#36 Daniel Cockburn, Mind the Gap Production Residency
50 opportunities for 50 years
I first engaged with Acme as an Associate Artist in Residence, which was well timed to coincide with my having recently moved from Toronto to London. This made it quite different to my usual experience of a residency – normally, to me, a residency meant showing up in a place other than the place where I lived, making it my home-away-from-home for a finite time, engaging with it and its people in the context of “this is lovely but we know it’s going to end”. Whereas my Acme residency was the beginning of an introduction to, and integration into, a place where I knew I was going to continue living.
My relationship with Acme continued over my subsequent years in London, including via an Alumni Residency – in which I occupied a temporary role vis-à-vis the city where I lived, where I had been living long enough to feel it was my home, more familiar than un-. And, finally (so far) and strangely (to me), this summer I took part in my first Acme residency as an out-of-towner, having moved to Glasgow in 2020.
It seems I’m very focused on place. And I know that’s only one aspect of a residency… Yet I keep coming back to it as some kind of barometer. What is it to engage temporarily, in a very specific way, with a new and unfamiliar place? Or with a place you call home? Or with a place you once called home? My Acme experiences have, among other things, acted as a rare series of landmarks by which I can chart my relation to these questions.