The Site Residency has been initiated in 2013 on the island of Gotland, Sweden. Now the programme has begun its journey to conceptually linked locations in other countries or continents, chosen for their special features: oddness, remoteness, “exoticism”, seclusion, harshness, or unique architectural values. The Site Residency programme is a tribute to the artistic strategies from the 60s and 70s – an escape from rigid institutional structures and gallery/studio-based production – and all references to land- and conceptual art tactics are obvious and intentional. The program, is oriented towards “the secret world of doing nothing” and its consequences. It is structured to reduce the stimuli and thereby motivate a new artistic approach towards the place/work system – which is always an equation with two unknowns. The character of this residency specifically implies that the artist is to refrain from production – or at least attempt to live his or her artistic practice in a somewhat different way during the residency period.
The Berlin-based Swedish artist Annika Eriksson is the third artist-participant of The Site Residency (after Agnieszka Polska and Susanne Kriemann). Over the years, Eriksson has produced a number of works in which the perception of time, structures of power, and once acclaimed social visions are called into question. Strategically Eriksson plays with duration, repetition and looping revealing how this is subject to unexpected political appropriations and inversions.
