Virtual Workings | PERTIWI : Resilience in the arts
Participants of the online residency Virtual Workings Kamiliah Bahdar from Singapore and Savitri Sastrawan from Indonesia worked together on “Pertiwi” under the mentorship of Luckana Kunavichayanont. The two curators talk about the project’s development and working virtually with a mentor in their final article below.
Resilience is one of those words and concepts that is very hard to pin down, but also perhaps because of that, it is a term used in many contexts from ecology and economy to psychology, and a favourite between us, the name of the stimulus package in Singapore named the Resilience Budget, with its subset, the Arts and Culture Resilience Package. While the dictionary definition seems to capture something of the essence of its meaning, the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties, and the ability of a substance or object to spring back into shape yet it remains very open-ended. These qualities
Through their reflexive participation in the Virtual360 Konnect – Emerging Arts Leaders Residency Series, Minji Chun from Korea & Micah Pinto from the Philippines investigate how the current global conditions and the changing creative landscapes affect, and continuously reshape our experiences of exploration, collaboration & production.
Several months into the lockdowns caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, global communities have been forced to rethink and recalibrate current systems. And while constraints on mobility have been affecting artmaking and artistic collaboration, we began to ask questions that led to a web of inquiry: how will residency programs be experienced in new environments we create physically and digitally? How will artistic activities and creative experiences be realised online and offline? How can real collaborations be cultivated?