long and layered history of artist residencies, from nineteenth-century artist colonies onwards, reinforces certain assumptions about the format. Residencies have often been idealised as spaces where artists retreat from the world to focus on uninterrupted creation. This framing perpetuates the myth of the artist-genius as detached from the contexts that sustain their work. In recent years, however, the field has developed a rich and increasingly self-reflexive discourse around artist residencies as institutionally complex formats.1 This article contributes to that expansion by approaching artist residencies as systems of exchange between art practice and the conditions in which it unfolds, both within institutions and in dialogue with broader social and spatial realities.

While site-specific art practices respond to a given context, I use the term ‘site-symbiotic’ to describe a process of forming reciprocal relationships with the socio-political, spatial and environmental conditions in which a residency is situated. Borrowed from biology, the term symbiosis means ‘living together’ and refers to forms of coexistence in which different organisms shape one another’s lives. How might residencies help institutions develop mutual relationships with their surrounding socio-political, spatial and environmental conditions around them? In doing so, can they expand the contexts, methods and disciplinary possibilities of artistic and curatorial practice?

This question gains urgency as cultural institutions endure budget cuts and heightened demands to justify public value, while artists increasingly operate across social, spatial and political terrains. In response to these conditions, the concept of ‘site- symbiosis’ offers a framework for rethinking art’s civic role and reach: one that resists institutional isolation and foregrounds forms of engagement beyond designated art spaces and audiences. This redefinition cannot be achieved simply by relocating art outside the museum or subsuming it within social work. Instead, this article focuses on the thresholds between these spheres, where institutional structures, civic agency and everyday life intersect and work together.

The museum advisor Elaine Heumann Gurian’s notion of ‘threshold fear’ shows that the museum threshold often acts as a social and psychological barrier, dictating who feels entitled to enter and who remains outside.2 The architect Stavros Stavrides, however, describes the threshold as a ‘mediating zone’ that connects and reconfigures opposing realms:

How might art institutions cultivate thresholds as reciprocal spaces? Could residencies function as one such threshold, enabling forms of exchange that extend art’s civic agency beyond the art world?

Artist residencies as thresholds

Artist residencies contain multiple thresholds. They blur life and work, unsettling distinctions between the professional and the personal, the private and the public, home and elsewhere. In long-duration residencies, artists become not only guests but temporary co-inhabitants of the institution, and neighbours within a wider community. As the boundary between guest and host becomes porous, hospitality is continually enacted and renegotiated, making residencies a critical testing ground for how institutions might rethink the conditions under which they host artists and audiences.

Residencies are a threshold where artistic processes negotiate with institutional frameworks, values and material conditions. Residencies make room for experimentation, reflection and unfinished thought, often in tension with the production-driven timelines of exhibition-making and the accelerated rhythms of institutional life. Might residencies be understood as sites of temporal resistance, spaces that reclaim slow, indeterminate and ‘unproductive’ time as essential to reflection, care and institutional learning?

The threshold between the artist’s process and institutional presentation invites a rethinking of the role of the audience, from spectator to participant in unfolding artistic processes. In making visible the conversations, relationships and material conditions that surround artworks, residencies can potentially reorientate institutions as spaces of shared experience and collective speculation rather than sites of display. How might this expanded frame shape how institutions engage audiences, and conversely how audiences engage art?

Finally, by allowing artists to stay and return, residencies can shift their role from transient visitor to active participant in the life of a place. Context becomes an interlocutor rather than a backdrop. How might residencies establish conditions for sustained engagement with place, countering the pressures of short funding cycles and shifting institutional priorities?

Can the residency be understood as a ‘sensing membrane’, intensifying an institution’s engagement with its audiences and the local area to enable more responsive forms of action, while allowing local realities to shape and transform the institution from within?

Context, conditions and visions around the Palais de Danse

These questions have been central to the development of the residency-based Artists Programme at Tate St Ives, which since 1993 has developed projects in collaboration with local communities, often in public space. The questions also inform current thinking around the Palais de Danse, a new community-focused space for Tate St Ives. A residency programme is being considered as one of several programmatic strands for the Palais, with the ambition of embedding artistic research and exchange within the building itself. The research behind this article emerged from my 2025 Brooks International Fellowship at Tate, developed in dialogue with Tate St Ives around the programme.4

The Palais de Danse is a building with layered histories. Built as a cinema in 1911, it became a dance hall from 1925 and was purchased in 1961 by the artist Barbara Hepworth (1903–1975), who used it as her second studio until her death (fig.1).5 Gifted to Tate by the artist’s family in 2015, it is now being reconceived as a space that can extend her legacy while responding to local civic needs.6

Consultation with local stakeholders, priority audiences, schools, community groups, young people and Palais de Danse Open Day visitors revealed significant personal and community attachment to the building.7 Many residents value both Hepworth’s legacy and the social history of the Palais. Tate’s vision is to reimagine the building as a shared civic space, one that balances artistic function with communal significance (figs.2 and 3). This vision builds upon longstanding practices of engagement between Tate St Ives and its local context, as well as the institution’s artist residency programme.

The Palais de Danse sits within a context where local heritage coexists with economic precarity and the seasonal patterns of rural and coastal life. Cornwall is a region marked by a distinct cultural and geographical position within the United Kingdom and a strong sense of identity as a Celtic nation. The maritime town of St Ives, known internationally for its artistic legacy since the late nineteenth century, contends with tourism-driven pressures, seasonal labour and housing displacement. Pronounced population shifts between quiet winter months and summer influxes of visitors produce distinct, and at times conflicting, temporalities of residence, work and belonging.

While my research focused on the residency-based Artists Programme, it also considered interconnected programme strands, including community engagement and public programming, that strengthen reciprocity between the Palais and the people and social processes around it. A key strand is the Collaborators Programme, which invites international socially engaged artists to co-create projects with residents from different generations, working primarily in civic spaces rather than museum settings. Related strands, including the Spaces Programme, Community Connections and the Palais Liaison Group, are addressed later in this article.8

My research focused on artist residencies in rural, peripheral or locally embedded contexts. It examined St Ives’ conditions as a coastal town shaped by heritage, seasonal economies, housing pressures and a strong sense of local belonging. The following three case studies are chosen for their resonance with this context. inSite/Casa Gallina, Grizedale Arts and Robida were selected because each uses the residency format to test how institutions, artists and places might enter into extended, reciprocal and sometimes difficult relations. They exemplify varied modes of site-symbiosis, ranging from long-term embedded initiative to rooted institution to grassroots inhabitation.

inSite/Casa Gallina: Neighbouring, housing, sowing

Casa Gallina was established as part of INSITE, a binational initiative that fosters artistic dialogue across the United States–Mexico border. Founded in 1992, the organisation is known for commissioning public art projects in collaboration with artists, institutions and communities.9 Under the direction of the curator Osvaldo Sánchez, inSite/Casa Gallina shifted away from the initiative’s biennial model towards a long-term, locally embedded project in Santa María la Ribera, a working-class neighbourhood in Mexico City.

Conceived as INSITE’s sixth edition, the programme unfolded over six years (2013–8) as a process-based initiative guided by local rhythms rather than a fixed exhibition schedule. inSite/Casa Gallina was anchored in a single house and the surrounding sixteen blocks, which together formed the physical and conceptual framework of the project. This urban area was set within a dense fabric shaped by low-income families, pensioners and small businesses.

Internally, the building fostered encounter, learning and collective life. The ground floor, comprising a vegetable garden, an open kitchen, library, computers and meeting areas, formed the project’s social core, enabling informal exchange and shared learning (fig.4). The upper floor accommodated artists-in-residence who engaged with the neighbourhood long-term, usually a period of one to three years. Artistic outcomes were encouraged to emerge gradually from reciprocal relationships rather than predefined briefs.

Before initiating residencies, inSite/Casa Gallina invested in listening and learning through three contextual studies on Santa María la Ribera: a socio-cultural investigation into the social dynamics, history and present situation of the neighbourhood; an ethnographic study of the local La Dalia Market; and a collective mapping addressing gentrification and the unequal ways in which access, visibility and rights are distributed across urban space.10 Together, these studies built situated knowledge and trust that artists could later inherit. This ethos was further enacted through a community garden and weekly workshops, translating engagement into cyclical practices of care and reciprocity.

The project’s architecture reflected this social and curatorial orientation. Deliberately unmarked from the outside, and operating without press releases or institutional branding, Casa Gallina resisted the visibility-driven economies of the art world.

Grizedale Arts: From idealised landscape to the complexities of social dynamics

Grizedale Arts is a contemporary arts organisation based at Lawson Park, a restored fourteenth-century hill farm in the English Lake District (fig.5). Founded in 1977, it grew from the Grizedale Society (1969­–99), a programme of site-specific sculpture and land art in Grizedale Forest. Notable for commissioning artists such as Andy Goldsworthy and David Nash, the project positioned nature as a site of transcendence and the artist as mediator of its sublime qualities.11

When Adam Sutherland became director in 1999, the organisation underwent a decisive shift, redirecting its programme from a landscape-centred understanding of the rural towards commissioning artists to engage with the social, economic and everyday realities of the Lake District. Marked by an unsettled sense of who belongs to a place, shaped by factors such as second-home ownership and tensions between tourism and local livelihoods, the conditions of the Lake District resonate strongly with those of St Ives. The reorientation of Grizedale Arts unsettled local expectations and provoked confrontation, including complaint letters, media disputes and the burning of The Forest Billboard – a platform for artists to display work, initiated in 1999 until 2002 – by community members.

By challenging both rural myths and art-world conventions, Grizedale Arts reframed its purpose: to test how art might operate usefully within society by engaging with the complexities of place rather than idealising them. This prompted a rethinking of the organisation’s artist residency, from isolated retreat to a process-based and community-embedded framework. Artists were invited to spend time in the Lake District without the expectation of producing finished work. Each year, approximately ten artists were selected through an open call to undertake an initial three-week research period focused on understanding the local area and engaging with residents. Many were subsequently invited to return, allowing ideas and relationships to develop over time.12 Today, Lawson Park functions as a working farmhouse, where artists live and work on site, collaborating with local communities and participating in the rhythms of rural life and maintenance of the land.

Robida: Growing into place

Robida is a multilingual and multidisciplinary collective based in Topolò/Topolove, a small village in northeastern Italy near the Slovenian border (fig.6). Shaped by two world wars, fascism, the Cold War and sustained hostility toward the Slovene minority, its population has decreased from around four hundred inhabitants to just over two dozen.13 Robida’s arrival emerged from long-standing attachments that became a shared way of living. Before settling in 2017, the group, consisting of young people from the region and friends from outside the local area, developed close ties to the village through the annual art festival Stazione di Topolò / Postaja Topolove. What began as periodic returns evolved into a collective decision to re-inhabit the place.

In a village with limited infrastructure, everyday necessities became the basis for communing practices: living unfolded across multiple houses, with paths, gardens and ruins forming an extended domestic and social space, and the village gradually functioned as a collective dwelling. If Casa Gallina reimagined the domestic interior as public commons, Robida transforms the public sphere into a shared home (fig.7). Rejecting nostalgia and isolation, Robida asks how marginal places can host urgent contemporary conversations. Working across publishing, radio and spatial practice, the collective brings together architecture, design, the humanities and the arts to cultivate ecologically attuned, interdependent modes of living.

Through initiatives such as the symposium Care of Margins (2021) and the learning platform The Academy of Margins (2022), Robida has rethought the artist residency not as a temporary retreat for production, but as an invitation to join a community already practising coexistence.14 Artists and guests participate in the seasonal flows of village life through shared work, maintenance and collective gatherings. The residence becomes part of Topolò/Topolove’s ongoing life, a cyclical process of what Aljaž Škrlep, a member of Robida, describes as ‘living-from’ and ‘learning-with’, that sustains both place and community (fig.8).15

The analysis that follows moves through four interrelated thresholds. First, it considers the ethics of arrival, dwelling and return in artist residencies. Second, it examines how domestic, institutional and civic realms become entangled. Third, it asks how residencies can operate beyond exhibition focused models without instrumentalising art as a means to an end. Finally, it considers how commissioning and authorship might be redistributed through more reciprocal forms of institutional practice.

An ethics of arrival, dwelling and return

In artist residencies time functions as a medium of relation through which artists, institutions and communities negotiate forms of coexistence. An ethics of arrival, dwelling and return invites us to understand these temporalities not as linear sequences of coming, staying and leaving, but as interdependent gestures of attuning, inhabiting and re-engaging. Across the three case studies, we can see different modes of becoming situated. Casa Gallina and Grizedale Arts mark moments of institutional reorientation, in which existing frameworks and working methods were redirected outwards and made more responsive to the social, spatial and economic realities around them. Robida emerges from the distinct condition of inhabitation.

To speak of arrival, dwelling and belonging in St Ives is to enter a contested terrain. The town is shaped by overlapping patterns of time: a stable year-round community alongside cyclical influxes of visitors and seasonal workers. Tate St Ives must continually recalibrate its tempo, deepening engagement with local and historically excluded groups during quieter months, while sustaining encounters with wider audiences during the high season. What forms of support enable artists to enter a place with care, rather than through what the sociologists John Urry and Jonas Larsen refer to as a ‘tourist gaze’?16

This question draws attention to the often-unseen role of local teams, whose situated knowledge helps artists orient themselves. Across St Ives and Cornwall, institutional infrastructures developed by organisations such as Visual Arts Southwest and Creative Kernow already support this work.17 Rather than treating local structures only as support for incoming artists, could the Palais de Danse cultivate reciprocal relationships that allow knowledge, skills and capacity to circulate in multiple directions?

Across all three case studies, dwelling becomes inseparable from artistic and institutional work. Robida’s year-round presence in Topolò/Topolove resists both displacement and the transformation of villages into aesthetic experiences for outsiders. Similarly, the former Deputy Director of Grizedale Arts Alistair Hudson observed, ‘we are trying to change the situation here – not just as an arts organisation, but as residents, as citizens’.18

But even carefully designed frameworks for situated engagement do not always unfold as intended. Despite inSite/Casa Gallina’s long-term vision, many artists spent less time in residence than anticipated. As its Executive Director Carmen Cuenca reflects, the hope that living within the neighbourhood would deepen relationships and privilege process over production of finished work was only partially realised, due in part to the pressures of the global art economy and a miscalculation regarding artists’ willingness to remain long-term guests in the neighbourhood.19 This exposes a contradiction: residencies often aspire to continuity yet operate within transient, market-driven systems. What temporalities do they truly require: continuous presence, cycles of return or long arcs of relationships over years?

The three case studies also differ markedly in how they position the artist in relation to context and community. Casa Gallina operated with an aid-oriented ethos, using cultural practice to strengthen the social fabric; artists and artworks functioned as tools through which the community could rearticulate itself.20 Grizedale Arts, by contrast, mobilised friction and irony to unsettle romanticised visions of the rural and to question art’s role within it, exposing tensions between heritage, tourism and the conditions of rural life. Robida frames artists as temporary co-inhabitants, where practice is inseparable from the labour of living with a place rather than intervening upon it (fig.9).

In residencies the artist inevitably arrives as a kind of ‘foreign agent’, someone who enters a place with a different rhythm, language or gaze, unsettling its habitual ways. Yet this foreignness can be generative. The filmmaker and curator Florian Schneider suggests, a ‘foreign agency’ does not simply observe or integrate, but renders the familiar strange again, bringing unspoken assumptions and possibilities into view.21 How can residency frameworks preserve this productive unsettling while cultivating care, reciprocity and shared responsibility?

The domestic, the institutional and the civic

Across the three case studies, an inversion of scale becomes visible: the scale of the institution set against the larger life of the place. Domestic rhythms begin to structure institutional processes, while institutional infrastructures are reimagined through everyday practices of attention, learning and coexistence. The Palais de Danse carries a comparable complexity. Once a dance hall and cinema hosting collective gatherings, and later the private studio of Barbara Hepworth, it layers civic life and individual history.

At Casa Gallina, the house’s domestic architecture was inseparable from the programme’s logic. Programme strands such as Knowledge (Saberes) positioned the house as a site of collective learning, activating neighbourhood knowledge through workshops built around skill-sharing and critical reflection. Synergies extended this ethos into everyday economies: the Neighbourhood Lending Library (Prestaduría Vecinal) supported a sharing-based micro-economy, while collaborations with local shop owners reconfigured shopfront identities and linked cultural practice to daily commerce (figs.10 and 11). Together, these strands established a strong social foundation that artists-in-residence could build upon in their work.

The residency strand Co-Participations functioned as a structure for commissioning new art through long-term residencies, inviting artists to develop reciprocal processes with neighbourhood locals over one to three years. These collaborations unfolded with diverse groups (neighbours, schools, artisans and local organisations), producing works in which artistic meaning emerged through sustained social relationships.22

Although inSite/Casa Gallina came to an end as a programme, Casa Gallina continued as an organisation. Cynthia Gutiérrez’s Floating Grafts 2017–8 was one of the projects that helped shape its subsequent approach, extending its commitment to neighbourhood-based research, exchange and collective learning. Drawing on local stained-glass traditions, the artist collaborated with a primary school and an artisan over a year-long process through which children explored identity, memory, belonging and language. The work culminated in a stained-glass window installed in a communal school space and was accompanied by workshops for the wider school community (fig.12).

However, as Casa Gallina’s Director, Josefa Ortega, has noted, a tension remained between these process-oriented practices and the broader INSITE framework’s expectation of a final artwork. Even when artistic processes operated as catalysts for collective reflection, the demand for a discrete outcome risked reabsorbing the work into art-world circuits. Since the conclusion of the sixth edition of INSITE, Casa Gallina foregrounds social processes themselves, collaborating with artists already rooted in their own local contexts through long-term partnerships, particularly with local schools, where works remain active through educational engagement.23

Robida further inverts the domestic and urban logics in Izba, a co-working and gathering space that functions less as a cultural facility than as a collectively maintained social commons. Village residents hold a key and Izba is shaped by daily use – reading, cooking, meeting – so that cultural activity emerges not through invitation or outreach, but through shared responsibility. In this context, institutional agency resides in the community’s ongoing capacity to organise and host itself (fig.13).

Palais de Danse’s Spaces Programme takes a comparable approach. Through an open call, Tate St Ives will invite local artists, creative organisations and community groups to take up the Palais as a working space, hosting activities, gatherings and projects that embed the building in everyday cultural life. In doing so, the programme positions the Palais as a shared civic resource for Cornwall’s creative networks. This inversion between institution and community is not only spatial but also procedural and infrastructural. At the Palais de Danse, the Palais Liaison Group links Tate St Ives with the surrounding community through a forum for dialogue, feedback and shared decision-making. Composed of community members from local groups and organisations, the group articulates community priorities and advises on how best to serve local needs, helping to ensure that the project remains responsive to its context.

A useful parallel can be found in Gasworks’ Participatory Residency in London, an eight-month programme linking contemporary art with local residents in Lambeth and Southwark, particularly those with migrant and diasporic backgrounds. Working with long-term partners, the residency prioritises artist-led processes that foster mutual learning and civic participation rather than short-term outreach. At the core of the programme is the Participation Advisory Board, which brings together artists, community representatives, educators, mental-health advisors and institutional staff, alongside critical friends from partner organisations. Meetings take place monthly and evaluation is not conducted on participants but with them, reducing the sense of othering that often pervades evaluation of socially engaged practice. This model has also enabled Gasworks to maintain ongoing connections with the communities involved, extending relationships beyond individual artists’ residency periods.24

Art at full scale: Beyond the exhibition

Across the three case studies, residencies also test how art might generate forms of social value beyond the symbolic, without aestheticising places and communities in ways that fuel exclusion or gentrification. At Casa Gallina, this translated into low visibility: residency artworks were not exhibited in the house. Instead works were shown off-site, such as in the local Museum of Geology, ensuring the house remained a lived space of exchange rather than a catalyst for redevelopment.

Grizedale Arts moved away from producing works that clashed with local self-perceptions and began partaking in local events, such as country shows, car boot sales and roadshows, testing how art could inhabit a social context without imposing its own hierarchies (fig.14). Projects such as A Different Weekend 2000 brought together brass bands, falconry demonstrations, Cumbrian wrestling and a face-painting stall run by the artist Mark Wallinger.25 Grizedale’s projects productively played with the tension between art and everyday life. They raised fundamental questions about the artist’s role and identity and about whom art ultimately serves, whether an insular professional field or the lived realities, skills and values of local communities.

In Creative Egremont: A Public Art Strategy for Egremont, a programme of temporary public art projects celebrating local culture run between 2006 and 2011, this approach extended into cultural regeneration powered by local agency. Rather than treating residents as audiences or beneficiaries, Grizedale developed modes of working, commissioning and curating that enabled direct participation and community ownership of both process and outcomes. Instead of importing artworks as symbols of cultural refinement, the project worked with existing local traditions, most notably Egremont’s annual Crab Fair, a festival dating back to the thirteenth century and known for the greasy pole competition, a collective effort to reach a prize fixed atop a lard-covered post. When the practice was suspended due to public liability concerns, the artists Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane proposed a permanent pole as a public artwork, restoring the tradition by making it insurable. The Greasy Pole 2005–7 functioned as both civic infrastructure and symbolic outcome of a broader relational process, activating collective self-organisation and enabling the tradition’s return to public life.26

This reimagining of local traditions also echoes earlier projects within Tate St Ives’ Artists Programme, such as Linder’s Your Actions Are My Dreams 2009 (fig.15), which revisited the Cornish custom of guise dancing, and Allard van Hoorn’s 063 Urban Songline (Another Hurling of the Silver Ball) 2019, which reconceived the annual tradition of hurling a silver ball on St Ives’ Feast Day (fig.16).27 Van Hoorn’s rolling of an oversized ball through the town streets became a playful tool for fostering connections across communities. This raises an important question for the Palais de Danse’s Community Connections strand, which foresees festivals or pop-ups linked to local heritage events. How might such moments move beyond the symbolic insertion of contemporary art into existing traditions and instead become catalysts for shared authorship, agency and collective ownership?

What distinguishes Grizedale Arts is its sustained shift from ‘art-specific’ to ‘art-related’ practice. As the art theorist Stephen Wright argues, ‘art-related’ practices are oriented toward ‘usership’ and operate at full scale, 1:1.28 They are not representations or models of usefulness, but forms of use in themselves. This is what Wright describes as art’s ‘double ontology’, practices that are simultaneously what they are (a community garden, a residency, a wedding, a cooperative) and propositions of what they might become: open-ended experiments in how art can function otherwise. As Adam Sutherland has explained, the aim of Grizedale Arts was to be ‘a constructive influence’, to enable people to take on the ambition of a project and shape its future, even when that future diverged significantly from the intentions of the artists or the institution.29

Other residencies mobilise art practice as a means for communities to assume authorship of their cultural expression while sustaining Indigenous knowledge and processes of land reclamation. Sakiya | Art/Science/Agriculture is a community-embedded residency in Ein Qiniya, Palestine, that reactivates abandoned buildings and agricultural terraces through collaboration between artists, researchers, farmers and local land stewards. Operating through collective farming, workshops and site-specific projects, Sakiya functions as a living school and a form of cultural resistance, protecting Palestinian agrarian knowledge and architectural heritage at risk of erasure.30

Makotaay Eco Art Village offers a comparable model as a community-led residency on Indigenous Makotaay land in Taiwan. Grounded in the return of ancestral territory after decades of struggle and guided by Indigenous knowledge keepers, the residency positions art practice within the rebuilding of relationships between land, culture and everyday life.31 Similarly, Taroko Arts Residency – Tree Tree Tree Person takes place on the ancestral lands of the Indigenous Cihara’ay community. Led collectively by Indigenous women in dialogue with curator Cheng-Tao Chen, the residency aligns artistic activity with community priorities in villages shaped by long-term displacement.32

These initiatives suggest that residencies and the durational forms of engagement they foster can empower vulnerable knowledge systems without aestheticising or appropriating local knowledge. They also shift the question from how artists engage with communities to how communities can define the terms, urgencies and responsibilities of artistic engagement.

Rethinking commissioning and co-authorship

Across these examples, we see a broader shift towards rethinking the structures through which art is commissioned, produced and sustained, opening them to shared decision-making rather than concentrating authority within institutions. The New Patrons (Nouveaux Commanditaires), initiated in France in the 1990s by the artist François Hers, advances this redistribution of agency by allowing citizens, rather than curators or institutions, to commission works in response to issues that matter to them. More than four hundred projects have been initiated by diverse groups, including farmers, students, doctors and activists.33

Patrons are first asked to articulate why a work matters and why collective investment in it is justified. They work with a mediator to translate these concerns into a project brief. Artists are proposed and selected in dialogue with the group, and projects are refined collectively before the mediator secures permissions, funding and logistical support. This process grants communities access to the formal procedures of artmaking while artists are moved outside of the protective frameworks of institutions, compelling them to renegotiate their authorship and responsibility (fig.17).

The resulting works embody negotiated desire anchored in local urgencies and stress the distinction between representation and the redistribution of authorship. The question shifts from procedure to power: who decides what matters, and who has the right to bring issues into public life through art? To commission collectively is to negotiate and decide on what is valued, what is shared and how art might function as a tool for collective self-determination.

The art historian Estelle Zhong-Mengual reminds us that participation is too often narrowly framed: citizens may be invited to debate solutions but rarely get to define the problems themselves.34 The democratic test lies not in how many voices are temporarily included, but in whether such initiatives reconfigure the conditions of who speaks, who decides and who retains the right to name what matters over time.

Towards threshold institutions

To think of residencies as situated thresholds is to reconsider the relationships between artists, institutions and the social contexts they inhabit. This raises a set of questions about the purpose of cultural institutions today: Whom do they serve? Where do they speak from? And what forms of responsibility are they willing to assume? The curator Vasıf Kortun notes:

From this standpoint, the task is not simply to make institutions more open, but to cultivate trust as a sustained institutional practice. Residencies are more than programme formats: they function as mediating infrastructures through which institutions operate as sites of encounter. Holding relations between different parties, they are catalysed by artistic processes and frictions within formal frameworks of accountability. To endure, and more importantly, to matter, institutions must learn to function as site-symbiotic and porous membranes, accountable to the relationships they sustain.