The Artist Travel Agency
2022 - ongoing
Installation (two wooden, rolling desks, two computers, lightbox, red vests, nametags, paper, drawings, 3 plastic plants, postcards, framed documents, etc.)
The Artist Travel Agency is a dynamic and changing installation that functions as a research environment to reflect and think of ways to develop a sustainable artistic practice. The project was first created in 2022 for the duo exhibition On and Off the Clock with artist Inga Gerner Nielson. It is a playful and colourful parody of a travel agency where concepts of labour, work and free time are ambiguously and undefined through the eyes of a young artist exploring the complexity of the different aspects of the artistic landscape.
The Artist Travel Agency is also a functioning body for discounted tickets and accessible free-time activities as it is a recognised partner of Iedereen Verdient Vakantie and Vrijuit.
The installation takes form according to the pressing questions of the moment: for the exhibition in 2022 the question of what is work? How do we define work and when are we working? Was a main concern. However, over the years more complex questions on the artist-economy and the relationships between different jobs of artists came into frame.
In January of 2024, The Artist Travel Agency was part of a residency at The Green Corridor, with a main focus on understanding how different funding bodies and alternative economy proposals function within a system of permanent scarcity. What does it mean for the livelihood of an artist when an institution doesn't have enough working budget? Who keeps their job? Who can pay the rent? As an environment for new understandings and ideas, the project produces independent works that stand on their own and can be part of different contexts without needing the support of the travel agency set-up. Am I Lost In The Labour, Or Is This My Own Design? (2024) as a result of the work done in The Green Corridor, and made later that year for the exhibition of The Solo Project.
Though the project works as an environment for exchange, research and reflection, it also bridges to a larger society. The Artist Travel Agency is operated by travel agents that do not have an artist practice. Professionals who in their day job employ artists, work with artists or have a connection to labour or free time. They are put in conversation with the visiting or invited artists and art workers about ambiguous working conditions, myths, stereotypes and misunderstandings about the needs regarding work and non-work.
Exhibition: On And Off The Clock
On and Off the Clock is an exhibition project which functions as a set, in which performative actions take place. These actions are diverse; some are discreet and apathetic, while others are affirmed by gestures and words which invoke, under these multiple designations, our cultural rituals.
Inga Gerner Nielsen deploys some of the activities of " THiS INSTiTUTE ", a nomadic institute that she herself recently founded, while Liselore Vandeput dedicates part of the space to one of the first manifestations of a new project, " The Artist Travel Agency ". The first goes in search of situations conducive to her work, the other questions the conditions of leisure. The two artists thus cross their common interests as they question the borders of their practice: a myth, a taboo, a social claim, where does it start, at which moment of the day does it end and according to which criteria, does it ever stop? What is the impact of the contractual framework on the creation, what is the impact of its absence, how to trace the modalities of conversion, which value takes the utility ? Is it a necessity, what to sacrifice, and why, in the name of the creation, … ? Questions that they formulate on a background of malicious misunderstandings, of fertile duplicity. Together and individually, they let themselves be, carried by the desires and the paradoxes that constrain them and thus take advantage of the intimate and political conditions that determine the economy of artistic practices. Having in common the ancestral symbolic institutions of proximity, both scrutinize the meshes and the escapes of an immateriality that are those of art and of life.
" THiS INSTiTUTE ", by Inga Gerner Nielsen, is thus less a place than a space-time of reinforcement of the attentions which she initiates and closes according to conditions judged appropriate, in a concern of collective maintenance tinged with cheerful activism. The stake of this practice is thus characterized by a relational approach which is established with the audiences of its performances, and through systems of addresses conceived specifically for the various social contexts, to induce sensitive modalities of the thought. Her starting scenarios take various forms, such as sessions inspired by methods of picture analysis from iconology, or trekking sessions in the vast Scandinavian expanses. Inga's work is in fact infused with the tools of self-analysis regarding the powers and formations of symbolic imaginaries, which lead her to question the heritage of her Protestant culture, both in its manifest dimensions from urban perspectives, to its most latent expressions in the depths of her aesthetic sensibilities. Through her research, she has come to probe the apparitions of singularly feminine figures and postures to note the permanent hand-to-hand reconciliations, notably the decisive influence that motherhood has had on her practice as an artist, while fearing the essentialist leanings of a complementarity of these roles.
Between the dedication as a social worker and the socio-political commitments of the artist, Liselore Vandeput perceives the risks of a dispersion of the self. This is why she has imagined, not without irony, " The Artist Travel Agency ", a project that allows her to speculate on the causes of a non-place and to consider the problematic absurdity of the productivity of free time and the precarious situation of the art workers in cultural capitalism. For the first public activation of this research destined to grow in the coming months, the fictitious and nevertheless functional travel agency is exposed by a series of elements articulated around this double workstation ; an information desk and a reservation desk, which will be sometimes taken in charge either by the artist or by two performers. A series of attributes will reinforce the mimetic aspirations of the service company.
Proposed as a scenario format that is as open as it is sensitive to the influence of context, On and Off the Clock is also an archive in progress that feeds on the dialogues between the artists and their installations over the course of the exhibition.
Pauline Hatzigeorgiou
Open Studio - The BiR (2024)
Residency The Green Corridor (January 2024)
Exhibition: On And Off The Clock (December 2022)
(c) Silvia Cappellari
