LIMINAL SPACE, WORLD WIDE REPORT

The starting point of this website is the Artist-in-Residence Program titled "Liminal Space", which was held on the Internet from January to February 2021.

The Artist-in-Residence Program, which invites artists for a certain period of time to conduct research that leads to creative activities and to often create artworks, has been held not only in Japan but also in many other parts of the world, and has attracted not only artists but also curators who plan exhibitions, researchers, designers, writers, and others over decades. In recent years, they have supported the movement, temporary stay, and interaction of a wide range of people involved in the creation of art and culture.

However, in the wake of the new coronavirus epidemic that has been sweeping the world since the beginning of 2020, major travel restrictions have been imposed on movement across national borders (and sometimes even across more familiar provincial borders), and residency programs have been forced to think and work differently than in the past.

In this context, the artist Seira Uchida and the artist/designer Teresa Feldmann, who were selected from an open call, were invited to participate in a residency program organized in collaboration with Baltan Laboratories based in Eindhoven, the Netherlands and Arts Initiative Tokyo in Japan. Seira Uchida and Teresa Feldmann participated in the "Liminal Space," an artist-in-residence program that uses online as a "space" for research and interaction.

Liminal Space, which is broadly translated as "a place of intermediate transformation" from one point to another, was not only an opportunity to reconsider the nature of the residency program itself, but also to highlight the "strains" of everyday life that have not been exposed until now, as the world experiences major changes almost in the same way. Uchida and Feldmann responded to this with their own sensitivities. During their “stay,” they were interested in the Japanese family system and the role of women in society at large, and compared it to the situation in the Netherlands.

The global context of this liminal situation and the desire to weave "voices" and "experiences" during the pandemic not only from Japan and the Netherlands, but from everywhere, led to the launch of this report project. By outsourcing via online the texts which were originally written upon the residency, we asked new writers with whom we have had no previous relationship to trace the texts. Moreover, in this age of remote work and social distancing, we decided to use handwriting to trace the texts, which have been digitized by text files due to the spread of computers and the Internet nowadays.
This kind of outsourcing, which can be considered the ultimate in remote work regardless of location, has taken these texts to places we cannot easily visit today, including various locations in Japan, the US, Kenya, India, and Algeria. Within a few days, the handwritten texts came back from the remote workers with their own comments (I would also like to note that many of them were initially puzzled by this deviant request for their own opinions and experiences to share, compared to the regular outsourcing process, which I imagine is a step based on the one-way communication).

In the Artist-in-Residence Program mentioned above, each program produced a booklet documenting the residency and describing the artist's impressions. In a departure from similar production methods, we have included these worldwide reports on our website.

In addition to the interest in feminism shared by Uchida and Feldmann, we present here a small but solid collection of diverse voices and experiences during the pandemic.

In spite of the continuing instability in all aspects of the world, we would like to express our gratitude to all the people involved for their great cooperation from the implementation of the residency program to the completion of the Worldwide Report Project. We would also like to take this opportunity to thank all the remote workers in Japan and abroad who willingly accepted our request and shared their experiences with us in the Worldwide Report Project.

Supported by the Agency for Cultural Affairs Government of Japan, Fiscal Year 2020