For most of the year (2003 - 2004) I worked as a mother at home. My daughter was born last June 15th, so I did not work at all between June and October. From October until March I worked at home so that I could look after my daughter at the same time. I was not able to get child care until March because I am not a legal resident of Belgium. Child care had a significant impact on my process because it gave me the time to concentrate on my work. As I am here 'illegally' I spend a lot of time in social services, or at the commune (city hall), or at the police station, and I think that because of this I see a different Brussels than most of my peers.
Since I am an illegal resident I am not able to work and am also not eligible for Belgian grants for artists. So I make my work at home with as little expenses as possible. This means that I work in spaces and with materials that are free and available. This is one of the reasons why I chose to work with Constant. Constant offered me the materials to work with: their archives. At the same time, they offered me a contact with the arts community in Brussels, something that I was interested in because I am a foreigner and so I do not know the arts community here. My practice is portable: there is no physical object, and this makes sense with my living situation because when I move there is nothing to transport. I want to be ready to adapt to a new space, or a new location with my work. I believe that I am not alone in this way of working and living, and that this is a way of living and working for many artists. I would not choose to work differently. I think it is important for several reasons that I do not make objects, that my materials are already existing and part of a context separate from my work, and that my practice is portable.
My typical day at the moment goes like this: I get up and get my daughter to the daycare, then I come home and work at writing and developing ideas in the morning. In the afternoon I go to the Constant office where I am working on the material collected from Digitales 2004. My research process has not been just about developing a way of archiving material. I am directly involved with the Constant team in gathering the material for the archives - taking photos, making recordings, writing and translating texts. Also, I help to transfer the material to accessible formats: for example digitizing audio recordings, editing, and putting finished files on the web.
I am interested in making work that is part of a daily use. In this sense, I think the research project that I have done this year is at the border between art and design. I am also interested in making work that is embedded in a social, or working context. This context is where I make contact with a public ( rather than an audience). This way of working implies a different time scale. These things mean that my work this year is not intended for an exhibition or gallery setting. I am also not interested in what I refer to as the ‘master discourse’- a way of conceiving of a work of art as original, and the artist as singular creative genius.[1] I think that this way of thinking about art and artists is outdated, not to mention decisively not feminist, and does not reflect current art practices and works. For this reason the work that I have done this year is covered by a creative commons share-alike license. This means that anyone can use any part of the work that I have published on the website as long as they give me credit, don’t use it for commercial purposes, and cover any new work that they do using my work with a share-alike license as well.
[1]With regard to the term artist: ‘The modern definition is the culmination of a long process of economic, social and ideological transformations by which the word ‘artist’ ceased to mean a kind of workman and came to signify a special kind of person with a whole set of distinctive characteristics: artists came to be though of as strange, different, exotic, imaginative, eccentric, creative, unconventional, alone. A mixture of supposed genetic factors and social roles distinguish the artist from the mass of ordinary mortals, creating new myths, those of prophet and above all the genius, the new social personae, the Bohemian and the pioneer.’(parker and pollock, 82)