This book is yours: recipes for artistic collaboration

In a house where several people live and work together, the centre is the kitchen: the meeting point for informal exchanges. This is also the case for the Arc artist residency in Romainmôtier: the kitchen was the beating heart of the institution. It was a place where artists gathered when they took a break from their research, where they cooked and ate together, where other guests came. This book is inspired by the kitchen, its conviviality, the exchange of food and knowledge, the experiences that took place there.

This book covers a four-year period in the life of the Arc Artist Residency - an institution of the Migros Culture Percentage - from January 2015 to December 2018 under the direction of Sally De Kunst. During this time, Arc has constantly reinvented itself by constantly questioning the residency as an art institution from the inside and the outside, challenging values, experimenting with new ways of working together and questioning the socio-cultural ecology. Arc was more than just a chronology of artists in residence, projects or research paths. It was a breathing organism, an experience of living and working together, a plural community of practice created by artists, experts and other guests, an ecosystem in which the sharing of research was an integral part of the research itself. With this book, we would like to convey the experiences and insights gained during this period to a broad audience.

This publication is a handbook for artistic collaboration. It is neither a retrospective of Arc nor a documentation of the artistic projects that have taken place there. Rather, it is a tool and a source of inspiration for reimagining your own practice and your own life.