The Artist-in-Residence, Just Another Tourist?

Although a vast typology of art residencies exists, there seems to be a consistent mandate to place artists in a local and social context, particularly in the case of research, exploration, and creation residencies. These implicitly or explicitly invite artists to enter into dialogue with the environment and even solve problems, which leads to increasingly profound interactions with the surroundings. In 1996, art critic Hal Foster emphasized the ethical issues stemming from the position and exteriority of artists who appropriate ethnographic methods.³ 3 - Hal Foster, “The Artist as Ethnographer,” in The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 171 - 204. Just as we might rebuke some tourists for exoticization, the development, through temporary residencies, of transient human relationships without follow-up or redistribution could correspond to a form of social extractivism.