 In the 1930s, the U.S. government initiated the WPA, the Works Progress Administration, which was part of the New Deal. This plan employed millions of people to create public works across the country. This included building essential infrastructure, like bridges and roads, and it also established art and cultural centers all across the U.S. Hyde Park Art Center was one of those opened 80 years ago, nestled on a quiet street in Hyde Park neighborhood on the south side of Chicago. Started exclusively by a group of artists to present their work and the work of their peers, the organization has grown and evolved a lot in scale and scope over these years. Financial stress threatened to close its doors many times in the early decades, but the organization managed to prevail and now has a permanent home not far from its initial site. Today, in addition to an exhibitions program, it has a school that offers studio art courses to students from children to seniors for those exploring art for the first time, as well as those who earn a living making art. The Art Center aims to be an incubator for artists at all stages of their career and all levels, and into that mix is a residency program that I have the pleasure of overseeing. The program supports local artists with studio space and access to the various facilities and resources, and importantly, it invites visiting artists and curators for deep dive, immersive, and intensive residencies, an opportunity to spend for a short period of time to consider Art Center and Chicago home. Our invitation for all resident artists, rather visiting or local, is to enter a deep mode of reflection, asking questions of their artistic practice while in dialogue with other artists inside our community and with the space of the community center itself. So through this program, we really try to understand how can a locally invested organization provide a platform for visiting artists to thrive? How can a community-facing organization act as a citizen inside our own city and more broadly? What does it mean to host a visitor? Not simply to invite them into your home, but to prepare them for the experience of that visit, to facilitate their sense of groundedness and connection despite being from another place, and also to prepare ourselves for the questions and difference that that visit may bring. Can an artist visiting or local be transformed through residency? And can an institution be transformed by the artists that it engages? I've spent just over four weeks in Chicago at the Hyde Park Art Center on the south side of the city. I was new to the neighborhood, an alien to the context I was committing to. In fact, I knew very little about how this place shaped the lives of the people I was encountering. One can only hope that over time, the unfolding of the complex city landscape will start to set in, revealing to its visitor its true purpose. What did I represent to this place? Who was I in the eyes of a passerby, or an artist, or an activist, or a community that I was so eager to immerse myself in? Upon my arrival, Chicago Teacher Strike broke out. Educators, students, and community members came together to demand better conditions for their children. At the same time, another Teacher Strike took place in Croatia, a locality I was born into, but always had difficulties identifying with. Being away from home only emphasized the unfading feeling of structural isolation. I was seeking to bond, to feel allied and interconnected to the place I was a stranger to. A desire to go long, even invisibly. United States are a violent place, both historically and in its present state. I believe there is nothing great about making America or any other country great ever again. The only worthy commitment would be in unmaking every single one of them. In disassembling these toxic cages composed of various forms of systemic violence, injustice, and inequality. I was able to consider those questions during my time at the High Park Art Center. When confronted by the system, we often feel powerlessness in fear for bare life. But in that confrontation, we also encounter a comership and grow profound, unbreakable connections to people we barely know. Visiting Chicago and the Art Center was a fierce lesson that will continue teaching me. Over the past month, a very short period of time, Selma sought links between the transmigrant activism she's deeply engaged with in Zagreb and across Europe through meetings, studio visits, conversations, meals together in High Park and across the city. She was planting seeds for future conversations and possible projects. One day, she also initiated a simple, beautiful exercise. She invited my colleagues, the people who run the organization, to join in her studio for a sort of game that she called What Is Our Urgency? I wanted to learn about High Park Art Center through its people. In that particular moment, I was not interested in the center's photography, but in community, in order to better comprehend how we can practice communality in a cross-cultural context. Selma invited us to pose a spontaneous question to each other and to ourselves, which others in the group would then build upon with their own question. The questions jump from topic to topic and sometimes arrived at fascinating and pressing anxieties and urgencies. Is voting really the way to change? Does voting just settle the crowd? Is voting fundamentally compromised? Is democracy compromised? Can everybody in this country even vote? Should we still rely on established forms to create change? Is choosing not to vote the same as voting? How much injustice are we willing to put up with for our own comfort? What does vertical change look like? The game lasted about 30 minutes or so and it was a welcome break from the administrative tasks we would otherwise have been doing. Some questions ventured into humorous territory and I was quite surprised at how some of them really managed to touch a nerve. I agree. I was given a lesson of humor and of bravery. The group was ready to examine difficult questions to be fragile and supportive at the same time. It was also a way to form a bonding base through a collective experience one I could rely on during my residency. I feel happy that my residency at the Art Center because of its brave and dedicated community served as a generator for communal thought asking difficult but necessary questions. We are keen to share with this assembly. How can a visiting artist like myself become a part of the ongoing struggles for social justice in the US? Can a residency act as a model for how we create community across geographies? How can we practice transracial, transnational, transgender, transgenerational and trans-class solidarity in cross-cultural context? How can we further develop our understanding and embrace of difference of what may at first seem unfamiliar? What is left unseen? What needs to be unlearned? What is yet to be discovered? When can we meet again? When can we meet again? Thank you, thank you.