Copenhagen residency

The Residency

In April and May 2015, Canan Marasligil participated in a writer's residency organised by Culture@Work and hosted at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen.

The Culture@Work Project aims to develop an international platform for the circulation of artistic work and for the collaborative training of professionals in the cultural sector.

The Copenhagen residency programme pursued three main goals:

Interdisciplinarity: with a focus on literature, the Residency involved working across disciplines, from performance to exhibition, or any other artistic expression.

Cross-sectoriality: as a platform for collaborative training, the Culture@Work project encouraged dialogue between artistic practice and theoretical reflection.

Translocality: the Residency encouraged meeting and collaborating with local practitioners and to developing a project with local relevance for the city of Copenhagen as well as an European outlook.

methodology

Canan has organised her work through following discrete and complimentary phases:

Exploratory: in the spirit of the "flâneur" and from a personal point of view as a visitor with different backgrounds, languages and perspectives, Canan explored the city on foot, camera in hand, looking at languages other than Danish. This phase has allowed the creation of various material from written notes to photography. This process has been shared through social media.

Collaborative: with the support of the University of Copenhagen, Canan met with local practitioners and attended several events, interacting closely with the University community. A key moment was participating to the workshop on circulating critical practices organised by Culture@Work in Barcelona.

Reflective: following the residency, time was needed to reflect on the experience, evaluate material collected, to further research where needed in order to build the stories. This is an ongoing process aiming to bridge creative practice expressed through fictions and academic inquiry shared in tandem through resources.

The creation of this site is a first step towards hosting the Fictions and Resources, and sharing them widely. It is also the space where further work will be developed from, such as workshops, city tours, publications or other events to involve audiences outside the digital space and to create further opportunities for interaction.

The dominant language of expression throughout the site is English but other languages will not be excluded. This is a project celebrating multilingualism and I do intent to honour that in the near future.