This Book is Yours. Recipes for artistic collaboration

In a house where several people live and work together, the kitchen is the hub: it is the meeting place where people engage in informal discourse. This is also the case with the Arc Artist Residency in Romainmôtier: the kitchen was the beating heart of the institution. It was a place where artists gathered when they took a break from their research, where they cooked and ate together, where other guests joined them. This book is inspired by the kitchen, by its conviviality, the sharing of food and knowledge, the experiments that took place there.

This book covers a period of four years in the life of the Arc Artist Residency – a institution of the Migros Culture Percentage – from January 2015 to December 2018, under the direction of Sally De Kunst. During this time, Arc continually reinvented itself, constantly questioning the idea of a residency as an arts institution from the inside and out, challenging values, experimenting with new ways of working together and questioning socio-cultural ecology. The Arc was more than just a chronology of artists in residence, projects or research pathways – it was a breathing organism, an experience of living and working together, a community of plural practice created by artists, experts and other guests, an ecosystem in which the sharing of research was an integral part of the research itself. The editors would like this book to pass on the experience and knowledge gained during this time to a wider audience.

This publication is a handbook for artistic collaboration. It is neither a retrospective of Arc nor a documentation of the artistic projects that took place there.