For 10 years freeDimensional (2003-12) urges a sea change in the artist residency sector by practicing artist shelter and evacuation placements, convening networks and coalitions of expert practice, and publishing lessons learned in immigration and cultural policy fora.

“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” ―Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks (1947).

“… if you scratch the surface of a human disaster you will find creators responding to the most difficult of circumstances, making art to live, to eat, to kindle the human spirit, to bring peace or to resolve conflict.” —Bill Cleveland, Art and Upheaval: Artists on the World’s Frontlines (2008).

I make new forms. freeDimensional was both a framework for me to meet other thinkers and a specific tool for helping artists stay safe. It was my first assemblage, and showed me how to assemble better for the next project, Lanchonete(.org). I knew it needed ten years to blossom and for me to gain command of a methodology of, let’s say, ‘rhizomatic activation’. Performance, immersion, thematic, duration, multi-actor would also all be keywords for freeDimensional alongside its deep thematic on artist safety, shelter, safehaven, solidarity of spaces, resource-sharing and so forth.

I have tried to keep up with all the initiatives and institutions impacted by the freeDimensional idea. I have tried to make a work that responds to the safety needs of artists around the world.