MAP Resides.

A retrospective show co-curated by Janaina Moraes and Kat Stefanova for Movement Art Practice (MAP) hosted by
CoCA Centre of Contemporary Art Toi Moroki in Christchurch, New Zealand.

May 2024

My first artistic experiences as a child were actually through dance. I used to choreograph dances and perform them at family gatherings. That inevitably resulted in me becoming a professional dancer, competing and performing in Bulgaria and Europe. However, my teenage were devoted to exploring the world of visual art: graphic design, drawing & painting.

What I’m trying to say is that dance has always been an integral part of me. So logically I was looking for ways to engage with the Christchurch dance community and it happened through Movement Art Practice.

Movement Art Practice (MAP) is a not-for-profit contemporary dance organisation based in Ōtautahi Christchurch, running community dance classes, artist residencies, performance events, and workshops for the past 10 years.

MAP is one of the only organizations in Christchurch actively promoting contemporary dance and performance art. In 2022 I applied for a job, starting as a Classes Manager, then Tutor and Social Media Coordinator and then growing into a more broad artistic role, in which I get to design, document, facilitate, teach… and now even curate a show.

As a visual artists and as part of the MAP’s team, I was offered the opportunity to collaborate with Janaina Moraes and take on the task of guiding the visual aspects of the project. I had to say yes!

MAP Resides is and exhibition part of the MAP Residency Outreach Program aiming to research and discuss the reality and future of art residencies. It’s a celebration of MAP’s art residency programmes -
a journey of recollected memories of residing / desiring / re-siding.

This show is a curation of the archives, featuring fragments of the experiences of the 43 artists hosted between 2015 and 2024.

The show aims to pose important questions such as: what is an art residency; how do we move forward when we cannot see ahead; while also highlighting the importance of allowing space and time for research in the artistic practice.

Residencies are often outcome-based, and this is where MAP has tried a different approach - valuing the research process as much as the potential outcome. Many of the artists featured in the show, have now expanded on those ideas (they researched years/months ago), resulting in something way bigger and meaningful for their artistic development.

“This was the first time I had to curate work that was not mine.”

The Concept

MAP has always encouraged the artists to share their research in one way or another, through talks, workshops, showings, photo sessions and/or in written form, but has tried to remove the pressure to produce a finished piece of work.

Without the imposition of resolution, these residencies offered time and space for artists to dwell in their works with a sense of rest, release, research, re-imagination. These fragmented memories of their time researching at MAP are the starting point for this show.

Janaina (my collaborator) has been diving deep into the concept of art residencies through her practice and her studies. As the Residency Coordinator at MAP, she had a strong desire to compile MAP’s archive (as it was never shown before) and shine a spotlight on all those artists part of the residency program in a meaningful way, where the research is the artwork.

Further the idea was to show the cross-pollination that happens through and organization like MAP. When people with similar interest meet, they start to collaborate and affect each other’s work in interesting ways. Those community relationships are hard to pinpoint, however, we know they exist, and we wanted to visually represent them through the way we curate and arrange the show.

As curators who are first and foremost artists, we approached the show as an artwork on its own.

wood, nails, string | 2024

by Kat Stefanova, Janaína Moraes and Oliver Thevenot

Yarning Circle

Our focus was on integrating all elements to create a cohesive experience, while also developing a unique visual language. Hopefully helping to navigate the complex map of strings and the intricate relationships between the individual artists and their work, enriching the viewer's engagement and providing the needed context to understand the work.

“Researching the research.
This is how working on this show felt like.”

What is research?

There is a piece we featured in it’s complete form, which gives an insight into the mind of an artist during a residency. It’s written by Sean Curham, and titled ‘What is research?’ - reflecting on the concept and his time residing at MAP. It's an amazing read! Here are a couple of quotes from it:

”That’s one part I like about it – research supports persistence.
Its a chance to experiment, to investigate in a way that is more about what I don’t know – this is the good stuff, the bits that are obscured either by my habits or by the project itself….I like the idea of a research process that is able to continue as though it were a conversation between friends – where its fine to say the wrong thing – to reveal the limits of your knowledge or experience – where the exchange is unguarded whilst your well-being remains guaranteed…
In part its helpful to look closely at what current research models do – and consider how these approaches shape or determine the art that results….”

Read the full here.

Throughout the years, MAP has hosted a diverse series of residencies, each shaped by the available funding and resources. Some residencies have provided studio access and accommodation, while others have been fully digital. The fluid nature of MAP’s residencies allows them to adapt to the evolving practices and needs of the artists, resulting in a wide array of outcomes.

This context is crucial, so we have included it in an "info sheet" for each year’s residency, designed to aesthetically resemble an archival document. With broken edges and taped directly to the wall, it symbolically references the messy, partially infinished and organic nature of the research process.

On this photo:

‘Info Sheet’ 2022
The MAP Publication (often featuring text/images from recent residencies)

about…

Janaína Moraes

Janaína Moraes is a Brazilian artist based in Aotearoa (New Zealand), Janaína’s work navigates between dance, language, performance, pedagogy and research as entangled/expanded art forms. Recently becoming a Doctorate in Dance Studies at the Waipapa Taumata Rau (University of Auckland).

She has been an artist in residence throughout the globe, including Europe, South America, Central America and Australasia.

Recently she moved to Christchurch and took on the role of MAP’s Art Residency Coordinator, which is how we came to work together on this and many other projects.

https://www.janainamoraes.com/

The process

The biggest challenge we faced was familiarizing ourselves with the archive, especially since neither of us had engaged with MAP during some of the artists' residencies.

When we say archive, don't imagine something neatly organized—there was a lot of digging and tracing of digital footprints. As we delved further back in time, the documentation became scarcer, turning the task into a process of researching the research itself.

I had the pleasure of meeting many of the recent artists in residence and documenting their experiences throughout the years. Some of the photographs from these residencies were also featured in the show.

on the photo:
Olivia McGregor taken by Kat Stefanova

To create visual coherence, we decided on a template that featured at least one piece from each artist, printed all photographs on the same paper with consistent ratios and dimensions, and painted the strings inspired by MAP’s brand colors, color-coding them by year.