When the dead rise: encountering resistant legacies of creative economy within an artist’s residency at a municipal cemetery

ABSTRACT

Recent criticism of creative economies demonstrates tensions between programmes that support innovative cultural expression and community belonging, and those more oriented to instrumentally economic outcomes. While municipal planners recognize the link between cultural activity and enhanced quality of life, related budget support typically calls for quantifiable outcomes. Creative economy policies and projects are thus vulnerable to favouring more narrowly construed forms of economic growth. We explore the municipally embedded artist-in-residence (AiR) programme as a source of friction, complexity and inefficiency intentionally introduced into organizations constitutionally regulated to suppress exactly these kinds of excesses. In Deleuzian terms, the social machinery of neoliberal urban and economic development hesitates when it encounters the short-circuiting unpredictabilities of creative desire introduced by the embedded residency. The municipally embedded AiR is a residual apparatus of creative economy policy that can offer resistance to and even inoculation against easy alliances with neoliberal economic agendas. In the case of an embedded AiR in city cemeteries in Edmonton, Canada, the artist, working on the grounds, meeting visitors and holding workshops, uses now-obsolete photographic craft production to manipulate conventional memorial images and texts in unexpected conjunctions with experimental aesthetic expression and living stories. The physical presence of the residency also disrupts received categories to produce the cemetery as living public space rather than a setting with “holes to put the past in”. In this sense, the cemetery becomes accessible as newly encoded, sustainable cultural and recreational space with minimal civic investment. Calling up ghosts of challenged creative economy ideals, this AiR opens new forms of engagement between citizens, local history and urban nature as a complex adaptive system that incorporates both cultural values and commodity logic without primary emphasis on quantifiable outcomes.

KEYWORDS:

• Artist residencies
• assemblage
• creative economy
• aesthetics

Notes on contributors

Michael Lithgow joined Athabasca University in 2016 as an Assistant Professor in Communication Studies, and steward for the Writing for New Media area focus in the MA-IS Program. His research interests broadly focus on citizen participation in public culture. Current research projects include artist-in-residencies and their social, epistemic and discursive impacts, and the growing use of amateur images in network news coverage. Most recently, he has been exploring new digital literacies as forms and strategies for cultural resilience.

Karen Wall is Associate Professor in Communication Studies at Athabasca University and also teaches in the Heritage Resource Management programme. She has published research in areas of cultural policy, urban indigeneity, fine arts education and history, and social history. Her past and current arts practices inform her current research into cultural phenomena, space and narrative in everyday urban life.

Notes

1 For example, capitalist social order regulating the flow of desire into employees produces lines of flight which manifest in labour unions, an assemblage of desire that was presumably unexpected and even unwanted, but which has become an inextricable element of capitalist assemblage.

2 Personal interviews with Candace Makowichuk dated: October 2017, February 2018, May 2018, June 2018, in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. All related references to the artist’s thoughts and experiences herein derive from these sources.

3 Personal interview, Teena Changarathil, September 17, 2018.