“How to be here”

“In the eight and a half years since the founding of Alice Yard, one of our primary concerns — both practical and conceptual — has been vocabulary. How do we describe and define what Alice Yard is, our evolving sense of purpose and method, the organic structures which have grown around this enterprise?

“Alice Yard began not with a mission or an agenda, but with an opportunity and a series of questions. The opportunity was to take a modest domestic urban space — literally the backyard of a house in west Port of Spain — and open it to the imaginative investigation of artists, musicians, writers, and others. The questions were if, why, and how this creative community would respond.

“Their answers have been unpredictable, illuminating, occasionally frustrating, occasionally inspiring. And they have challenged us to devise a language focused enough to discuss the particularities of our space and time, but also expansive enough to comprehend the organic openness of a process that has never had a specific end in sight.”

From “How to be here”, an essay by Alice Yard co-director Nicholas Laughlin, included in You Are Here — Rethinking Residencies, an e-book and website recently published by the Factory of Art and Design in Copenhagen, following on from a seminar on the same topic in June 2013.