Artist Residency In Brussels

What should you expect from an unfamiliar city where you are given the opportunity to live for a while? How can you get an idea of its layout and its structure before you arrive there, not only as laid out on a map, but also in your mind? How will you gradually develop your own configuration of the city, based on the places you visit, the people you meet and the friendships you establish?

It is the same when you are offered a residency: you work out in advance what you’d like to try to create and how to do it. You suggest an idea, a title. You devise a plan. And then, for a variety of reasons, things don’t work out exactly as you expected. The reality differs completely from what you had planned.

All of a sudden, your stay is coming to an end. You’d only just started to feel at home, it seems, when you meet people who inspire you. You’d got used to your daily routine. You’d just got yourself organised and now you have to pack up and leave. Isn’t that a metaphor for life itself?

You bring images home with you that you haven’t yet seen, and you are unaware if any of them are interesting or not, but you hope they are. After a while, you finally get to see the photos, fragments of that part of your life. Then you show them to people. And you are the only person who knows how much of your original idea is in them, but they contain something that you cherish, at least as a memory of that city, those moments and the people you met there.

Alexandra Demenkova, 2019.

Translation: Chris Bourne.

The photographs in this exhibition are the result of Alexandra Demenkova’s residency of Contretype in Brussels in 2017, with the support of the French Community Commission.

Website: www.alexandrademenkova.com

© Alexandra Demenkova, Artist Residency - Contretype, 2017