Halleck House Virtual Residency

Halleck House is raising funds for participants in our Collaborative Virtual Residency. This experimental project brings creators together digitally, to share their work and their experience of this moment with one another and to work together to make something coherent from what it is to be living and creating at this time. Work from the residency will be shared digitially, and the project will culminate in a collaboratively-produced print document, to be distibuted freely within the city of Detroit.

Halleck House is proud to be hosting 3 Detroit creators this season, Katelyn Durst, Kirsten Kirby-Shoote, and Edie Roberts. Their work weaves together poetry, prose, social practice, gardening, and food preparation and speaks to issues of social justice and identity, food security and political awareness. Their unique perspectives coalesce with intersection points that illuminate this moment with poignancy and immediacy. Halleck House residency functions as a platform for their work, an opportunity to engage the question of what collaboration looks like within the social limiations brought on by the pandemic, and a means of awarding compensation for meaningful creative labor.

Kately, Kirsten and Edie will navigate the process of working collaboratively, and Halleck House is as much about the excitements, challenges and failures in this process as it is about the resulting project. Documentation will cover collaborative processes, the artists experience of the current moment, and the work they produce together. 

In awareness of the many who are without access to digital media, sharing will happen in phases. The initial project presentations will occur in online platforms, and will culminate in a final printed publication that encapsulates the full run of the project and is produced with an eye towards mass physical distribution (at a time when safety once again allows for it). The residents are diving deep into this present moment and simultaneously documenting it the future--using their voices to exercise the right and the responsibility to create and preserve our own narratives. 

April - July 2020: Residency in Session: Dialogue, group meetings, creation and sharing of digital work, formation of a collaborative practice

August 2020: Final print publication release and FREE dissemination

Many artists and creatives work freelance gigs or in the service industry or non-essential fields. The arts community has been financially hard hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. We are raising funds to provide stipends for artists who are sharing their valuable work and unique points of view with the public. It is small but meaningful compensation for the staggering loss of wages people are experiencing due to these realities.

In addition to providing an economic boost to creators in need, Halleck House views collaboration as a timely concern. The pandemic and the government's response have shown that valuing rugged individualism over collective safety and care puts all of us at risk. This moment is a deep call for us to learn how to care for one another and be better community members. We hope that some of the lessons learned and issues explored in this residency will be hopeful fodder for current and future conversations.