 Let's start the next session. Again, we are here in the context of Meet the Neighbors Project, the network of organizations somehow gathered together on the invitation of quarantine. And working for more than a year now about the context of the artist's presidencies in the context of local communities and other spaces. I have to explain more about who we are as a moving part, who are excluded from this presentation, in a way we did our presentation earlier today. But I think our very first artist having presidencies in the context of the project presented the part of the outcomes and the materials which now we use to slowly start working on. And we have probably the final shape around the late spring outcome here. So there may be the very last word for now, before I take my microphone to the forum Massaka, who also have been with this project and support us as an advisor from the very beginning. And that thanks to the E-PAP partnership with Colbround, we can be here not only in this crowd of people who have gathered, but this session is also live streamed. So those who do not, for some reason, come to think and also with us. And possibly unfortunately, as we know, that's a new question. So Colbround, for the next two hours, the forum is yours. And it's not only the presentation of the project itself, so it's changed between us, what already happened and as we put it in the frame of the panel, what we know so far. Well, thanks a lot. What we know so far, as an experience of meeting the neighbors is the most pragmatic title of the panel, I don't know what it is, I think. But it fits quite well. Hopefully it will be interesting for you that are not involved in the project, because I think it will bring up a lot of the questions that we were dealing with already, like what does it mean to go all the way to the institution or does it mean to expand the institution or to propose an institution, et cetera? And what does it mean as an artist to go into a neighborhood which sometimes a little bit sounds like the jungle or the powerway, or what does it mean, actually, to also create this distance and to consider yourself as part of this neighborhood to an extent, I think. Come up in very different ways, so I hope that will be also interesting for you. And it's definitely interesting for everybody involved in the project, because as you know, things don't develop normally like just the written concepts. So meet the neighbors and we'll ask Richard and all the other users, everybody, to tell a bit briefly about the project and such, but in a way meet the neighbors, or you can say quite well, so it's a rather white frame, to a certain degree, of this new project, and everybody has a different take in it, when you start talking about it, it sounds abstract, but the project takes into it and then develops, so I think it's a good moment to look at these projects while they are still in the making, so there's some outcomes already, like here, Lugin, which you mentioned, but there's also still some time to pass, so until it can change the direction, so we will see a bit about this concrete case studies, and so the procedure will be in it, like so far, each project will be presented, and we'll have a bit more time for that, but I think we'll go a bit deeper, so everybody has about around 50 minutes to do that, and then we'll have enough time to dig into it deeper afterwards. So, Winnia is Cecilia Backe, from the community between, who will introduce the first residency that happened in November, in June, and then they came back in November, and he moved from the county of Tampoligin, and Richard Gregory from Carinthal and Manchester, and Francesca Massello, from New York Marrakech, and also this, I will not introduce the institutions you work for, because I think it will be part of your presentation, but what makes it interesting that you already see, it's quite a geographical range of places with all the social, political, etc. applications that has, but it's also very different institutions, so two, I would say, middle-sized theatres, a theatre company, an artist in the space, and a little digital really, and of course very different approaches, I guess. So, with no real specific order, maybe if you would, but on the paper, you first see the line, do you get the first one on the paper, so you have to start, I think it's because of the last guy, I need the last name. I don't know, who knows the computer? It's a part where Richard, actually, he uses first the projects, and we have the background a little bit more, so, yeah, here we go. And so, the whole meeting, the next project, started to take shape, I guess, around two years ago. But prior to that, we had begun thinking about making a project on our own in Manchester, which was really a response to a very rapid changing situation in Manchester with regard to the development of housing and a huge population boom in the city. And I'll talk more about that when I describe the project. But what then occurs is that we got into conversation with the partners that are here, some of whom we had existing relationships with. So we began a conversation with Cecile around the maybe parallel situation, a very different or parallel situation in Bed Toon, and the changes that were happening in that town. We got into conversation with Nick, similar around Bloomington, and the shifts that were occurring in the city, and then we spread further, and with Gagalsh and the monitor, and with Francesca, and brought the whole group of people together, and worked together on an application to the EUs, creating Europe, which is what supports the delivery of the project. I think as Florian indicated, not only are the partners geographically spread and very different in institutional form, but also what's occurring, I think, is that we're all taking quite different and distinct approaches to the framing question, or questions of the project, which as the projects are emerging over time, so they're all emerging in parallel over the period of the year and a half, I guess, in total. We're seeing very different approaches and very different outcomes. So hopefully you get a sense of what some of those approaches are, and so the early outcomes of the project through the presentations you were about to give. Okay, I was forced to forgive me for my English, so I was done well. I'm Cecilia, I'm from France. I'm a lecturer, I'm also a stage director, and for five years I'm also a stage director, director, no, stage director, just director, at the Committee du Béton, which is a national dramatic center. That means it's a house production, for my direction, but also I share the possibilities and the stage with the other artists which are associated for many years to the project, to my artistic project. And we have, as a dramatic center, we have several missions, productions, co-production with other artists, diffusion, that means we invite shows and performances, and also something, I'm afraid it is very, very French. In French, you say sensibilisation in the public, I try to translate to, we must build a relationship with other people, so who are other people than people who are, which form the audience in the country, so we have this question and this mission, to sensibilise people around and in between to see our shows. We receive money, so it's a mansion, is that right? A mansion? From four different sources, governments, from the Ministry of Culture, regional council in the north of France, region of the France, because between the north, there is a national council, which is a smaller structure than imagine a council among the territories around between, and the city of between, which is not exactly a city, but a natural variation, because the between is a very tiny town, but all around, you've got a lot of other city, and now this is a natural variation concerning 200,000 people, 2,000, and 250,000 people, approximately. So let's go between, so between this small city, not so far from Paris, because it's in the south of North, as you can see, it's an historic city, just like many cities in the world. You can see that it's not a church, it is a befoir, which is really, really a great difference with Poland, because befoir is a lake, not a lake, you can get lake monuments, and after, so many pictures, this is the cathedral, this is the befoir, and you can see many, many games to do in between, this is not ironic, and okay, this is the official settlement of the city, and the street, and the pictures you see, told and relates, that between is a very quiet city with people that have money, everything is okay, you can have a befoir, you can have a merry Christmas, and all that sort of thing, that's obviously not true, because between is in the Pat Calais, the Pat Calais is one of the most poor department in France, just one number, which is terrible, concerning the young people between 18 and 25, one of them, or about three are, is unemployed, unemployed without study, one above three, 33% of the young population, that's one of the, in France, everything is related, just a situation, but it's all for a number, so the National Traumatic Center was looking for someone who could be courageous in the work, and trying to work with the young and poor people, and unemployed people, that's me, but I wanted to, I was really interested, that's why this question, when I met Alie Kenevin and Richard in the quarantine company, they got the first question before the neighbors, it was, how can we, as artists, that we are, in different way, parallel ways that we are, how can we form projects with people who doesn't, nothing to do with fear? That is one of my question in work for a very, very long time, so for me, the neighbors, we identified around between, in between and around between three places, it could be interesting to invite artists in residency, and from that, and I tried to answer to the question of Marta this morning, who are the partners in between, we worked with the social landlords in that gallery, we have a lot of social landlords, they are often owners of buildings, often owners of all quarters, all mine quarters, because this is a territory which is really in the story of this territory, the mine, the structure of the mine is really, really important, and the landlord tells us, okay, there is a place in the center of the town, which is called the Brian Act Residence, residence, Brian Act is the name of a doctor who founded it, I suppose, and this is building with approximately 80 persons living in it, and there was a lot of, there is a lot of social problems and a lot of difficulties in neighborhood, just like we heard yesterday, so our first partner is S-E-R, S-I-A, which is the acronym for this landlord, we invited a French company, in documentary, that means that every show of La Bonne-Bassante is always like a thriller in a city, in a quarter, in a place, so that's why we invited them, they came in June for two weeks and they were our first neighbors in the Brian Act Residence, there were two, Benoit and Kathleen, Kathleen is an actress and space director, and Benoit is a sound man, sound engineer, mixer and composer, in a way, and what is interesting in the residence, they were afraid, they were afraid to, how to be a good neighbor, how can we be good neighbors, and they were afraid because they didn't know how the adventure could happen, and in the first days, something was very difficult for them and they told us it is difficult because we live in the building, but nobody talks to us. Okay, so we're going to knock on the door, but when the door were open, they tried to build relationship and it was very complicated because they couldn't come inside, so there were several days wondering about what to do, and they found the image in, they can work in the, not in the building, but in the graveyard, the graveyard, the ground yard, before just in front of residence, and there is something else which is very important, they discovered there is a shared garden just before the residence, and Benoit told me, but if there is a shared garden, there is something to share, these people, they share something because there is a garden to share, so because they had the feeling the people living in the building wanted to, do not want to share anything, and in the yard, they organized what they call la cour d'histoire that mean the yard of the story, something like that, and it was a meal, just like a meal, but they invited another artist, which is also technical, but cooker, and cooker for sweet food, and they organized, not in the evening, but during the afternoon, a meal, and they imagined to act something for the sharing that they would ask to every person to give something, if they, la bonne passante, could give a cookie or something to drink or something to eat, and it worked, and it worked really great, and we were, everybody at the committee, they can say, okay, there's something rolling on, it was difficult at the start, but something happened with this yard of the story, so with this yard of the story, they met not only people living in the building, but after the yard of the story, they went at the cafe just across the, on the other side of the street, the cafe which is named Le Longchamp, the Longfield, something like that, and in the total adventure, they met 250 people that mean much more than only living, but they had to find what to do, which was not a performance, but only a meeting, something like a meeting. So I've got some pictures because we were in the center of Bethune, and now this is Kathleen, one of the performers, this is the cafe, and this is the residence, at night. They wrote La Résidence de Bernard, La Nuit, at night. And you can see the flat, they were living as neighbors. Now the residence, tak, tak, tak, tak, tak, tak, tak, and after one or two pictures about the cookies, now I'm looking for the yard, and this is after, this is the yard, I think, which was a real moment for exchange. That's what happened. After, they were for two weeks, and when they left, some habitants were saying, but it's not possible they leave because we were, if they are neighbors, they must stay with us. So it was a bit difficult to explain the project and the concept of residency, but Benoit and Kathleen told us, okay, there is something to do now because we have shared something with living and eating cookies, but we have recorded many stories and memories, we have made pictures, we must come back to give something back. So they went back in November, just one week because we invited them to present their work, their show, not on the residence, but another show, and then they organized something like a restitution of pictures and memories and sound memories at the comedy this time, and this is very important for us because that means that people living in the residence has come at the theater for the first time of their life, for many of them. There were around 60 persons and now we can build and continue to build relationship with them, but there are many questions. First, I have some feedbacks to share. The feedback from the person living in the residency in the building, some evident feedbacks about the artist Zantel. People say that they were artists, they describe them as very simple persons, very accessible persons, and they didn't think it was possible to be an artist this way. They said it would be good to have such neighbors, but our real neighbors are not just like them. Some people said it could be good to continue with other artists because we said, but you know the project for me, the neighbors is to have other residences and other artists, okay. Now, some feedback from artists. The experience for us to become neighbors first, just a point about what they've done. They decided, Benoit and Kathleen, the both of them, the second or third day, that they need to share what they were living with someone else, and each of them has been writing to his or her sister, they have a sister, both of them, every day. So they have letters, emails. They have recorded just as told you, they have made videos and pictures, and they have built a website, a small website which is open to receive other signs, other pictures, other letters, other, we don't know why, we don't know what, from the artists, we will come in this residence after them. This is a small website, but which is open. And as I told yesterday, the two artists told me something I was thinking it's important. They say, in fact, a good neighbor is someone you can count on, someone you can trust. That means that in this French reality, in this small town in the north of France, it is not the case. That's why there is a social problem. If the definition of neighborhood is not, for the moment, is not okay, a neighbor is someone you can trust and someone you can count on, there is a question. And they let another testimony about their experience about a shared memory and a shared transformation. What they said is that if maybe we had to change or transform something in the life of people living in the building, we've been changed too as a person and as human beings, I think. So, we, at the Committed Betune, so let's talk now about the team of the Committed Betune. After this first experience, we think that it could be really interesting to purchase the residences in this place. We didn't know at the beginning, but something has been started. This is slow, just as you say, this morning. This is very slow as a work, but we must continue with other artists. And some question. I think there is, if I try to describe what is the life of these people in the building, they never go out or they crowd the street to go to the cafe and back. So, I think something could be really interesting as a name is to make them, propose them to travel, even a very short travel. And another question is how is it possible now to mix these people with other persons? How can we organize a sort of meeting at the theatre, at the comedy, obviously? We've got many ideas about that. I think you slowly come to an end. Okay. You have something important to add? No, I think... The other question. I think later in the conversation other things can still come up. Maybe I will just not ask a follow-up question, but just collect all the projects and then we go into the conversation. Thanks a lot. Thank you. Welcome. Nick, if you would do the next part. Okay. My name is Nick Von Brug. I'm the general manager of Grand Theatre in Groningen, which is a sort of semi-large town in the north of the country of the Netherlands. The Grand Theatre has a history of trying to be a central place in the city and also in the region for the independent artistic community. They've been doing that for, since the 1980s, really. They were forced to... We came in after bankruptcies. We were forced to restart the organization and already after like six months or so, Richard asked us if we want to be part of the Meet the Neighbors Project and that came at a really good moment because we were really thinking of new ways to be that sort of central partner for the artistic community in the city, building on the traditions that we already knew that already were there, but also in a new way because we're a completely new team and we want to look at the surrounding city in a different way. So what we were looking at from the context of Meet the Neighbors is that we as a team in the Grand Theatre were new. A lot of us actually came to Groningen or came back to Groningen to work at the Grand Theatre, so in a way, everyone, the whole city, were new neighbors for us, but we looked at the city as a whole and we're seeing some major changes in the city and one of them is the internationalization of the population and there are three major forces behind that. So what we try to do is meet our new international neighbors and three ways of looking at that is the migration, international migration, refugees, so basically people who did not choose to come to live in Groningen but ended up living in Groningen and because it's such a central town in the region, if you end up in the region, you usually end up in the city and the city is actually quite progressive and really looks after refugees once they're there. International students, we have a big university in a large college and they are really aiming at international students and you can really notice, especially in the center of the city, that the population is changing, especially because of the international students and the third one is an emerging scene of creative startups that's a relatively new thing in Groningen because it has art schools, it has a music school and a really good art school but usually people would come do their education and then leave for Amsterdam or Berlin or wherever but the last five to ten years, young people stay. They stay in the city and they try to start a career not just in the city but from the city so they live in the city and they see the whole country and the whole world as their work field and they are usually quite internationally connected from the beginning so they really have an impact on the city also because the scene is growing, it's very internationally oriented very internationally in its population. What we do in the project Meet the Neighbors is for every sort of section we do one project so as a partner we are quite small we only do three projects and even the projects are quite small that's mainly because when we decided to enter the project we were just revived for like ten months so we had no idea where we were going and how strong we would be for the duration of the project so it was safer for us to keep it small and actually that's a really good decision. I look at the projects more as sort of guerrilla projects because they're really concrete and quick because they only last for a few weeks and then it's over and then we continue our business until we do the next one but also guerrilla because we look at them as ways of finding out new ways of connecting to new people in the city because we are a building what the discussion was this morning we are a building and from that building we try to connect to the community and also of course we try to attract the community but the building is always the center of our activities and the building is right in the center of the city. We chose to do what we call house exchanges so we ask artists to... we look for partners in not necessarily artistic partners but social partners for example for the migration project we work together with an organization that's been around for 30 years and who create housing facilities for refugees especially for refugees who have come to the Netherlands their application to stay has been denied but they cannot leave the country it's a large group in every country I think in Western Europe there's a large group of people that are not allowed to stay but they also cannot leave and it's a difficult... of course a very difficult group of people they're called INLEA and they do very very good work for this specific fragile group of people and we're really happy to work with them so we ask two local artists to sort of go into residency in one of their housing projects and at the same time we ask one of their inhabitants one of their guests to live at the theater because we will also want to learn from this project how a building or an organization as a Grand Theatric can be for new people living in the city and I think what better way to do that is to invite them into your house and have them stay and have the conversations have them come to the activities that we have and so we can learn from that this was the first project we didn't build a boat but the boat is where actually I think about 180 refugees live it's one of the housing projects and it's obviously a large one supported by the city government we had two local artists staying at the boat for a week they didn't actually sleep there because that's too much of a sort of intrusion in their environment but they were there during the day and they connected to some of the guests on the boat and especially what they did is the guests on the boat took them into the city the two artists actually were born in Groningen and these new neighbors took them on tours through the city where they would go and they would really go to different places and they would really take different routes so that was for them also really interesting having new neighbors who actually used the city in a completely different way while they were there and after they were there they also collected stories they wrote a lot about their sort of reactions to the stories we asked them and also there was the restrictions given to them by the refugee housing organization do not talk about family do not talk about the flight here do not talk about the legal situation etc so you can talk to them as your new neighbors but don't ask after these issues unless they tell you and even then let them tell you what they want to say but don't go ask questions so that's what they did so they really connected to them as neighbors which is in a way a very human connection to make and they really were impressed by that situation the two guys on the right are the two local artists and in the background it's the boat and they made an artifact and also later based on their experience the two guys are from a video collective in the city so they started as a video collective and it started transforming into more performing arts projects and also things like 3D and everything really technical they love it but the organization that runs the boat existed for 30 years and they sort of had a if it weren't so cynical you would call it a festival but it's not that good that they have been doing this for 30 years and it's so important still but they were having international guests and all kinds of activities also at the Grand Theater and in that weekend we presented our results also so these guys presented their 3D model of the actual ship the ship as you can see is like a river cruise boat that's rented for this issue on the inside it's really funny because it's really built as a very luxurious river cruise ship and now these people are living there and this is a 3D model and what they did is because these people are not allowed to be in the Netherlands they're not allowed to be where they came from so actually they're not allowed to be anywhere and what they did is build a replica of the boat so if they leave or if the boat leaves the replica will still be in the city and what they did under the boat is sort of represent the colourfulness of the group of people living there because usually that's the part under the water so you don't see it it's the colourful diversity of the group of people living there and they did a sort of specific GPS device they built into it that's used on ships so you can always know where any ship in the world where it is they built it into these ships to sort of say this ship even if the ship is gone even if you are a guest on the ship now and you leave this ship has a GPS signal and this signal is somewhere in Groningen where you do have a place to connect to you do have a place to sort of be as a human being I really like that concept and it's a really nice artefact and it's now in the general manager's room of the refugee organisation because he really likes it at the same time we invited someone into our theatre that's the man in the middle he's been living in Groningen for 20 years he was a refugee from Afghanistan and he has a really difficult legal situation but we never spoke of it I know it's the case but we never spoke of it because he's also a writer and we started talking to him as a writer we're an art organisation, he is a writer let's talk about it because we didn't know him so he told us what he does he writes poetry, he writes novels he translates novels, he writes essays but he writes everything in Pashto so no one in the city of Groningen can read it and he actually wrote a novel about two men travelling from Kabul to the Netherlands in Pashto and then we said well that's really strange because he wrote a book about us and we can't read it so we organised an evening at the theatre building we asked him in the middle to read parts of the book and the person to the right is sort of simultaneously translating it into Dutch so we get an idea of what it is that he writes about us and afterwards we could have a discussion and a conversation with him we invited only a really small group of people so it doesn't look really spectacular but this man really is really vulnerable he lost his family while he was already in the country so we know a bit of his background so we decided to keep it really small and we just people on invitation and it was one of the most amazing evenings in the whole season for us as a theatre organisation because he was always really modest he's quite a small man he's also always sitting a bit like this and not very talkative not very can I leave now is it okay now so can I go so he was always trying to, I don't know almost try to not be very present but we gave him a stage and he came in a suit and even the people from India had never seen him in a suit so he came in a suit, he sat at the table and he was really sort of the guest of honour and he really played that role really well in that evening so everyone was amazed that this person that everyone had an image of you gave him a stage as a writer instead of a refugee and he sort of really grew in that role and was fantastic but what's even more interesting is that the parts that he wrote we didn't find very interesting so we asked him to read parts of his book and we didn't really find these parts interesting so we got into discussion afterwards would we consider these artists would we consider him a writer if he were a Dutch writer so it really sort of switched ideas in our heads if we want to connect to new neighbours like Mr. Dakeek will that work if we stick to our ideas of what a writer is or what literature is or what art is or what so to us this was one of the most impressive evenings in the whole season even though there were only 13 people there am I slowly going forward this is the second project with the international students this is the student hotel we worked together with them it's a really big building in sort of at the edge of the centre it's really big for that part of town and there are I think about 300 international students living there so it's really an icon of the internationalisation of the university we asked two artists to go into residence into the student hotel they were there for three weeks the moha collective two of them and what they did is sort of try to infiltrate almost into the student hotel so they joined the cleaning crew so they were able to enter the rooms they were at the reception so they spoke to everyone they had to build sort of open office in the downstairs open area and so they spent three weeks there trying to get to know the people living in that sort of bubble because it's really strange and in a way a closed space they did all kinds of small artistic interventions to try to get stories but they had a really difficult time with the international students because they didn't really open up they closed it with an activity the sort of performance the revival of the international students where they work with one of the residents one of the international students who did sort of a Japanese ritual with him because he was really trying to grow as a human being in this period of life so they did this he actually sat there for 10 to I think 30 minutes every day in the bicycle basement so they sort of had their intervention there and it ended in a result and it ended also in a quite interesting blog that they wrote of their experiences in those three weeks at the same time we had it had quite some attention from the media at the same time we invited two people international students to live at the theater which got so much attention that it really surprised us every news media in the city came to us so we had two people living in the theater this is a dressing room but we built it into a student room for them to stay in the kitchen they used the cafe downstairs they used the whole building they created a lunch for everyone involved in the project at the same time and in that moment they also asked everyone to give them a sort of artistic input for a little performance they made in the end I'll put this on quickly it's a short film they did a short performance in the end and we had again a small conversation afterwards with people involved in this project and again it's in a way a really small project but it got a lot of attention which makes it a lot bigger but for us again it was a really good project to get to know a group of people a community in the city that we do not connect with at the moment and they really gave us interesting ideas how we can connect to them not just marketing ideas but also artistic ideas how to create projects that can actually be of interest to an international student community I think again we do the questions afterwards it's interesting to see the exchange with the institution which will be something we'll pick up later on how to infiltrate or influence the institution I think that's an important aspect Richard please I'm going to start with a brief moment of just talking about a little bit of personal history which combines with our company's history so I started our company Quarantine 20 years ago in November so a month ago was our 20th birthday I started it with Rene O'Shay who is my co-artistic director and also my partner so we live together and our designer Simon Bannum when we started the company Rene and I were living in a flat in the centre of Manchester it was a what we call in England we call it a council flat it was social housing so when we first began the company we ran it from the spare bedroom of that flat for several years now 20 years on we have an office Quarantine has an office that's probably less than five minutes walk from where that flat is right in the centre of the city oops, I've gone back, sorry that's us on the day that we left the flat eight years ago so we no longer live there I'm showing you the photograph because I want you to just have a look at the aesthetic of that situation so it's at the time when we set the company up in 1998 around about 2,000 people lived in the centre of Manchester Manchester in common with many British cities has never since industrial times had people living right in the centre of the city people tend to live in suburban situations over the last 20 years that's changed very dramatically so when we first set quarantine up in 1998 living in the city centre was a very different experience from the experience you would have now if you were to visit the city of Manchester or if you were to live in the city shops would, when the shops closed then at 5.30, they don't do that anymore now shops stay open sometimes throughout the night but then shops would close at 5.30 and at that point the city centre would effectively become quite dead there were some bars and some restaurants but not a lot of life not a lot of activity in the city centre the city of Manchester is geographically rather small relatively speaking it's 20 miles from top to bottom and 3 miles across so at that point 20 years ago it had a small population and because of that it was considered to be a relatively poor city in the British situation 20 years on in 2018 there are now 52,000 people living in the city of Manchester in the broader region the imaginary region if you like of Greater Manchester there are 510,000 people living the Greater Manchester is made up of conurbations and suburban areas and other towns that are attached to the city Manchester is very much the heart of that Manchester is currently an economic boom town there are apartment buildings office blocks growing all the time Manchester is the engine of a policy of the UK government called the Northern Powerhouse which is a strategy to move decentralised power from London to move economic power across the country Manchester is driving that the regeneration if you like Manchester's fortunes and the regeneration of the city in terms of its housing stock and the rapid development of the city has been driven by a relationship between the city government Manchester City Council who are again a very interesting and unique city council in the country at least they were I'm not sure if it shifted in the last election but they have been for a very long time the only city council in the country that had 100% members who were all from the Labour Party they've driven the development of the city through very close partnerships and relationships with property developers and other partners for example the university in Manchester is one of the largest landowners in the city very strong partnership between the city and the university so this rapid development has attracted of course an enormous shift in population but not only in numbers but also I guess in the characteristics of the population in the city so the 50,000 or the 50,000 increase is substantially dominated I think by young professionals the demographic of the city is relatively narrow people being attracted into the city predominantly living in apartments and attracted to jobs present in the city alongside this development certainly in the last 5 to 8 years in a very significant and very visible rise in homelessness people sleeping rough in the city very very very visibly present and lots alongside the inarguable sense that Manchester's economy has grown and is booming questions about in the housing situation about where is the place of affordable housing and where is the place of social housing going back to the fact that when we start to the company Rene and I were living in social housing living in one of those council houses one last statistic on Manchester's population this is an estimate from the city council themselves that by 2030 so in 12 years time population in the city will have risen to something like 100,000 people of course that rapid growth in population brings with it enormous challenges about providing services for a much much much larger population so medical services, doctors, education, transport leisure etc etc significantly public space the vast majority of the developments are private developments private developers often provide and I'll talk about this in relation to tenancy will often provide communal space or a shared garden or a shared yard as Cecil referred to in Béton but those spaces are rarely public available to the people who live in that particular apartment situation so Rene and I having experienced this huge dramatic shift in not only in the architecture of the city and in the life and atmosphere in the city but also I guess a potential shift in how we thought about ourselves as artists and our relationship with this place and we decided that what we wanted to do was to try to make a project that looked at that and in the UK in common with many other situations there has been something of a history of artists taking up residence in domestic situations but they've most often been in situations where an artist has moved into an area of some kind of deprivation or poverty or social problem that's where the engagement has been the shift in Manchester the dramatic shift in the identity of the city certainly on the surface isn't about that it's about the provision of a new way of living for a new population so what we wanted to do was to see if we could find a way of embedding ourselves in that situation so in October of this year, so just a couple of months ago we took the keys for a brand new house which sits on the border on the edge of the border between Manchester and its sister city of Salford in Britain, I think it's a unique situation in Britain that Manchester sits side by side with a neighbouring city where you cross a bridge or you cross a road and you go from one city to the other if you didn't know it, you wouldn't know it however they are very different characteristics very different histories very different perhaps quite different futures we wanted to kind of put ourselves in an unfamiliar situation and I guess in a sense try to work out how to be part of this rapid change and to confront what we perceived as some of the challenges and problems of that one of the questions that I think we began to ask at the beginning which has certainly grown through our involvement in this project in Meet the Neighbours is what has this rapid change or what is this rapid change doing to the notion of neighbourliness because not only are these new apartments arriving and often in developments that are consciously deliberately designed so that they provide everything that you could need some of the developments you could live, work, shop, go to the gym go to the restaurant, go to the cafe there and never leave the same square kilometre people do of course but you could live a life entirely on the estate that you live in I guess maybe some very different but some kind of parallel perhaps with LSM in a very different situation so we entered this house the it sits, there's the river, that's the river Urwell that's one of the boundaries between Manchester and Salford, the boundaries sometimes the river, sometimes a road that image of it looks very bucolic, it looks very lovely it's not quite like that in reality one of the very interesting things about these where we're making tenancy take place is that their houses there are very very very few new houses being built in Manchester it's almost entirely, as you can see from some of the other buildings it's almost entirely tall apartment blocks because of availability of space but in this area which was an empty site the developers who are a local development company who really were the forefront of some of Manchester's development over the last 20-25 years a company called Urban Splash who specialised originally in the conversion of ex-industrial units, ex-industrial factories into apartments, they've built these houses and they've built them in terraces and I guess the terrace street is very much part of the vernacular architecture of Britain, certainly of the north of England if you were to go outside the city centre into some of the suburban areas where Ben lives in a terrace house, Ali you live in a terrace house it's the norm in the suburbs you live next to your neighbours in a ribbon of houses and so they've built a kind of contemporary version of this in the city centre near to the city centre and our project is to live in the house or actually to invite artists to live in the house I think we try to be very clear that this is not a theatre this is not a gallery, this is not a museum it's a house to live in so we invite artists to live in the house we invite them to get to know the neighbourhood get to know their neighbours and leave some trace of their stay behind that's the brief to the artists, we send them a pack of information which keeps changing the connection with the research of some of the issues that I've just touched on and then we ask them to come and live in the house spend time there and leave something behind there's no constraint nor real influence on what they might leave behind we realise that because this is a very large and amorphous issue that we needed a kind of approach to it to perhaps frame or contain the approach to the question so I remembered doing an exercise at school at primary school in a nature class where we were asked to throw a hoop like a hula hoop on the ground our teacher would say what do you see there and the teacher would say get on your hands and knees and have a look and you'd really have a look so I guess in a sense what we're trying to do is follow the same approach to tenancy with this house which is a Urwell Riverside as the centre of the hoop I'll go back to that in a second so we invite the artists to live in the house across the year we have eight different sets of artists some of them are three of the sets of artists are UK based working across different art forms from performance through filmmaking through choreography to writers and visual artists and then some artists from Europe and further afield they include the Belgian artist performance maker Sarah Van Hey and her collaborator Flo Herrmann a photographer who trained as an architect who's based in Istanbul called Ali Taptik Shyma Nader who I guess you might mention as well that Francesca we came across Shyma through Francesca Shyma was the first artist who undertook a residency at Lidizuit in Marrakesh Shyma's from Palestine and has an interest in working in projects around water which I know Francesca is going to talk about and as you can see the river Urwell is bordering, the house is bordering on the river Urwell and then at the very end of our project we'll invite Janek Tukowski and his owner Novacka, I asked you and now it's gone wrong Novacka, I was so good at it before lunch they're going to come right at the very end of our project and be our final artist I guess kind of wrapping up something of the project whilst when artists aren't there we quarantine we have the kind of luxury and the space I guess within the year of the project to be able to not only think about and respond to what the artists in residence make happen but also to initiate our own projects and our own engagement with the neighbours and the neighbourhood so we we have a kind of whole range of activities that have started to begin and we'll continue in the new year projects around guided walks in the neighbourhood lots of conversation based work our work over the last 20 years has always been around very direct relationships with people, with the public, with other people so this for us becomes a particular frame to occupy, to continue the work that we've made for 20 years but we'll do that through walks, through conversations taking the form of lunches and dinners, mediated conversations and a specific example we have a resident philosopher quarantine has a resident philosopher who also happens to be one of my oldest friends, he's a professor of philosophy at Glasgow University and Mike is going to come and Professor Brady sorry is going to come and lead an event around the notion of neighbourliness as a virtue so really trying to bring a very I guess very philosophical approach to some of the questions that are emerging through the project and alongside that we'll also run surgeries and encounters for local artists really trying to get under the skin of questions around artists and their relationship with the space that they live and work in nearly there so we commissioned a table it felt like the idea of having a table at the heart of this home was an important thing that we wanted a table that could exist in different relationships, constellations and that we wanted to support a local maker so we made a table that becomes a kind of both a very practical solution and I guess an interesting metaphor for asking the question who is at the table that seems to be one of the key questions who is involved in this process of developing the city who is invited to the table who's not part of that conversation who's left out, who's left behind we've over the last couple of months we've involved ourselves in lots of meetings and encounters with a range of individuals in the city from professor of urban planning the directors of planning and the director of city centre regeneration at the city council with housing activists with I made a dinner for the board of directors and the property developers who built the houses and a sort of a very strong thing that's come out of that for me is this sense that although there's absolute disagreement and variance in the way that each of those individuals and those parties think about and approach the issue there's also something very telling that each of them, every single one has an absolute passion for and commitment and belief in the fact that they think their approach is the right one to develop the city of Manchester so I think there's something at the heart of our tenancy project which is about trying to potentially bring some of those voices around that table Perfect, final words for this presentation thanks a lot and it's always good to have a carpenter to make a table for a residency so that at least not all furniture are made by IKEA so maybe that could be a rule for all residencies Francesca if you would take the floor Hi everyone, I'm Francesca Mazzuerov I work in Marrakesh at the Dizuit I hope you're all not fully asleep already my presentation is going to be very colourful so hopefully it's going to help you be awake It's already up Is that the full screen option? Okay, it's okay As I'm not very good at speaking in public I wrote my text so I will go through it and try to stay more or less in time Firstly, I want to thank Gregos and Marta for the welcoming and the efforts in the programme and also in the simplicity of the question asked through this symposium in general and for these sessions specifically What do we know so far is supposedly very simple but it's really a good level of modesty and honesty to find an answer as well as a good amount of time to formulate a proper one So while thinking about pertinent temporary questions to share with you today in relation to the evolution of CANAT the project that we are developing also as part of mid-neighbours, I was happening to be reading Preparing for the Not Yet and I say by Dutch artist Jean-Evan Heeswig reflecting on agency as a collective endeavour and setting some proposed lines of thinking and an open-ended agenda to help defining how we as cultural actors could or should engage in a collective yet to come, yet to be built While encouraging all of you to have a look at the text which is available online and also at her work in general My proposal here is to share some thoughts related to the accumulated experiences linked to CANAT and to Le Disuit in general combining some of my conclusions with some of the suggestions that are presented in her text I believe that Le Disuit and CANAT as well as many initiatives that are led by the people in this room are going in the direction of trying to create those spaces that can prepare us for the not yet But before bringing you to Morocco I would like to share some concepts that I think resonate pretty much what we have come up to know so far I believe that for us what is of utmost importance is to take the time the right time to try to understand space and through that to try to define and redefine our own place In other words it is important to understand positions in space mapping different ways of being and seeing understanding power dynamics normalize modes of functioning its resistances and the spaces in between in order to set our positioning while also setting our actions as open processes I believe it is fundamental to create spaces to allow ourselves and others to be affective and be affected to be sensitive to one another to listen and take some risks of getting off track of living on the side part of our own subjectivity and indeed autorship and to let in some traces of the others This means to learn how to unlearn or to understand differently and to re-root us with others otherwise And finally I think it is really important to be critical and self-critical knowing our own external and internal limits and also being willing to open spaces and projects in collaboration with others So now let me move to our project and the context in which we work Ladies' Wit was created in 2013 by artist Leila Ida which I joined in 2015 and it is a multidisciplinary cultural space based in Marrakesh A well-known tourist destination often subject to substantial exotization primarily consequence of the quasi-soul representation of the city as encapsulated by the Medina the old or the Arab city portrayed as an essentially chaotic, colourful, noisy, messy somehow pre-modern territory inhabited by traditional craftsmen as well as nick-charmers and storytellers populating Jamalevna which is the main square in the Medina The Medina is not only colourful slippers or fancy rads and increasingly fashion boutiques It is also the era of the city in which a relative poor population still lives though increasingly pushed out due to gentrification forces It embodies also the heart of the ancestral traditions, knowledges and heritages of a millennial and eclectic civilization today at risk because of a lack of strategy or I would say maybe political interest in its sustainable preservation or reinvention The Medina of the Postcard Malakeshdo is quite more extended than the Sol Medina It has two central districts Giliz and Fensier district called Ivernage both heritage of the French protectorate and housing primarily the expert community in the middle and middle higher Moroccan classes Far away from the centre is Far away from the centres I lost the point there are various kind of districts more or less degraded as well as some industrial ones that are nonetheless neighbourhood by luxury golf resorts and actually here I would like to mention that in Malakesh there are at least 15 of them which is a quite telling number for a city that lives in a semi-desertic area Finally the Palm Grove historically the green lung of the city somehow a functional garden traditionally embodying both the main green space for the Marachi and the city food reservoir is today half dried out and half transformed in an exclusive secluded residential area with villas and swimming pools and all that comes with it Modern reforms and more recently liberal policies have altered profoundly previous equilibrium in the whole country and produced deep transformations whose direction does not require much analytical skill to answer the question for whom and in whose benefit What I see as a consequence at the city level is that the social and even stratification of opportunity and risk distribution matches to some extent a spatial organization So while young and more educated Moroccans avoid the Medina today as being perceived as either too poor and dangerous or as a spectacle for tourists the urban transformation I sketch have also resulted in a drastic reduction of both intimate and public spaces to assemble and socialize and actually here there are some telling images of an old map of the city with both the Medina and a relatively small external area Today as you see everything is completely built and the second one shows it's a very bad quality picture I'm sorry but shows half already from the protectorate time the green spaces inside the Medina have basically disappeared So now the creation function and functioning of Ladisuit has somehow intuitively tried to respond to and position vis-à-vis some of these dynamics As I mentioned Ladisuit is a multidisciplinary cultural space and residency space located inside the Medina and hosted in a traditional house Its creation came from a very personal desire from Leila that you see jumping in the picture to create a safe and intimate space of expression as feeling that something was missing and hence identifying a response at their own scale Since its inception one of the main objectives has been to sustain the local emerging artists and to connect them with the international art scene As a residency space it has allowed foreign artists to engage with the city giving oneself some time to navigate it possibly otherwise Here are some other pictures This space has been able I believe to maintain the intimacy and informality of a house to become a communal point and a space of discussion and exchange gathering and partly creating an expanding community Ladisuit also offers a really yearly running programation spanning from visual arts to performance from cinema to literature with a key transdisciplinary vocation connecting artistic research with social theory It is a space allowing for the production of critical research and discourse while testing new and experimental methodologies Indeed the self-critical reflection of the ambiguous role that contemporary art performs in the city has been always very much present in our activities or way of thinking about it One of the ways we have tried to deal with it is on the one hand that we have tried to withhold some normalised understandings of how an art space should operate to adapt at least partly to the specific context in which we are for instance by making our a specific temporality and in fact our instituting process has built up quite organically and carefully adapting to the pace of our surrounding environment while working through affiliations and affinities evolving through time in increasingly dialogue with various and diverse realities in Marrakesh and in Morocco and thanks to encounters, dispositions and friendship If I can surely argue that Ladisuit has succeeded in bringing together a community of both practitioners and not practitioners that today perceive the space as a common and as a safe one most of the programs that we have run until last year had remained within our walls The still diverse group for and with whom I believe we work hence belong to a general extent to the art and the cultural community the students and the educated youth A challenge that we felt was in front of us and I think that it's still in front of us to a certain extent at least is to start getting closer and open to our closest neighbors It is a challenging terrain Some challenges are related to language to human resources since we are an extremely smaller association but another one is also a spatial one There are maybe not so invisible borders that it's hard to cross for a certain segment of the population as we are perceived as an art institution or gallery that is frequented by an eclectic and partly also quite western crowd So Kanat has been set up in continuity with the long term trajectory of Ladisuit and with the particular willingness to test ourselves in new terrains by engaging more proactively in public or rather common concerns and spaces of intervention Kanat is in fact a long term trans-deep listening project that we initiated in 2017 which aims to critically reflect and act upon the politics and poetics of water in Morocco while also aiming at creating a space of exchange and reflection on the possibility for artistic and curatorial methodologies to be catalysts or facilitators for the reactivation of the collective memory of traditional water cultures and for engaging in fostering a collective agency fighting for the right to the commons and for the creation possibly of a common It is a quite ambitious project that we envision as working on the one hand actually in relation to Marrakesh while it is also growing as a transnational and methodologically diverse platform a curated network of people with resonating passions that are helping us to map what commons may mean and how the project could develop by bringing forth knowledges, narratives and visions of the past arrangements and present configurations and future imageries of water In the context of the project water and canats themselves are interpreted both literally and as a metaphor The canats or hetaras are where the historical water system that was then dismissed and dismantled since the protectorate but that made Marrakesh become known as the garden city with underground waters from the neighboring mountains and creating also a very specific social contract that operated within and beyond the city borders and feed the communal spaces such as the now-quasi-disappeared gardens and the palm grove What we try to explore is what effects has their decline had on residents' relationship with water and more generally with the idea of the commons of public spaces and of being in common What legacies do the traditional system of the canat have today and which acts of resistance to water privatization exist and how can we engage them or net them together As a metaphor the canat is a resomatic system of underground channels and wells of connecting feeding lines and circles Circles that in the Moroccan culture directly relate to the concept of the Halka an horizontal circular constellation of people that comes together and in which knowledge and stories circulate erasing distinctions between the performers and the audience Currently we are still at the stage of mapping mapping positions but also dispositions, visions and strategies emerging both from inhabitant testimonies existing artistic and cultural projects and militant campaigns and civil struggles in Morocco This mapping process started in 2017 through multiple formats and configurations artistic residency programs of course but also setting up temporary spaces for knowledge production and sharing such as exhibitions, presentations, workshops interventions in public space, collaborative researches and collective cartographies An example of this has been the five days of the event cannot perform in change from the margins that we organized this last November, so some weeks before ago The five days represented a moment to bring together a diverse set of actors either engaged in water specifically from a research or an activist perspective or engaged in social and participatory methods at the urban level in Morocco The program also represented space to experiment collaborative participatory methods ourselves such as collective cartographic experiments with the participants and with students from Casablanca We also organized city tours which we had done already last year with the bikes inside the palmer to trace the water systems and to share knowledges about what is happening there We also organized city tours to see what is happening there and also interventions in the neighborhood often led by artists both in the direction of collecting the memories of the inhabitants on water commons and common spaces but also in the direction of stimulating their imagination for the future Actually, this specific intervention was co-led by Jerome Gillet invited in the context of the neighbors and the idea for that intervention was to stimulate particularly the kids of the neighborhood to think about green spaces and oasis and to create a forest of science related to what we would find in an ideal garden and then we circulated it across the district through a march that was quite funny In the developments of Canat the involvement of various artists you want that one? In the developments of Canat the involvement of various artists since last year has been quite essential firstly to conquer, to map the spaces of water in Marrakesh and the works that we presented in the exhibition from last year it was December last year with six different artists partly from Morocco partly from abroad, went in that direction and were grounded on various and different mediums and political languages from direct work and engagement with specific more or less proximate communities From 2018, thanks also to the neighbors we have been having two artists in residence both of them who had already participated in the project the year before this is somehow what we are trying to do in order to have the problem of not having or feeling that we never have enough time for the artists to go in depth with their researchers and particularly when approaching specific communities that we keep certain flexibility and try to bring them back as much as possible so we privilege long term relationship with some artists with whom we feel that there is an affiliation and affinity so Jerome Gillet is a Belgian artist he's concluding this week's his second residency and these are pictures from last year he developed an early subjective cartographic research that was combined with public works along the river of Marrakesh while in the context of the five days and in November he co-initiated the march of the Oasis in the neighborhood and he also collected other testimonies linked also to public fountains that are disappearing in the Medina right now and the major project that is developing for the residency specifically is related I mean is related to weaving in the sense that he has started a collaborative work with the women weavers of a cooperative called Anguan that means all united that is located in a city a little bit outside Marrakesh he's linking the carpet and the art of weaving in the Amazir culture Amazir is Berber is a privileged way of defining Berber because Berber reminds to the Barbarian etc. so in Morocco most of the people prefer to define themselves Berber, Amazir rather than Berber and for those that don't know it's the octoctonus population that existed before the arrival of the Arabs and before Muslim so he's connecting the specific tradition of weaving in the Amazir culture to the question of water through a reflection of on the space of the common and he has proposed to the women of the community of the community of the cooperative to translate their imaginaries of water through the production through the collective production of a carpet in the Amazir culture carpets are in fact not just decorative objects but they also perform functional social communal and communicative tasks so as such the carpet can be read as a common social space and so Jerome project is also exploring and questioning the tradition and the modernity of the carpet, the transmission of know-how and the view that women have in the landscapes that surround them as it has happened already before his work is still in process so even though he's living in a couple of weeks he will be coming back in 2019 to continue and finish this first carpet and engage either with the same cooperative or with others in Morocco in the future I think something interesting at least for the Morocco our context is that we we have quite a lot discuss the question of the legitimacy of the position of a maybe I skip the legitimacy question for later but there is a legitimacy question which is there the other artist that we had in residence is Shai Manader who is a Palestinian artist that came also ready in 2017 and back in 2018 she has been working on an extremely interesting case and a very rare one in Morocco related to water struggles she has been working with it's a set of villages, a community composed by different villages in the southeast of Morocco they are facing a mine owned by the king since the 80s is badly polluting the water and the land in front of them what they have been doing since 2011 is to occupy the mountain in front of the mine and trying to cut the pipes the water pipes that were bringing at least part of the water to the mine both me and Shai Manader spent some time with them Shai Manader me it is extremely hard-core situation in the sense that it really looks like a world of positions of course the mine is trying to make them die autonomously after years and years of physical occupation of this area what is very interesting and what Shai Ma has been looking at she is very interested in the role of music as a form of resistance in struggles and actually this population, this community has been redefined and re-activated or re-adapted a traditional form of song poetry to both communicate and somehow reinforce their struggle so she has been recording and trying to understand and translating the various set of songs that have been produced throughout this eight-year of occupation of the mountain and we were supposed to have this ready already but it's not ready yet there will be an album and it's going to be a way to narrate the history of this movement I guess I'll finish here thanks a lot now we have a couple of minutes left and I was kind of thinking what to do with it which is not so easy because it's interesting listening to the project again to see in one hand they all have something in common but then they are quite different from the approach, whom do they approach what kind of neighbours they are looking for how do they position themselves between participatory work creating own work etc it covers quite a lot of things and it covers a lot of problems which would take another hour to ask the legitimacy of a question of who represents of what are power relations and so on but they all are already implied in the project also there is an awareness obviously for it I would say in a way to make a sketch of what maybe the intention of these projects to different degrees but the aspects of it that I would see obviously with the words I use it will show the problems but also I don't mean it that negative because there is a legitimacy also for that there is this kind of an expedition aspect in it which means on one hand I guess a certain research that's why I don't mean it so negatively because there is an interest in understanding something of the expedition bringing something back whatever that is and what problems that might bring but bringing back artwork and result or whatever to another audience for example or to the institution so there is this aspect in it there is sometimes the aspect in it of course how the artistic work, the work that is done at this moment is going to be changed by the situation there is probably something about how maybe the whole artistic practice not only of this project might be changed but in a larger scale and then as maybe the last step in this logic is how is the institution, is there an aim that the institution changes somehow through that and maybe for the last moments we have let's look for a moment in this because it relates a bit to questions that were there already during the day and yesterday the question of the change of the institution if you could maybe briefly at the moment where you are in the middle of the project anticipate where is the do you already anticipate the point where you would say there is the limit of the institutional frame or the artistic but the institutional frame we work in and actually if we would want to continue in this way something actually has to change within the institution and is that also something which might be first of all not easy to answer but that's why I ask it but second something that is in a way also maybe might hurt not only saying yeah okay we need to put a thousand more into the project for next time or whatever but where is something where say no maybe something in the structure maybe something deeper has to change which is a huge question so I'm not asking for an answer but maybe a small encounter towards this problem that you might have had in the work so far it's very abstract but I think maybe you I hope you understand what I'm aiming at but just take a shot at it if I have to answer for cannot specifically I think it is I mean the ambitions of the project could bring it out of the institution and make it live it alone in a way or on its own we don't want to set a too clear agenda on the direction of it because what I would like to create is more a platform in which other people come in and co-define with us where to lead it in a way I mean we have some plans for it but they will require a proper budget so I'm not sure it will happen very very soon in terms of this week I think we are on the I mean cannot is not the only project we are doing to sort of redefine or ameliorate certain things in terms of working with new audiences or working in a more engaged way in the city and in the city transformations so I think it is nicely and slowly coming together little by little and very much little by little because the question of time and is very important I think and yeah I think that we feel like there's a kind of a sort of paradox at play that we feel like we're still at the very very beginning of our project but in reality we're a quarter of the way through so so far we've had we've had one artist residency that's been completed and one that is a quarter of the way through it and that feels significant because I think something that we've realized very early on through the practice of making the project rather than the planning of it that the our artists are cuckoos in the nest that they're arriving somewhere for a very short amount of time and then they disappear and I think we recognize our own role in that and our own relationship with that even even at this stage and that's both a kind of positive and a negative and that it's already may it's already prompted us to begin to have conversations about what might be for us the longer term impacts on hesitate to describe quarantine as any kind of institution but on our practice and the way that we're structured the way that we work together and it seems like this situation of having a house to live in having a house surrounded by neighbors having a house that we can welcome people into that isn't an office, that has a table in it where people can come and stay that exists in close proximity to a neighborhood is an incredibly attractive thing a productive long term space for us so a sort of, yeah, a complicated thing with your project one of the crucial points of course obviously and intentionally is that you put yourself in a situation which is not so bad first of all I mean all your neighbors are very happy that they just bought this house so it's not exactly an unpleasant situation in that regard and you do it with money from the developers so in a way your project very much shows the dilemmas I guess one is in do you feel that you reach some limits or in the line you're balancing on here, do you feel that you got into something that you cannot handle and control anymore maybe also in terms of like what, that you become a I would not say marionette but to a certain degree somebody who plays for somebody else's agenda in fact not at all I don't think, there's no, I don't feel there's a sense of that, I think that we, in the relationship with the developer in the relationship with the stakeholders if you like in the project, from the outset we've tried to be very open and explicit about what the project might deal with and there's been no, as yet no indication from where Well they got their cultural center for free which they didn't do put in their development so the neighbors in terms of making the place more valuable there's something I don't feel that there's a we've kind of fallen off the line that we started on I think it's just simply through the experience the practical experience of being in the house and living in the neighborhood those two strong senses this is a really interesting productive situation to be in and this ephemeral version of it in this very particular situation with tenancy might lead us on to other versions of that other longer-term versions in different situations in the future and as I said the brevity of the artist's residencies brings with it both certain kind of clarity but also challenges that are difficult to overcome That's something you already mentioned the question that the neighbor cannot just leave after a while so the question of sustainability and also long-term engagement which would be very difficult in the way for an institution might be one of the challenges is after meet the neighbors you will leave and say that's a nice experience we put it in our yearbook or do you think this can be something where you will permanently engage in some way? I think it could be something really engaged but I think it's more what we began with the residence brine art I think it as a narrative story I don't know exactly which and I like that because nobody knows the end today but I'm sure it's really interesting to have some moments different moments to relate to story and the artist we're inviting in residence will contribute and invent imagine this story I was really interested I've got the same feeling than Richard about the time towards the project and in the project we are at the beginning we have two residences which I didn't told it but Richard in quarantine has been coming at the beginning but it was not exactly a residency with the question of neighborhood it was a show it was an artistic adventure really great but it was a bit something else I was really interested about what you said Richard about the house the question of the house that you incone really in tenancy project literally and I feel maybe there's someone there's something institution like the comedy between one of the limits could be that this theater is not really a house because very obviously we don't work at night it's really difficult but maybe possible just like Nick told it to invite some neighbors to live in the comedy between maybe maybe that's something to change I don't know but there is something in this project which is really in deep connection with the question of house that's all for the moment Nick you mentioned something which I find very interesting in this regard quite to the what's the end where you said maybe the criteria we have or in this case you have as an institution or an organization might have to change if they don't fit for certain things you raised this question which is a big question but I found that quite a challenge for an institution or any artistic project to say what is with the limits of our criteria of artistic quality for example even more fundamental our ideas of what is art to people but let me start we like I said we really use this project to shape ourselves as a new institution actually I like being an institution as Grand Theater because it makes people it makes it in a way I think more attractive to connect to you but that's a different thing we use the project to shape ourselves after as a new team restarting the organization and we already decided to continue the idea of house exchanges after the EU project so at the moment we are thinking of a new continuation of the project from 2020 because it's helping us so much to how do you say that to look from our place in the center of the city to the surrounding and changing rapidly changing situation we want to be of importance to people living in the city but if the city changes we have to change that's the basic idea and one thing we found two things one thing that we really do need to be more of an institution because the first two projects were completely chaotic and so we need more structure we need more support we completely forgot the really important phase of evaluation just forgot to plan it that kind of thing we really have to structure these projects in a better way but on the other hand they gave us so much energy already and so much so many new ideas that were really growing as an organization because of this and that's also why we want to continue because we just enjoy it very much but the criteria is also a very practical thing we had as a team a conversation and our programmer and some of you know her she's a really good programmer and she raises the question does this mean I have to change my program in the next couple of years because if we connect to more people and communities in the city and we want to be relevant to them doesn't mean I have to change my program and we haven't answered it yet but that's of course the question that comes up I think we are a bit over time but we started a bit late so maybe we can take if there is a question comment then we can still take it 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 no then we continue the conversation over I don't really say coffee but maybe tea and I think a lot of the topics are raised in there and we will hopefully have other opportunities in other cities to look how these things develop in the future thanks a lot for listening thanks a lot for talking