Nomadic Experiences: Scholars and Artists in Transient Communities

The Conversation

From Rainer Maria Rilke's sojourn at the Duino Castle in 1911 to write his poems, to contemporary artists and scholars in residence across the globe, a significant amount of art, literature, and academic knowledge is produced within the framework of fellowship residency programs. This conversation aims to create a space for exchange and reflection on the condition of knowledge production and creation today, focusing on the phenomenon of nomadism and its impact on the lives of academics, writers and artists.

To this end, we will bring together an artist, a scholar, and a writer and researcher who will present some aspects of this experience that, while enabling transcultural dialogues, also poses several challenges. The figures of the dandy, the globetrotter, the wanderer, the tourist, the cosmopolitan, and the digital nomad will be discussed to provide a clearer understanding of the concept of nomadism in today's academic and artistic contexts.

Ronald Po (Hong Kong, 1983) will discuss the dynamics of academic sojourning among cultural elites; Yornel Martínez will explore the importance of maintaining spaces for artists and researchers to freely create and imagine, as well as the challenges of integrating artistic work into various reception and critique contexts. Additionally, Laura Erber (Brazil, 1979) will explore the history of literary and artistic residencies and examine their contradictory role in the creative system today. The conversation will be moderated by Emily Shin-Jie Lee, who is responsible for residency programmes and cross-institutional collaborations at the art platform Framer Framed, based in Amsterdam.

After the conversation, we will open the floor for questions. This platform of discussion warmly welcomes the invaluable insights from the audience to cultivate a deeper understanding of the current conditions under which artists and scholars are working and living.

The Speakers

Yornel Martínez (Manzanillo 1981) is a multidisciplinary artist, poet, and cultural manager, interested in collective learning processes. He has developed his work close to conceptual practices through various media and materials. He participated in the 6th and 7th Cuban Contemporary Art Salon, the 12th Havana Biennial, and the Aichi Triennale in Nagoya, Japan. He received the Davidoff Fellowship for Caribbean artists in collaboration with Atelier Mondial, Basel, Switzerland, in 2017. He has been awarded fellowships from several international institutions, including the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation, the Cuban Art Fund in New York, the Royal Academy of Spain in Rome, the Center for Arts, Design and Social Research at Villa Pianciani in Italy, and the Waley Art Center in Taipei, Taiwan. He was an artist in residence at the Jan van Eyck Academie from 2022 to 2023, during which time he collaborated on projects with the Framer Framed platform.

Ron Po (Hong Kong, 1985) is a historian of late imperial China from the fourteenth to early twentieth centuries. Since completing his doctorate at Universität Heidelberg in 2013, he has taught in Germany, the United States, and Canada, and is currently an associate professor of the Department of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is the author of The Blue Frontier: Maritime Vision and Power in the Qing Empire (2018), The Placid Ocean: Qing China and the Asian Seas (2021), and Turning the Tide: Historical Actors and Social Memory in Late Qing China (2022). In 2019, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. For the academic year 2023-24, he holds the Chair of Taiwan Studies at the International Institute for Asian Studies and Leiden University.

Laura Erber (Brazil, 1979) is a writer, artist and researcher. She was an associate professor of Art Theory from 2012 to 2019 at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. She has been an artist and writer in residence at various institutions, such as Le Fresnoy in France, Akademie Schloss Solitude in Germany, and in the Batiscafo Program in Cuba. She is the author of the novel "Esquilos de Pavlov" (Pavlov’s Squirrels), translated into Spanish and Romanian, which tells the misadventures of a Romanian conceptual artist in the post-communist context and his erratic traveling between artist residencies in different European countries. Since 2022, she is the IIAS Fellowship Coordinator.

Emily Shin-Jie Lee: is a cultural practitioner and researcher based in Amsterdam. Her work is often realised through discursive formats involving multiple interlocutors. She studied anthropology at National Taiwan University and obtained her research master’s degree in art studies from the University of Amsterdam. Emily currently works at Framer Framed with a focus on residencies and cross-institutional collaborations. Since 2022, she has been working on a PhD project at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) at the University of Amsterdam, in which she studies art residency and its critical engagement with ecological, feminist and decolonial enquiries. She is one of the founding members of Lightbox, a public photo library and center for contemporary photography in Taipei; co-founder of Limestone Books, an art book store in Maastricht; and co-founder of Hide & Seek Audiovisual Art, a collective/company reflecting on issues of transformative justice, identity, and history through public art projects.

Registration (required)

Everyone is welcome to attend, but we do ask you to register as seating is limited. Please use the web form on this page for this.