2021
Accord, New York
We eventually arrived at Circulate — a fully-funded, live-in, artist residency in upstate New York with a group of seven strangers, young artists of differing mediums. The rules? No screens, a project to start and finish during the time, and committed presence and engagement with whatever emerged.
We put out an open call (see the document here), and after interviewing 50+ candidates, we selected our members and spent three weeks together on a property in upstate New York (Art Farm, a music studio).
Together, in the spirit of distributed leadership, our crew decided on intentional limitations to bracket and deepen our creative and intellectual processes. Circulate was completely void of internet and cellphones. Between blocks of independent work time, we devoted substantial space to community work: morning care check-ins; workshops led by each member (book-making, clothing design, performance art, to name a few); nightly sessions of “Writing and Thinking” using an anthology of all our favorite short stories, poems and essays; outings to local nature sites; group film screenings. Every single meal was homemade and shared on a rotating schedule. On our final day we had an exhibition (just for one another other) to share our work.
Amira made a short documentary about it:
Summer 2021. Society sick with virus and virtual dependency. A group of seven city-kid strangers commune and create in upstate NY, forming a micro reality free of cell phones and internet.