Many artists and art institutions seem utterly tired. Stretching their bodies beyond limits to navigate between unstable working conditions, funding cuts and constant competition, they are too tired to imagine they could not be. This exhaustion leads some to (temporarily) withdraw from their work: they are leaving their positions, studies, projects, dance companies, theatre groups etc. Often, their refusal leads to creating new, alternative paths: when one goes off the trail, a new one needs to be paved.
Seen from this perspective, a withdrawal is not a defeat, but an affirmative, creative strategy to imagine new, more restorative ways of creating and teaching. How can we learn from the experiences of those who decided they could not go on like this? This research project engages with the pressing issue of exhaustion, which permeates not only the arts field but society at large. It examines cases of withdrawal as a form of active refusal that has the potential to transform the field by creating conditions to imagine the way we work differently.
Specifically, the project explores how withdrawal creates cracks in the dominant system of art production. The main hypothesis is that it is precisely through these cracks that the possibility of creating alternative imaginaries emerges, and where the political potential of withdrawal materializes. Stories of withdrawal offer conditions for practicing letting go in order to make space for the new to come. They are a promise that other, more regenerative modes of living and working are possible.
Tim Etchells, 'All the things', Komuna Warszawa, photo (c) Marta Keil
Update: March 2025
