“I am a very dedicated friend and correspondent. Actually, that’s probably my real talent. I’m what you might call a correspondence artist.”
“Ah I see, so you are giving us money to be friends?”
Read introduction in Spanish, in Russian, in Portuguese.
In early 2021 we found ourselves in an interesting position: with the job of distributing artistic project funding at a time when many of the artists we knew had had projects cancelled, or were at a loss as to how to continue their work in the pandemic Zoom limbo. The last thing we wanted was to add yet more pressure for artists to continue producing under such conditions. We wanted to distribute funding, but we didn’t want it to have to be for anything. We also saw an opportunity in the transition to digital communication to connect with the global artistic network of Women&Performance Journal’s collective members. Barbara Browning’s notion of “The Correspondence Artist” (from her novel of the same title) prompted us to think of exchange itself as an artistic process: the intimate, often queered and feminized work of navigating communication across distance and difference. We conceived of the Artist Correspondence Grant as a program in which selected artists would be “match made” with an artist in a different country and invited to correspond with one another as much or as little as they liked, in any form or medium; a low-stakes experiment in multilingual, interdisciplinary, international correspondence.
The artist pairs are: Kaelo Molefe (South Africa) and Bakhyt Bubicanova (Kazakhstan); Lia Garcia (Mexico) and Abigail Campos Leal (Brazil); Jabu Newman (South Africa) and Mariana Villegas (Mexico); Davi Pontes (Brazil) and Aphiwe Livi (South Africa). After months of correspondence these artists have shared ephemera from their exchanges with us. To describe but a fragment of this: Lia and Abigail have forged escape routes (“rotas de fuga”) in the exchange of trans intimacy; Kaelo and Bakhyt have improvised a form of gestural exchange to communicate beyond the frustrations of written language and translation; Mariana and Jabu have mapped the overlapping histories of femicide and feminist struggle in their home countries; and Davi and Aphiwe have wrestled with the challenge of choreography without location. We are so grateful to these artists for their openness throughout this program, and for the beautiful images, words and videos they have shared, allowing us a glimpse into their kaleidoscopic exchanges.
Featured
