The research Radul has proposed at BAC has a number of stages. She is not turning questions of the residency into the “content”, however the plan is to admit into the working process, all the complexities of the encounter. That is, the work incorporates its own startled response to the diversity and unfamiliarity of both the residency possibilities/expectations, and the Gotland experience.

It begins with developing a method. Not a method solely by which to produce an artwork, but a method which is an artwork. What is needed is kind of system for research, collecting, collaborating, recording, editing, displaying. The method is one that continuously turns the corner on itself. It begins with a re-conception of fieldwork.

Canadian artist Charles Stankievech makes a distinction between the method of field work, and “a fieldwork”, that is a work which is “dynamic and geospatial.” The method will configure the encounter between a range of artists, thinkers, visitors and locals who will be brought in as a team that is diverse and shifting. The models for such teamwork are ethnological or forensic fieldwork, script writing, collage, new music and movement improvisation.

Photocredit: Judy Radul 2013 © BAC

Judy Radul says: “we will consider the specifics of Gotland including militarization, limestone mining, nature and leisure and how these categories come into play. We will also tune ourselves to “nothing” to the tangible artificiality of our own presence, to the empty spaces as much as the obvious “topics”. One of the responsibilities of art is to produce a response where none has been called for, to visit without invitation, to alter the relation between subject and object, that is the paradigms for thought and social relations.”