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Application for Residency, Christiania Residency Program

March 8, 2006

To Emmerik Warburg, et al,

Beginning in 2004 I shifted the focus of my practice from installation-based works to the production of publications in a graphic novel/comic book format. I did so in order to integrate writing further into my artistic practice, and to formulate a working method that could encompass the full range of my interests—urbanism, cultural criticism, politics, history, and art history. This shift was, in a sense, a return to two earlier fascinations dating from my twenties—film and journalism. It is, in fact, a synthesis of those two interests, linked by my first engagement in art—drawing. Once could describe what has resulted as instances of essay comics—their written thrust being more documentary or discursive than fictional or narrative.

Recently, I was awarded a Danish Arts Council grant to live in Denmark from March of 2006 through May 2006. Ideally, this would give me the opportunity to investigate and make work about a number of things in Denmark about which I have had a longstanding interest: the story of the Blekingegadebandens being one such area of interest, Christiania being another. In conversation with yourself, Emmerik Warburg, and others, I have discussed my interest in participating in the residency program, and producing a series of works to be published in the Christiania community newspaper—something like a feuilleton, or serial comic series. This idea arose both out of making work in Christiania that would have a direct means of distribution to the community, and secondly, because an aspect of my work, as it has developed, has been an interest in engaging with specific publication entities, and making artwork under these conditions, instead of in a museum or gallery context. At the time we talked, I have emphasized previously, and wish to do so again, that I would prefer not to describe a specific area of research in advance (outside of the previous graphic production that has occurred in Christiania, examples of which I have seen and am greatly interested in). For myself, the work resulting from a residency in Christiania depends ideally on the time spent in residence: the conversations that might ensue, and the events transpiring which may lend themselves to artistic elaboration. I want to leave some room for spontaneity and improvisation. One could, however, safely describe the resulting works as being a species of oral history; fragments of lived time in Christiania—in the past and present—which conform to a poetical imperative I reserve as a motivation for making such works. But this is not to say that will not being factual or investigative. They will be in keeping with the essayistic quality of my previous publication production.

Because I have teaching obligations in Odense, my proposal is to be in residence for periods when it is not already booked—for periods probably no greater than a week—but making several visits over the next months rather than staying for a prolonged duration. Because I have already spent some time in Denmark (and Christiania) in the past, I am already familiar with the community, and do not need an initial period for acclimatizing.

With the Kindest Regards,

Michael Baers

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